Microsoft released the public beta release of Exchange 2010 (also known as E14)

Yesterday Microsoft released the public beta release of Exchange 2010 (also known as E14) and is available for download from:

Exchange 2010 Public Beta bits:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1898ed2c-2f88-48ac-824e-d3d20fad77d7

For the online help check out the link below.

Exchange 2010 Beta Technet Online:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124558(EXCHG.140).aspx

Exchange Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer released

Microsoft has release a tool/website for administrators to test remote connectivity to the published Exchange services. Currently this analyzer works for the following services:

• Exchange ActiveSync
  Windows Mobile 5, 3rd party devices
  Windows Mobile 6.1+ with AutoDiscover
• Outlook Anywhere (aka RPC/HTTP)
  Outlook 2003
  Outlook 2007 with AutoDiscover
• Inbound SMTP

For the complete story check out the Exchange Team Blog at http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/03/25/450908.aspx

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 evaluation kit released

Microsoft has released Office Communications Server 2007 R2 evaluation kit, a multi VM collection (of 15 downloads) totalling 8.9Gb.

Including in the download is the ‘Deployment Guide’ a 24 page walkthrough of everything you need to get you POC up and running. The VMs are in Hyper-V format.

The files can be downloaded from:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=3bfe2fb6-493b-42d6-859e-eddddf04e2e8

OCS R2 MUI's released

The MUI's for OCS R2 are available!

• MUI for Office Communicator 2007 R2 : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=e7871dcd-8173-4866-a0c2-af8659092acc
• MUI for Communicator Web Access : http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=77a14c4d-e15f-4c97-89e2-2fcc66a0393c
• MUI for the Response Group Service:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b49b7671-3a3a-4bca-bd97-1566ffb1413a
  

Available languages of the MUI Package for Office Communicator 2007 R2 includes the following languages:

Arabic
Bulgarian
Catalan
Chinese - Simplified
Chinese - Traditional
Chinese Hong Kong
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Estonian
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Latvian
Lithuanian
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese (Portugal)
Portuguese (Brazil)
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian

MUI for Communicator Web Access and the MUI for the Response Group Service is available in 15 languages:

Chinese - Simplified
Chinese - Traditional
Danish
Dutch
English
Finnish
French
German
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Portuguese (Brazil)
Russian
Spanish Swedish

OCS 2007 R2 SCOM Management Pack released

Microsoft has released the OCS 2007 R2 Management Pack for SCOM SP1 yesterday. It can be downloaded from:

https://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0fca3752-76d4-42f3-9241-a663e40c1e2c&displayLang=en

Forefront for OCS RTM available

The eval version of the RTM release of "Forefront for OCS" is now available for download on the MS website:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=d128fd1a-42a2-47cb-9de8-e4ea8ba2382d

The RTM release is not yet available on the MSDN or MVLK sites.

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

Issue with MOC and Attendant Console on same machine

Because of demo's I have both the Communicator R2 client and the Attendant Console installed on my laptop. But since the upgrade to R2 I lost the jellybeans/presence info in both Outlook and Sharepoint. This was kind of annoying, so we started to troubleshoot this issue.

It appears that if you have both these clients installed on the same machine, you loose this info in Outlook and Sharepoint. The moment we removed one of the clients, it all worked again as it should.

This still remains an annoying "feature" because I also want to do video and this is not possible in the Attendant console (another annoying feature :-). Therefore I need both clients. Hopefully a fix will be released for this in the near future.

The Jabra Dial 520OC rulez (and no I'm not sponsored by Jabra)

I recently received a couple of UC devices (optimized for OCS) from Jabra including the Dial 520 OC USB Phone. This is still a prototype, but I must say that already love this thing!

The BIG advantage of this device is that it looks like a phone and works like a phone... meaning, I think a lot of Communicator users will find it much easier to adopt this device than for instance a headset or the Polycom CX200. Especially laptop users, because dialing a regular telephone number using a dial pad is much easier than using the keys on a laptop. Also the phone is small and easy to take with you. The quality of the sound is great, although the audio level could be a little bit higher by default (Jabra said they will fix this in the final product). The phone completely integrates in Communicator without any driver/software installation requirements.

There are still some things to improve I think, like for instance a speaker phone function. Also the USB cable is a little bit too long and too thick. Ideally this should be a wireless devices of course, but that might be an option for version 2.0.

For more info see:

http://www.jabra.com/sites/Jabra/GNImages/Campaigns/OC/M520%20OC%20PRODUCT%20SHEET_EMEA_LOW_5894.pdf

Exchange Mailbox Permissions Issue

A while back we came across a nice "hidden feature" of Exchange that occurs after migrating mailboxes cross Forest. Again, its been a while, but I thought I would blog about it anyway.

Here is the problem description:

A migration of user, group, contact, etc. took place by migrating these objects with ADMT 3.0 from one Forest (W2K03 Native) to a new Forest (also W2K03 Native), including SidHistory.

Directly after that, the mailboxes of the users were migrated from Exchange 2003 in the old Forest to Exchange 2007 in the new Forest using the Move-Mailbox CmdLet.

Everything seemed fine.... until an admin tried to remove some mailbox permissions from a mailbox using the Remove-Mailboxpermission CmdLet. He got the following error message:

"Remove-MailboxPermission : Cannot remove ACE on object "CN=Migrated Mailbox,OU=....." for account "New Domain\migrated user" because it is not present"

Hmmm... when looking at the permissions on the migrated mailbox (Get-Mailboxpermission) it clearly stated that the user that was specified in the Remove-Mailboxpermission CmdLet has rights. The user was displayed in the following format: New Domain\Username.

First we thought a type-o was made or someting in the CmLets, but after some investigation all seemed to be fine with that. So what was happening here then?


The Solution:

What is happening here is the following. The name that is displayed when doing a Get-Mailboxpermission is actually not correct. The reason why it states "New Domain\Username" is SidHistory. Under the hood, the "OLD Domain\Username" still has permissions. To be more specific, the permissions are still pointing to the OLD Domain Sid of the user.

When performing the Get-Mailboxpermission, Exchange translates this OLD Domain Sid to the "NEW Domain\Username" based on the SidHistory value in AD of the migrated user.

To test this we removed the SidHistory of the migrated user in the NEW Domain. Because at that moment the Trust between the Forests was still active, when doing a Get-Mailboxpermission you would now see the permissions in the form of "OLD Domain\Username". If the Trust would be gone, this would state the old Domain Sid of the user because it would not be able to resolve the account name anymore.

Now when performing the Remove-Mailboxpermission on the mailbox for the same user based on the syntax of "OLD Domain\Username", it worked without issues. Without a trust you could even use the old Domain Sid of the user to remove the permissions, same thing.

Because removing SidHistory could have a big impact, a call was logged with MS. After sending a lot of info about this to MS we ended up in a conference call with Redmond discussing this issue. Basically MS told us that this is by design, and if you would migrate between Forests using SidHistory, you would first need to "clean up" all mailbox permissions before doing a Move-Mailbox....... right.

To me a simple option to just add another parameter to the Move-Mailbox Cmdlet that would enable you to just choose if you want to translate the mailboxpermissions to the value or not, could just do it. But MS thought differently.....

Basically the only option to solve this issue after a migration, is to clean up SidHistory. Yes, I know, you should always do this to finish a migration clean. In small migrations this is maybe not a real issue, but in large scale, phased migrations this in general is an issue. Maybe not after all objects have been migrated, but you still have that time in between the start of the migration and the end, in which you will not be able to remove mailbox permissions. A not so nice alternative is to grant explicit Deny permissions to the user if the user should not have rights on the mailbox at all anymore. But if you just want to change the permissions, you will not be able to.

Wim.

Microsoft released Clinic 10052: Introduction to Enhancements in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2

"This 1-hour clinic describes the various enhancements in Office Communications Server 2007 R2 clients and devices, conferencing, mobility, Office Communicator Web Access 2007 R2, and voice.

This clinic covers the following topics:
- Office Communications Server 2007 R2 clients and devices
- Audio, video, and Web conferencing
- 2007 R2 version of Office Communicator Mobile
- Office Communicator Web Access 2007 R2
- Call delegation
- Response Group Service
- Team-call group"

https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/courseDetail.aspx?courseId=112782&tab=overview

Using Remote Desktop Sharing in a dual screen environment

I really love Remote Desktop Sharing in the R2 release of the MOC! When using a dual screen setup you have the ability in the MOC to choose which of the two screens to share, or you can share them both.

This way you have full control over what the other side can see and cannot see. When sharing both screens it looks something like this:

OCS 2007 R2 MOM/SCOM Pack delayed

The Communications Server Team announced that the OCS 2007 R2 SCOM MP release has been delayed :-(

http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2009/02/12/367.aspx

A new Exchange 14 video available on the Exchange Team Blog

Multi browser support (Firefox and Safari), conversation view (like threads), and most importantly: Presence and IM integration in OWA!

Check out the video at:

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/02/12/450639.aspx

Availability of the Forefront Security for Office Communications Server (FSOCS)

MS announced the availability of the Forefront Security for Office Communications Server (FSOCS) RC. This release is currently available for the FSOCS TAP and CAG customers only. Final release of FSOCS is planned for March of this year.

C2ICT and "The new way of working" event.

Yesterday two colleagues and I had were present at the C2ICT stand at the MS event "The new way of working" (Het Nieuwe Werken) in 't Spant in Bussum (The Netherlands). We had a great spot right at the entrance of the exibition hall. It was quite busy at the event.

During lunch, MS organized a lunch carrousel which consisted of three time slots of about 20 minutes in which we could tell something about the way C2ICT thinks about the new way of working. Emphasis for us was a quick scan that we can do for organizations to check if they are ready the implement the new way of working using OCS as tool. What we noticed in the last year or so, is that many organizations want OCS, but they have no clue if the end users will adopt this way of working. Additionally we try to help organizations decide on the features they really need in their organization. The Quick Scan can be devided into two parts. The first part is an organizational scan. This is the most important part and has nothing to do with technology. Optionally a technical scan can be done in which we go through the IT infra to see were the bottlenecks are.

We also had a mobile OCS R2 lab with us. A lot of people were very interested in the new R2 features, especially the Response Group service stuff. So the lab was a great way of already showing people the R2 release before MS did in the final session of the day :-)

For more info see http://www.c2ict.com/uc and http://www.c2ict.com/page/brochures

Forefront Security for OCS video available on Edge

MS released a short video on Forefront Security for OCS on the Edge site:

http://edge.technet.com/Media/Forefront-Security-for-OCS-FSOCS-vNext-interview/

OCS R2 bit available on MSDN

MS released the OCS R2 bits on MSDN. Both the OCS R2 Server and Communicator R2 can be downloaded.

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Attendant Training available

MS published a really good slidedeck and videos focussed on training people for using the R2 Attendant. The set can be found here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=92ae62f2-5fb4-43da-a98c-9dff32ea97fa&DisplayLang=en

Of course it is a high level training, but it is a good start when you want to play with the attendant (or let your users play).

With thanx to Joachim for pointing this one out.

OCS R2 RTM available!

In addition to my previous post find below the links to the RTM release software for OCS R2:


OCS 2007 R2 Eval
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=45&p=1&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=3d619c8c-6540-4f2d-b78e-5b4c25780adb&u=details.aspx%3ffamilyid%3d67A3DE72-7DBD-4E0B-92A5-29D0B46009A7%26displaylang%3den

OC 2007 R2 Eval
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=45&p=2&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=3d619c8c-6540-4f2d-b78e-5b4c25780adb&u=details.aspx%3ffamilyid%3d535637AF-D92F-41B1-BF0C-54A526A88247%26displaylang%3den

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Attendant
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141218

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Group Chat Client
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141220

Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Group Chat Server
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141219

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Group Chat Administration Tool
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141221

Office Communicator Phone Edition
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141222

CoMo - MSI - Pocket PC
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141380

CoMo - MSI – Smartphone
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141381

CoMo - OTA - Pocket PC
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141382

CoMo - OTA - Smartphone
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141383

UCMA 2.0 SDK - 32 bit
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=140790

UCMA 2.0 SDK - 64 bit
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=139195

Speech Language Packs (12 langs)
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=139197

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Planning Tool
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141223

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Resource Kit Tools - 64 bit
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141224

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 SDK
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=141225

Microsoft Unified Communications Managed API 2.0 SDK released

Yesterday MS released the 2.0 version of UCMA. The Microsoft Unified Communications Managed API 2.0 is a managed-code platform that empowers developers to build applications that provide access to and control over Microsoft’s Enhanced Presence information, instant messaging, telephone and video calls and audio/video conferencing. It enables both text based, as well as voice based - speech technology enabled – conversations and collaboration.

The UC Managed API 2.0 is intended to support the development of server side, middle-tier applications targeting Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2. It contains a SIP stack, a media stack as well as powerful speech engines for both automatic speech recognition (ASR) as well as speech synthesis (TTS).

The UCMA 2.0 can be used to communications-enable your business software and processes and can be used to create outbound applications like alerts or notifications and surveys, as well as inbound speech technology enabled interactive voice response applications and automated agents, a.k.a. query response bots. The API gives access to the presence information available in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and can be used to build role agents that use Microsoft’s Enhanced Presence information to streamline communications between people.

More advanced developer scenarios enable applications like Automated Call Distributors, that do skill based routing, Conferencing Services, like conference access control, custom client gateways, which can interface e.g. with other communications networks, Interactive Voice Response platforms and speech servers using the Microsoft ASR and TTS engines.

• The UCMA 2.0 Core SDK abstracts away most of the Office Communications Server SIP/SIMPLE based protocols by offering an API that exposes almost all of the features of the protocol, but is simpler to understand and use.
• The UCMA 2.0 Speech API is a server grade speech API, that allows developers to build multi channel speech recognition and speech synthesis enabled applications using Microsoft’s state of the art speech technology.
• The UCMA 2.0 Workflow API is an higher API abstraction layer of the UCMA Core and Speech APIs that adds unified communications Windows Workflow Activities to the .NET 3.5 SP1 Workflow Foundation for querying presence and IM or speech technology enabled dialogs in Workflow based applications build e.g. on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007.

For the 32bit version, go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=768efa33-6606-4b2b-809a-6c69274621d3&displaylang=en

For the 64bit version, go to:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b20967b1-6cf5-4a4b-b7ae-622653ac929f&displaylang=en

UC Click Thru Interactive Demo

MS released a click thru interactive demo on UC last week.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9A7D929B-2134-414F-B6C3-6FFF25FB78A8&displaylang=en

Exam 70-638: Configuring Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Updated for R2

Microsoft has updated the 70-638 exam to reflect the R2 changes. Below the link to the preparation guide for this exam.

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exams/70-638.mspx

Recording Converter for Live Meeting 2007

I found this tool on the MS site to convert recorded Live Meeting content to a single wmv file. This makes it much easier to make these sessions available online for others to view them.



The tool can be found here:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA101215971033.aspx

1st public movie about Exchange 14

On Technet the first movie about Exchange 14 is available.
In this movie some new features are discussed and shown.

For the whole article and the movie go here:
http://edge.technet.com/Media/announcing-Exchange14/

Erwin Jansen
C2ICT

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Enterprise Deployment - Part 2

Part 2 is available as of yesterday.

http://www.shudnow.net/

OCS R2 32bit Available through MVLS

MS made OCS R2 available through MVLS! (but no MOC R2 :-(

Updates to the Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator (Version 16.3)

The MS Exchange Team has posted an update to the "Exchange 2007 Mailbox Server Role Storage Requirements Calculator " yesterday.

Enhancements in this version:

• We added the calculated (or user defined) read/write ratio per mailbox tier into the Storage Requirements Results User Mailbox Configuration table.
• We added the server's calculated database read I/O percentage value into the Storage Requirements Results Disk Space & Performance Requirements table.
• Since the Recovery Point Objective input question only dealt with SCR, we moved that from the Log Replication section to the Standby Continuous Replication Configuration table.
• We added a new message profile, Extra Heavy. With this additional profile, we now have 5 available messaging profiles as defined

Bug Fixes:
In prior versions, when you selected to use SCR and wanted to match the source configuration design, the following tables did not accurately reflect the correct values for the given SCR configuration (in so far as by selecting to match a source CCR configuration that means there are 2 SCR targets for every active database instance, so if you had 2 CCR clusters then you would have at least 2 SCR targets per CCR cluster):

1. Disk Space & Performance Requirements - Total for all SCR Servers column, all rows.

2. LUN Configuration (per Server) - SCR Targets column, Total Recommended Exchange LUNs row.

3. Storage Configuration - Environment column, Total Number of SCR Disks Requirement row and Total Number of Disks Required row.

Source:

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/07/05/445802.aspx

PowerShell for Network Load Balancing (NLB) and Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2008 R2

In relation to general infra and high availability for both Exchange and OCS, I post the blog posts below about using PowerShell for Network Load Balancing (NLB) and Failover Clustering in Windows Server 2008 R2:

NLB
http://blogs.msdn.com/clustering/archive/2008/12/26/9253786.aspx

Failover Clustering
http://blogs.msdn.com/clustering/archive/2008/12/20/9243367.aspx

General
http://blogs.msdn.com/clustering/archive/2008/12/11/9193726.aspx

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Enterprise Deployment - Part 1

Elan Shudnow has placed a part 1 post on its blog on how to deploy OCS 2007 R2 Enterprise. This is the first part in a 5 part series.

Have fun!

Update on the R2 Videos

First of all for everybody that is reading this blog: A HAPPY NEW YEAR!!

I wanted to post an update to an earlier article regarding the OCS R2 video's on edge.technet.com because I saw that I forgot to do this in the past, so here is the link where you can find all currently available video's on OCS R2:

http://edge.technet.com/Search/Default.aspx?Term=OCS%20R2

Wim