OCS2007 and QO(S)E

Post by Warren Barkley:

Earlier this week, Office Communications Server 2007 Quality of Experience Monitoring Server (QMS for short) released to manufacturing. As we were conceiving Office Communications Server 2007, we were looking at ways to give IT manager an improved and simplified management experience.

I knew that we didn’t want to use the quality management methods favored by many of the vendors which required administrators to put sniffers in the network and that we had some great technology in our endpoints which would tell you everything you need to know about the quality of every call and conference.

Unlike traditional approaches to voice quality which start and end at the quality of the network, QMS represents a whole new way of thinking about voice quality.  The QMS is a pure software-based solution that monitors voice quality using all the information collected by the endpoints, MOS (mean opinion score), loss, jitter, delay, device quality and over a dozen other parameters that are used to determine quality. All this great data allows administrators to not only monitor the quality of the calls but also gives them the ability to slice and dice call data to diagnose issues at their source.  QMS works with the other tools IT already knows and uses like Access, Excel or SQL for reporting and slicing and dicing data, and System Center Operations Manager for alerting and monitoring.

Overview

The QoE Monitoring Server is a new server role for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition. It provides the information that you need in order to better understand the media quality that your users are experiencing in your Office Communications Server 2007 deployment. With QoE Monitoring Server, you can do the following:

• Gather statistics on media quality of locations or based on a grouping of subnets
• Proactively monitor and troubleshoot media quality of experience issues
• Perform diagnostics to diagnose VoIP user complaints
• View trends which can help you with post-deployment growth and measure results against the service level agreement

The QoE Monitoring Server collects quality metrics at the end of each VoIP call from the participant endpoints, including IP phones, Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, the Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007 client, and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 A/V Conferencing Server and Mediation Server. These quality metrics are aggregated and stored in a SQL database. The data can then be used to alert you to abnormal media quality conditions and also to generate routine media quality reports.

System Requirements

• Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2003

• Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Enterprise pool or Standard Edition Server.