New PIC Licensing and released XMPP Gateway

Source: OCS Team Blog!
We are excited to announce changes to the Office Communications Server Public IM Connectivity (PIC) license that provides instant messaging and presence federation to the Windows Live, AOL and Yahoo! public IM networks. Starting October 1, 2009, the following licensing changes will be made:

A PIC License will no longer be required for federation with American Online (AOL). Customers qualify for federation with AOL if they have Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Standard CAL or active Software Assurance on their current LCS/OCS license.
Customers who want Yahoo! federation will continue to purchase PIC licenses. The price of PIC will be reduced by 50%, effective October 1, 2009, to reflect this change.

We are also excited to announce the release of the OCS 2007 R2 XMPP Gateway (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=141529). The Gateway provides Presence and two-party IM interoperability with the XMPP based systems of Jabber and Google Talk.
The Gateway interoperability has been tested against Jabber CXP Server version 5.4 and the current version of Google Talk. The OCS 2007 R2 XMPP Gateway is supported by Microsoft Support

This Gateway is licensed as Additional Software to OCS 2007 R2, meaning that there is no additional license cost associated with deploying the Gateway for OCS 2007 R2 licenses.
For more details about these two great announcements you can read the Microsoft Press Pass article with Eric Swift, General Manager of the Unified Communications Group at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/oct09/10-01ucinterop.mspx or in this Channel9 interview with the responsible Product Managers Ashima Singhal and Albert Kooiman http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/jccim/Instant-Messaging-Interoperability-extended-through-XMPP-Jabber/

Recap of June Announcement: In June 2009, we announced a similar change for Windows Live and renamed the OCS PIC license.

The LCS PIC license was renamed to Office Communications Server Public IM Connectivity.
A PIC License is no longer required for federation with Windows Live. Customers qualify for federation with Windows Live if they have Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Standard CAL or active SA on their current LCS/OCS license.

With these changes, customers qualify for IM/P federation with Windows Live and AOL with the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Standard CAL or OCS 2007/LCS 2005 SP1 Standard CAL with Software Assurance. http://www.microsoft.com/communicationsserver/en/us/public-im-connectivity.aspx