Viewing the Communicator Address Book

Jeff Schertz posted an article describing a way to "read" the Communicator Address Book. Check it out!

http://blogs.pointbridge.com/Blogs/schertz_jeff/Pages/Post.aspx?_ID=47

Microsoft Certified Master (MCM) Program Now Offers 30% Limited Time Discount to Get Trained and Certified

Yesterday Greg Taylor posted a message on the Microsoft Exchange Team Blog regarding a 30% discount on the Master certification program. For more info see:

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/12/16/450297.aspx

Office Communicator 2007 R2 (how could I have missed it!) almost ready for release

Two weeks ago already :-( the Office Communicator team placed a blog post about the new R2 release of Communicator Mobile:

http://communicatorteam.com/archive/2008/11/26/349.aspx

Very interesting new features! Sorry I missed it.

Unified Communications online End-User tutorials

Unified Communications tutorials are now available (English only):

http://www.microsoft.com/communicationsserver/enduser/tutorials/

Dude, Where's My Table of Contents?!

A post I found on the Exchange Team Blog describing a phenomenon I encountered myself the last couple of weeks and I thought I would share.

"So, you're reading all sorts of good stuff in the Library in the Exchange TechCenter, when, all of a sudden, the Table of Contents in the left-hand pane disappears! Where the #*$! did it go? Calm down, and hit T on the keyboard. Whoa! It's back! Such a relief. But, hey, now you're thinking that all that extra space was kinda cool when the TOC was gone.you don't need no stinkin' TOC. What to do? That's right, just hit T! It's gone again! Hit T! It's back! Go forth and amaze your friends.

Check it out! http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996058.aspx"

Source: http://msexchangeteam.com/default.aspx

Wim

FaceTime releases survey: The Collaborative Internet: Usage Trends, End User Attitudes and IT Impact

The results of our fourth annual survey conducted by third party, NewDiligence during September of this year are now in. The survey of more than 500 employees and IT managers tracks the growth of Web 2.0 and employee-initiated applications that contribute to the consumerisation of IT.

The results show not just that malware is costing enterprises US$125,000 a month, but that the disparity between the Web 2.0 applications that employees are using in the workplace – and the controls currently in play to ensure that they’re used safely.

The survey also revealed that fewer than half of IT managers could actively monitor and reproduce traffic from instant messaging (IM) communications if asked by corporate legal teams in the event of a lawsuit. In fact, 38 percent of IT managers said they have no such capabilities and only 13 percent said they could do it - but not in any practical time frame. This is in stark contrast to global legislation and regulation changes, which are now specifically calling for all available electronically stored information – not just email - to be discoverable.

Here are a few more highlights of the survey:

• Fewer than 40 percent of respondents report monitoring and managing applications such as P2P and only 25 percent say they are securing and monitoring Web 2.0 applications.
• 79% of employees use social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, You Tube) at work for business reasons and 51% access social media sites at least once per day.
• 73% of IT managers report at least one security incident as a result of Internet application usage; viruses, Trojans and worms (59%) are most common, followed by spyware (57%) for a close second.
• 37% of companies report an instance of non compliance with corporate or regulatory policy, while 27% report incidents of accidental or unintentional data leakage.
• Despite new legislation and regulation, such as the US Rules for Civil Procedure only 31 percent of enterprises store IM communications. One in four has copies of audio conferences (25%), while slightly fewer (20%) archive corporate Web conferences.

A full copy of the report can be acquired by completing the quick survey request form on the Facetime website.

Wim

VoiceCon 2008 Videos

On the VoiceCon website a number of videos are published about VoiceCon 2008 hosted by Amsterdam this year.

http://www.voicecon.eu/videos/#VCA-2008-1224165842

ESTOS Phonetools for Communicator 2007

I read a post from Dennis Lundtoft Thomsen in which he was talking about OCS Phonetools developed by Estos. This tool allows quick dialing to Communicator from any telephone number resource (number on a web page for instance).

The tool is free and works really good. Check it out on:

http://www.estos.com/produkte/eccg/index.htm#tools

Wim

OCS 2007 R2 Videos

In light of the OCS R2 public announcement, the OCS Technical Product Management team has recorded a series of videos with the latest additions to the product and the value those bring to the customers. The videos are posted at the TechNet Edge check these out.

Week #1:
“Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and the new Attendant Console ”
“ What’s New in Conferencing with Office Communications Server 2007 R2”
“What’s New in Office Communicator, Communicator Web Access, and Devices with Office Communications Server 2007 R2”

Yet to come:

Week #2:

“Group Chat and Office Communications Server 2007 R2”

Week #3:
“What’s New in Mobility and Anywhere Access with Office Communications Server 2007 R2”
“ What’s New in Administration and Management with Office Communications Server 2007 R2”

Source: http://communicationsserverteam.com/default.aspx

Microsoft SideSight

Something not directly connected to OCS or Exchange, but nice to know:

http://www.gearlog.com/2008/10/microsofts_sidesight_something.php

It looks like MS is planning to implement a surface computing alike interface on mobile and other small devices in the future.

Wim

More info on OCS R2 features

Jeff Schertz posted some more detailed info on the new R2 features on his blog:

http://blogs.pointbridge.com/Blogs/schertz_jeff/Pages/Post.aspx?_ID=43

Wim

Opening multiple Exchange Outlook Profile instances

Yesterday I encountered a post on a tool called ExtraOutlook. This tool will allow you to open multiple Outlook Exhange profiles in seperate Outlook instances at the same time! Check it out at

http://unifyandconquer.blogspot.com/

Wim

OCS 2007 R2 Features and Release Date Unveiled!!

After a lot of speculations, Microsoft finally unveiled the features and release date of their long awaited R2 release of OCS 2007 today at VoiceCon 2008 in Amsterdam.

The release date for R2 is set to 3 February 2009. The new features in this version are listed below:

• Dial-in audioconferencing. Office Communications Server 2007 R2 enables businesses to eliminate costly audioconferencing services with an on-premise audioconferencing bridge that is managed by IT as part of the overall communications infrastructure.
• Desktop sharing. This feature enables users to seamlessly share their desktop, initiate audio communications and collaborate with others outside the organization on PC, Macintosh or Linux platforms through a Web-based interface.
• Persistent group chat. This enables geographically dispersed teams to collaborate with each other by participating in topic-based discussions that persist over time. This application provides users with a list of all available chat rooms and topics, periodically archives discussions in an XML file format that meets compliance regulations, provides tools to search the entire history of discussion on a given topic, and offers filters and alerts to notify someone of new posts or topics on a particular topic.
• Attendant console and delegation!!!!!! This allows receptionists, team secretaries and others to manage calls and conferences on behalf of other users, set up workflows to route calls, and manage higher volumes of incoming communications through a software-based interface.
• Session Initiation Protocol trunking! This feature enables businesses to reduce costs by setting up a direct VoIP connection between an Internet telephony service provider and Office Communicator 2007 without requiring on-premise gateways.
• Response group!! A workflow design application manages incoming calls based on user-configured rules (e.g., round-robin, longest idle, simultaneous), providing a simple-to-use basic engine for call treatment, routing and queuing.
• Mobility and single-number reach. This extends Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile functionality to Nokia S40, Motorola RAZR, Blackberry and Windows Mobile platforms, allowing users to communicate using presence, IM and voice as an extension of their PBX from a unified client
  
  See the links below for more information.
  
  http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-14OCSR2PR.mspx
  
  http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/Features/2008/oct08/10-14OCSR2video.mspx
  
  Wim

Extra Network Name cluster resource causes Exchange issues

Last week I encountered a nice issue on an exchange 2007 SCC configuration at a customer. When opening the Exchange Management Console an error popped up saying:

"Cannot query cluster continuous replication status for a clustered mailbox server that is not local. server is not hosted on this cluster."















Additionally the cluster was not operating as you should expect from a cluster. When trying to take the Exchange resources offline using Powershell, the following error was displayed:

"Cluster Common Failure Exception : The cluster resource group for clustered mailbox server was not found."






And when trying to move the Exchange cluster group:

"Unable to communicate with the Cluster service on node ''. Please make sure the node is up, the Cluster service is running, and connectivity is operational."






The problem arrose when they wanted to do a restore using a RSG. After the restore was done, the store in the RSG wouldn't mount (another side affect).

After some troubleshooting we found out that an extra Network Name cluster resource was added to the Exchange Cluster Group. We had the feeling that this was causing the issue. We simulated the setup in a testlab and were able to reproduce the problems there. When deleting the additional Network Name resource, the problems went away. Just taking it offline doesn't do the trick. So lesson learned: Leave the Exchange cluster group alone!

Wim.

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007 Released!

Microsoft released the OCS 2007 MP for SCOM 2007 (finally)!

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A1832431-54B7-4070-9B10-14EFB231FF0C&displaylang=en&displaylang=en

Update: Microsoft Unified Communications Hardware Load Balancer Deployment

Microsoft released an updated HLB page on its website:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ocs/cc843611.aspx

This page describes which Server Hardware Load Balancer (HLB) partners have completed interoperability qualification testing with Office Communications Server 2007 and contains pointers to accompanying deployment white papers hosted by the partner.

FaceTime gets top honours with Network Testing Labs Review

Network Testing Labs created a special test environment for evaluating anti-malware products - putting themselves on a QUEST FOR THE BEST!

Here's what Barry Nance, of Networking Testing Labs saidWith unerring accuracy and quick, unobtrusive performance, FaceTime Communications’ Unified Security Gateway appliance easily thwarted virtually all Internet-based malware in our tests, and it gave us complete control, at a fine level, over which social networking and other non-business Internet applications we wanted to allow on our network. As a result, Unified Security Gateway garnered top honors in this Secure Web Gateway review

For the complete review check the following link: http://na6.salesforce.com/servlet/servlet.EmailAttachmentDownload?q=00m80000000GvzX00D3000000002oc00530000001ABBO

Office Communications Server 2007 Edge Planning Tool

Many people are struggling with the configuration of the OCS Edge servers in their DMZ. Certificates, routing and publishing are some of the topics that we see a lot of questions about on the web. Microsoft now has released the OCS 2007 Edge Planning Tool, which will help admins a lot with the configuration of their Edge infrastructure. Below you find a summary from the MS OCS team blog:


"The Edge Planning Tool for Office Communications Server 2007 is a tool that takes a user through a set of interview questions regarding the proposed or current edge server deployment. The tool interviews users about their perimeter network settings as well as some questions regarding their internal deployment.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=149e5dd5-eaae-46b6-afba-01c31e88a275&displaylang=en

Based on the answers to these questions and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 best practices, the tool generates a set of 6 reports.

The first report is a best practices report. This report compares the user’s answers to Office Communications Server 2007 best practices and using a stoplight based UI, shows the users whether they are in line with the best practices or not. The UI consists of a banner that is either green or red with a blurb of text underneath stating why it is a best practice. The report also lists the common pitfalls and errors that users have been known to make – so users of the tool can read them and ensure that they don’t fall in the same traps.

The next report that is created is the OCS Admin report. This report is generated for the OCS Administrators as it has all of the configuration settings in one report. This report is broken down into 5 sections: Edge Report, Reverse Proxy Report, Next Hop Report, Edge Server Configuration Documentation and Internal Director/Pool Configuration Documentation.
The first sections of the report are table based reports that have the settings for each of these servers. The reports have information on the FQDNs, IPs, Firewall Rules, Certificate and DNS settings.

The last two sections of the report consist of documentation that is taken from various Office Communications Server 2007 resources. The documentation is modified to include the actually settings. For example in the current documentation it says: “In the Next Hop Network Address textbox, enter the FQDN of your Director or Pool”, the custom documentation report would say this: “In the Next Hop Network Address textbox, enter the FQDN of your Director or Pool (director.contoso.com)”. On top of the customized settings, these sections also provide screenshots of where you would apply the settings with captions under the screenshots stating exactly what settings to set.

The next 4 reports were designed to be handed off to the various teams in your organization: Certificate, Firewall, DNS and Custom Documentation. These reports are stripped down versions of the OCS Admin report. The main point behind this is that it saves the OCS Admin from having to get the necessary data that needs to be provided to the various teams.
The configuration settings that are provided in the reports should be used to setup the edge servers in your organization. This tool does not pull any information from your servers nor does it apply any of the settings. It should only be used to generate configuration settings."