Now most of the things I discuss on this blog are related to open source. I love open source but I also think that Microsoft has some amazing offerings (thank goodness comments are turned off 
). Today I downloaded the Exchange 2007 virtual machine offered from Microsoft for evaluation purposes. My purpose was to try integrating Asterisk voicemail with Exchange using IMAP for unified messaging. While becoming familiar with 2007 (used 2000 and 2003 previously) I came across the Unified Messaging part of 2007. It is simply amazing. Asterisk’s voicemail is on par with it, it is the auto attendant that I can see some nice value with (if you are running an environment based on Exchange anyway). There is a how to on integrating Exchange 2007 with Asterisk. A SIP proxy is needed since Exchange 2007 only talks SIP over TCP and Asterisk only does SIP over UDP.