At what had been billed as a rollout event for the company's Office Communications and "softphone" software yesterday, Microsoft Business Division President Jeff Raikes unveiled an intriguing new plank of what the company now calls its Unified Communications Platform: Utilizing Office Communications software and Microsoft's VoIP services, hardware manufacturers including Hewlett-Packard, LG-Nortel, and Samsung will be making available a new class of communications devices, not only for messaging but for audio and videoconferencing. Among these devices is a 360-degree camera designed for video conferences called RoundTable, that has apparently emerged from a back-burner project called RingCam from Microsoft's laboratories.