(You can see who among your Messenger contacts are online from within other Office programs.) Conversely, if you don’t have a Messenger or Communicator account, you get none of that functionality it’s Communicator, Messenger, or nothing. It integrates nicely with Office’s presence-awareness functionality. It doesn’t crash, at least not in my use. It offers some improvements over previous versions, such as animated emoticons (evidently very important to some people), video and audio chat features.
Messenger is the home/SOHO/I-don’t-have-Microsoft-Lync/Office-Communications-Server-(OCS) IM application. As part of Office 2011, Microsoft has released new versions of its home and corporate instant messaging (IM) applications: Messenger and Communicator.
