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