<p>SUNNYVALE, CA -- (Marketwired) -- 12/10/13 -- NextPlane, the leading provider of B2B UC Collaboration and Federation Services, announced that its UC Exchange Service provides support for the Microsoft Office 365 service. Companies wanting to collaborate with their business partners that have deployed Office 365, as well as Office 365 customers, who want to collaborate with partners on other UC platforms, can now do so seamlessly through the NextPlane UC Exchange.</p><p>Click to Tweet: #NextPlane launches Microsoft Office 365 Federation Service, http://bit.ly/18uNURy #UC Collaboration, #UnifiedComm</p><p>B2B UC Collaboration, also called UC Federation, enables end-users to engage their business associates across different partner organizations in real-time communication, using instant messaging and presence (IM&amp;P), multi-party chat, voice, video calling and conferencing -- as if they are on the same UC platform.</p><p>As a hosted UC service, operated by Microsoft, Office 365 only allows direct federation with other Microsoft platforms, such as Lync 2010. This is enforced by requiring that the domain name (FQDN - Fully Qualified Domain Name) of the edge/gateway server published in the SIP DNS SRV record, matches the domain name on the security certificate -- issued by a certificate authority such as VeriSign. Otherwise Office 365 refuses to establish an encrypted TLS connection -- as a result the federation fails.</p><p><a href="http://www.virtual-strategy.com/2013/12/10/nextplane-launches-microsoft-office-365-federation-service">Keep reading...</a></p>