First of all, there are two flavours of Messenger available. You have MSN Messenger (
now in version 7.0 beta) which is the public version, and you have Windows Messenger (
now 5.1 available) which is the one you will use if you setup your own IM infrastructure within your company using Office Live Communications Server 2005. Windows Messenger 5.1 has a number of improvements you can read
here. Notably some faster performance when integrating with SharePoint.