UC and Exchange Blogspace

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

2009-04-15T10:33:00.002+02:00

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

2009-03-27T15:16:00.002+01:00

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

2009-03-27T14:59:00.002+01:00

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

2009-03-27T14:54:00.002+01:00

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

2009-03-27T14:12:00.002+01:00

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

2009-03-17T13:19:00.004+01:00

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

2009-03-09T12:31:00.003+01:00

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)

2009-03-04T22:08:00.004+01:00

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

2009-02-25T20:39:00.004+01:00

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

2009-02-25T20:23:00.001+01:00

"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

2009-02-19T09:15:00.009+01:00

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

2009-02-13T16:14:00.003+01:00

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

2009-02-13T13:49:00.003+01:00

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)

2009-02-12T10:23:00.002+01:00

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.

2009-02-12T09:26:00.004+01:00

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

2009-02-05T15:08:00.003+01:00

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

2009-02-05T08:29:00.003+01:00

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

2009-02-03T19:57:00.004+01:00

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!

2009-02-03T15:54:00.003+01:00

Microsoft Unified Communications Managed API 2.0 SDK released

2009-02-03T15:36:00.004+01:00

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

2009-02-02T17:34:00.002+01:00

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

2009-02-02T12:30:00.003+01:00

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

2009-02-02T12:21:00.004+01:00

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

2009-01-15T20:17:00.007+01:00

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

2009-01-09T17:00:00.000+01:00

Part 2 is available as of yesterday.

http://www.shudnow.net/

OCS R2 32bit Available through MVLS

2009-01-08T18:02:00.004+01:00

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

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

2009-01-07T09:14:00.003+01:00

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

2009-01-06T11:14:00.006+01:00

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

2009-01-06T10:47:00.003+01:00

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

2009-01-05T17:45:00.002+01:00

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

Viewing the Communicator Address Book

2008-12-17T16:39:00.004+01:00

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

2008-12-17T14:25:00.003+01:00

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

2008-12-11T19:32:00.003+01:00

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

2008-12-11T17:13:00.007+01:00

Unified Communications tutorials are now available (English only):

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

Dude, Where's My Table of Contents?!

2008-10-29T10:49:00.003+01:00

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

2008-10-29T10:38:00.004+01:00

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

2008-10-22T21:36:00.003+02:00

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

2008-10-22T21:23:00.004+02:00

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

2008-10-22T17:30:00.006+02:00

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

2008-10-22T17:19:00.003+02:00

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

2008-10-15T15:15:00.002+02:00

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

2008-10-15T15:11:00.002+02:00

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!!

2008-10-14T19:30:00.005+02:00

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

2008-09-29T15:59:00.010+02:00

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!

2008-09-19T09:14:00.002+02:00

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

2008-09-16T08:46:00.003+02:00

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

2008-09-03T12:03:00.002+02:00

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

2008-09-03T11:47:00.005+02:00

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."