The office controller was a networking concept of the early to mid-1980s. The concept was used by PABX manufacturers as the basis of families of products in which the PBX would supply data connectivity and applications along with its traditional voice services.

The office controller would be a central switch which would link users to applications and provide necessary services such as security. There was much discussion at that time of multimedia voice/data services but the conception of these services was very vague. There was no real understanding of the utility and therefore customer value of these services. As a result, office controller services were usually restricted to various forms of modem pooling.

With the development of LAN

Län

Län and lääni refer to the administrative divisions used in Sweden and previously in Finland. The provinces of Finland were abolished on January 1, 2010....

s and PC

Personal computer

A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...

s, the client/server became the dominant application creation model. As a result the centralized model supported by the office controller fell out of style. Office controller products were withdrawn from the market. Remnants of the idea, with examples such as thin client

Thin client

A thin client is a computer or a computer program which depends heavily on some other computer to fulfill its traditional computational roles. This stands in contrast to the traditional fat client, a computer designed to take on these roles by itself...

s and three-layer architecture

Three-layer architecture

The Three-Layer Architecture is a hybrid reactive/deliberative robot architecture developed by R. James Firby that consists of three layers: a reactive feedback control mechanism, a reactive plan execution mechanism, and a mechanism for performing time-consuming deliberative computations.- See also...

s, did persist with some interest. However the thick client PC model of services was predominant in the 1990s.

However the office controller idea is not without merit. With the development of SIP

Session Initiation Protocol

The Session Initiation Protocol is an IETF-defined signaling protocol widely used for controlling communication sessions such as voice and video calls over Internet Protocol . The protocol can be used for creating, modifying and terminating two-party or multiparty sessions...

 with its session border controller

Session Border Controller

A session border controller is a device regularly deployed in Voice over Internet Protocol networks to exert control over the signaling and usually also the media streams involved in setting up, conducting, and tearing down telephone calls or other interactive media communications.SBC's original...

s and service-oriented architecture

Service-oriented architecture

In software engineering, a Service-Oriented Architecture is a set of principles and methodologies for designing and developing software in the form of interoperable services. These services are well-defined business functionalities that are built as software components that can be reused for...

s, the centralized creation and management of user services is again finding widespread interest.