Friday, March 27, 2009

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!

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

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

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

Monday, March 9, 2009

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.

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

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