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.