Microsoft Office Roundtable @ e-office

Yesterday we had an fantastic overview of an brand new Office Roundtable at our company. William van Male (Solution Specialist Unified Communications) Microsoft Netherlands was giving a demo with Live Meeting 2007 RC. We connected the Roundtable to my laptop and within 5 seconds we realize that it was time worth. What an amazing device width also integrate perfectly with Office Communications Server 2007. e-office is on a pre-order list to buy an couple of Roundtable's. Microsoft is releasing the Roundtable over a couple of weeks (begin August). The prize is still around 3300 dollars.

Important and interesting features are panoramic view of all your meeting attendees. Multiple microphones integrated with active speaking capabilities. Great menu with plenty of possibilities to configure your Roundtable. RJ45 connection to automatically update your Roundtable with Microsoft Update Services. WSUS for only the device :-)! Outbound calling possibilities. Speaker settings, tutorials to get familiar with the Roundtable. When connecting the Office Roundtable it installs 2 devices under Device Management (1 for Audio, 1 for Video)

So great impression! Included some pictures of the device of the year 2007!

Device overview: (power cable with integrated RJ11,RJ45 capabilities), integraded color menu with various of options:

Panoramic view and closer picture of Office Roundtable Menu.



If you need to have some more indepth information do not hesitate to contact me.

Microsoft OCS Event - Office RoundTable!

Today Microsoft was doing another event on Office Communications Server 2007 the new way of communicating. We (Hans) also spotted the device of the year 2007.

Slick picture:



Tomorrow morning we also have an Roundtable to play with. So lets download the Live Meeting 2007 RC from the Microsoft download site and test it.

Hans thanks for spotting this wonderful thing!

Microsoft Office RoundTable review

This week we are reviewing the Microsoft Office Roundtable. Only for 1 hour :-(
There is a very interesting post about a RoundTable http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/microsoft/microsoft-roundtable-review.asp

This week i will post some pictures of a live Rountable!

Specialization Requirements - Unified Communications (Microsoft Partners)

Specialization Requirements
Certifications
To qualify, your organization must employ or contract with two individuals, each of whom must have passed one of the following Microsoft exams:
Exam 70-236 : TS: Exchange Server 2007, Configuring
Exam 70-237 : Pro: Designing Messaging Solutions with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
Exam 70-238 : Pro: Deploying Messaging Solutions with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
Exam 70-262 : TS: Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 - Implementing, Managing and Troubleshooting
Exam 70-284 : Implementing and Managing Microsoft Exchange Server 2003
Exam 70-285 : Designing a Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 Organization
Exam 70-638 : Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Configuring (available in 2007)
Learn more about the value of Microsoft certifications and a new generation of offerings available from Microsoft Learning.

Customer References
You must submit at least three customer references that meet the following criteria:
Each reference must feature the planning, deployment, and management of solutions that enable unified communications across email, instant messaging, voice, data, video, and Web conferencing, using one of the following Microsoft technologies:
Exchange Server 2007 or Exchange Server 2003
Office Communications Server 2007
Live Communications Server 2005
Each reference must feature a project that you have completed for a customer within the last 12 months.

Exam 70-638

When you decide to get certified for OCS you have to wait (source Microsoft Partner Site)

Configuring Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007*
Exam 70-638 (In Development)
Microsoft Learning Prep Guide (Available tbd*)

Microsoft will use UC (OCS) internally

Surfing the internet we saw also an very interesting website about UC.
Please check this website to see how Microsoft will use UC (OCS) internally.

As e-office we have a federation link with Microsoft so it will integrate perfectly.

http://blogs.technet.com/markdea/archive/2007/06/22/got-your-number.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage
Thanks Mark for sharing your experiences with OCS2007!

Microsoft VHD Test Drive Program

Download it from here or to see tall the Virtual Hard Disks available go here.

The Microsoft VHD Test Drive Program provides customers with an enhanced server-based software evaluation experience that’s faster, better supported and more flexible. You can now access the entire catalog of pre-configured Microsoft and partner products and solutions in the VHD format and start evaluating and testing today from www.microsoft.com/vhd.
This download enables you evaluate Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight. Office SharePoint Server 2007 supports all intranet, extranet, and Web applications across an enterprise within one integrated platform, instead of relying on separate fragmented systems. Additionally, this collaboration and content management server provides IT professionals and developers with the platform and tools they need for server administration, application extensibility, and interoperability.
This fully functional pre-configured VHD provides you a trial software will automatically expire after 30 days. This is a preconfigured virtual machine contained within the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format. Virtual Server 2005 R2 is required to run this VHD. Please refer to the system requirements section for more details.
Size: total 3789.4 MB*
Download it from here.

Where can you find me?

There are plenty channels to get in contact.

• check my Linkedin profile for more information: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/2/164/15A
• check my online status through AJAX (LCS)
• check our website http://microsoft.e-office.com
• send an e-mail joachim.farla@e-office.com

OCS infrastructure back online!

Important Windows Updates where installed on our OCS and virtualization network. Everything is back online. By the way if you intend to install your OCS infrastructure on virtualization products from Microsoft. Go your way. It works perfect. At e-office we are using much more virtualization over the time. At this moment we are using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1 for hosting our OCS mission critical applications. OCS2007 Public Beta is running very well and maintenance is much more easier. Before installing any update just make a snapshot. SP2 on Windows Server 2003 with OCS2007 (Public Beta) is also tested @ e-office. No problem at all.

AJAX down

AJAX is down because of maintenance on our Virtual Servers.

AJAX in my blog

Tnx to the graphical designers. My blog is now AJAX enabled. For al long time now we introduced AJAX as chatting facility within our internet facing MOSS2007 website http://microsoft.e-office.com/ (it's not live we working on it)

Step (1) Click Chat

Step (2) My Office Communicator Client 2007 (Public Beta)
is showing up!

Step (3) You're connected with me!

By the way you see live presence. Please do not hesitate and take a chat. I'll think this is working easier. More technical information is showing up in the next few days.

New MCTS exams

The following certification exams went live between April 17, 2007, and May 7, 2007, and are now available for registration at both Pearson VUE and Prometric sites around the world.
Exam

Language
Exam Title
70-236
German
TS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Configuration
70-236
Japanese
TS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
70-236
French
TS: Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, Configuring
70-237
English
Pro: Designing Messaging Solutions with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007
70-445
German
TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence--Implementierung und Wartung
70-445
French
TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence--Implémentation et maintenance
70-445
Japanese
TS: Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence
70-500
Japanese
TS: Microsoft Windows Mobile Designing, Implementing, and Managing
70-510
English
TS: Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server
70-526
French
TS: Microsoft. NET Framework 2.0--Développement client Windows

Office Communications Server 2007 sessions Netherlands

Office Communications Server 2007: a new method to communicate
Date: 27 June and 4 July
Location: Microsoft Innovation Center, Barneveld, Auditorium Microsoft, Schiphol-Rijk
Direct sign-up for 27 June at Barneveld
Direct sign-up for 4 Juli at Schiphol-Rijk

Location: Netherlands

OCS Ignite Tour 2007 Amsterdam

A couple of weeks ago Mirosoft has organized a great event - OCS IGnite Tour 2007 in Amsterdam. 2 day's of seeing a lot of OCS2007. There was also plenty of time for doing 8 modules to configure OCS2007, configure Enterprise Voice, Enhanced Presence, Creating Dail Plans, configure Exchange 2007, planning architecture etc etc.

Virtual Infrastructure (Microsoft Virtual PC 2007):

- OCS basic configuration (Standard Edition Server) - all roles on the same machine
- Mediation Server (between OCS2007 and the Voice Gateway of AudioCodes)
- Exchange 2007 with UM-role enabled.
- AudioCodes voice gateway (analog)
- Exchange 2007 - 32bit
- OCS2007 Archiving Service
- DC Windows 2003 (ADS,DNS,DHCP)

Excellent information, long day's from 08:00AM till 20:00PM. Included are some pictures of that day. For the next couple of months Microsoft will organize more event's. Most of the time a 2-day training event. For more information on that please review Microsoft Event's calender and sign-up. For problems finding these events please contact me.

For a quick impression of that day:

OCS integration with MOSS2007

MOSS2007 is a wonderful product we use for internal and external collaboration with our customers/partners. After implement OCS you see some interesting features become available within MOSS2007.

Now it very simple to communicate with your collegaes from Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Simply just fill-in the right SIP Address in the profile database and activate your Microsoft Office Communicator Client 2007.

When you implement Enterprise Voice capability's in OCS there are different methods to contact someone. (1) > Call from MOSS (2) sent a IM

On a simple list in MOSS you see presence tags. In this example you see my collegae Vincent Verweij.

When clicking on his name you see much more features like (agenda information, Call nr. details, start IM conversation etc)

When connecting a Basic or Advanced Gateway in your infrastructure you infrastructure is complete. It makes my workplace more complete. This is "Working Easier"!

Interoute rocks!

For a couple of months now we connected our LCS environment with Interoute in UK. We are very pleased to work with Interoute, especially the technical support is great!

Interoute makes VoIP as easy to manage as email

New service enables genuine unified communications and removes
the last barrier to corporate VoIP adoption

London, UK, 19 June 2007 - Interoute, owner of Europe’s most advanced next-generation voice and data network, has announced a new innovation that makes corporate voice calls as easy to manage and as cost effective as email, and all without the need for costly new hardware or complex integration issues.

The new service called Interoute One makes unified communications easy to set up and will drastically reduce call costs, slash migration time to VoIP-based telephony and offer a secure corporate service.

Interoute enables companies using Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005 or Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 to form the world’s biggest business community, sharing secure Instant Messaging (IM), presence and video calls across corporate networks.

The Interoute One platform enables companies using Microsoft’s unified communications software to interconnect in a unified, free speaking community without additional infrastructure.

Eric Swift, Senior Director of Product Management for Microsoft’s Unified Communications Group said: “We are pleased to see companies like Interoute embrace the flexibility of Microsoft’s unified communications software and make federated interoperability with their network easier for customers. By connecting with Interoute’s network, organizations can communicate with more people using Office Communicator for VoIP, video and instant messaging.”

It only takes 10 minutes to connect (or “federate”) to the Interoute One platform, at www.interouteone.com, quickly enabling direct communication with other companies and the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), without the need for additional hardware, difficult integration or expensive upgrades. The solution acts as an ‘intelligent bridge’ so businesses only need to register once to Interoute One, rather than create bilateral agreements with each individual company.

Jim Kinsella, Interoute’s CEO, said: “We have been working with Microsoft technologies since 2006 to develop this solution, and we’re very proud of the innovation that has gone into its development. Unified communications is the future of telephony, and we’re uniquely positioned to deliver that promise with our European network. Interoute One is the first genuinely secure corporate VoIP federation service for business that’s quick and easy to implement. On top of the security benefits all calls to your business community are free and other calls are extremely competitively priced.”

Interoute One also offers secure and safe roaming for all remote workers, significantly reducing mobile expenses whilst enabling employees to be contacted ‘at their desktop’ wherever they are in the world. The provision of a single telephone number that can search from desktop, to desk phone, from mobile phone to any of your devices to find you, means it’s easy to manage. The solution can be fully managed via one web page. So you can control, monitor and access your entire voice services easily online.

Technical Information
The solution is designed to meet the requirements of every organisation. For businesses that don’t run Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005, an alternative desktop phone Soft phone is available, and SIP trunking is available for businesses that want to connect directly to their Private Branch eXchange (PBX), without the cost and hassle of having to upgrade their owned equipment. With Interoute One you get all the advantages that moving to VoIP brings without any of the usual migration costs.

About Interoute
Interoute is the owner operator of Europe's most advanced and densely connected voice and data network, encompassing over 53,000 kms of lit fibre. Its full-service next generation network serves more than 12,000 customers from retail to aerospace, every major European incumbent as well as the major operators of North America, East and South Asia, governments, universities and research agencies. These organisations find Interoute the ideal partner for hosting content, providing wholesale transit services, corporate access or creating new services. With established operations throughout mainland Europe, North America and Dubai Interoute also owns and operates dense city networks throughout Europe's major business centres. More than €1 billion in e-commerce transactions flows through its data centres each day, making Interoute a key part of Europe’s Digital Supply Chain. http://www.interoute.com/

EE-pool and persistant/transient user databases

OCS version (Public Beta)

Tips and tricks when configuring your Enterprise Pool against a Microsoft SQL Cluster

When installing and configuring your EE-pool the Deployment Wizard is asking you about where to put the Persistent User Database / Transient User Database. The OCS Deployment Wizard is searching for the right place to put this information on your local server. In case of deploying a EE-pool environment you MUST enter the fully UNC paths of your cluster connecting virtually to your LUN's . These UNC paths must be accesible within your SQL cluster resource.

Example:

E/F are logical disks within the cluster resource group. If you do not change anything and leave the default settings in place the OCS deployment will fail.

OCS deployment e-office

We are working with Microsoft for a long time now. This year the TAP program for OCS has launced. We are a litte bit late to particate within this program. Additionally we are participating in the Enterprise Group at Microsoft to deliver business cases and effectively deploy infrastructures at customer places. For a couple of weeks now we are designing our own infrastructre in coorporation with Microsoft Netherlands. So let me tell you with infrastructure we choose. This information is based on our experiences with OCS2007 Public Beta. Information about RC1 of OCS is excluded in this blog because we sign a NDA.

e-office is about 120 people big and we are running LCS2005SP1 at this moment to deliver instant messaging. We also connected our LCS environment with interoute (with is delivering VOIP and SIP hosted environments).

To replace our environment we started to setup a plan to build and configure OCS2007. Planning your environment with OCS is the most important thing because te integration with telephony (Enhanced Presence).

At this moment in-place upgrade is not supported so we build a separate OCS environment and migrate manually our users from LCS to the OCS enterprise pool. Just one click and very simple te handle. LCS and OCS can coexist in the SAME forest or SIP enabled domain. This "feature" makes it very simple to setup, configuring in the infrastructure.

How does e-office started with the inplementation of OCS:

1. Make a plan based on input of the OCS Planning Guide (Public Beta)
2. Use SharePoint 2007 to make roll-up list (tasks) etc.
3. Split your activities into small blocks of work - decide (Standard or Enterprise bits!)
4. Extend you schema and prep your forest and archive your printscreens and install info.
5. Prep your domain and decide with SIP domain name you will use
6. Setup and configuring you pool - assign your certificates
7. Start your RTC services and check your configuration.

e-office rely on a SQL Server 2005 Cluster SP1 as Back-End storage. You must implement OCS Enterprise Edition for remote SQL installations. Within the new version of OCS Microsoft introduced Edge roles. The same naming convention you see in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007.

OCS is coming with the following set of possible Edge Roles:

1. Access Edge Role (keypoint for Remote Access connection, federation with partners, PIM etc)
2. Web Conferencing Edge Role
3. A/V Audio and Video Edge Role

additionally you can implement CWA2007 (Communicator Web Access) or Live Meeting features.



In the upcoming weeks we are setting up our DNS and certificates to fully complete our installation and to make this wonderful product work in our production environment.

My first mobile blogpost!

e-office is Gouden 'Great Place to Work' 2007

Welcome to my blog

Welcome to my first blogitem. For the next couple of months i am sharing my knowledge of Unified Communications with the community. My goals are: sharing technical information about Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. Most of the time infrastructure related. Setting you up with good alternatives in you traditional telephony network. Show you the possibility's how to integrate SharePoint Technology's within OCS or LCS.

Please contact me if you struggeling with some item above! I am always pleased to help you out.
Can can also contact my by e-mail (joachim.farla@e-office.com)