Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Conference Expiration Period

We are running OCS for 7 months now and first migrated our environment from Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 to Office Communications Server 2007 RTM Enterprise - Expanded Configuration.

Before running the RTM version of OCS we ran OCS 2007 Beta 3 (Certified Schema) in production. And before that we experimented with Beta 1 in a closed environment completely under NDA. Nice thing to know - the first thread in the RTC Private Beta newsgroup of OCS was from e-office ;-)

Sins 1 month we are downscaled to Office Communications Server 2007 RTM Standard Edition - Consolidated Topology - 1 OCS Standard Edge Consolidated, OCS Mediation Server and Communicator Web Access server. Everything works fine. The expanded configuration was way to big for us (110 employees).

OCS is not only for me a big change in life. It really affects the way how I organize my work. Especially how I streamlined my business communication with customers. Truly sure it makes my work much easier. As described earlier not only for me it's a big change but also for my colleagues the Information Workers at e-office m.

When using OCS and it's features like Live Meeting 2007, MOC, MOCM end-users came with different sets of questions. One question really triggers me to figure out how Live Meeting is dealing with expiration dates etc.

Basically what do you need to know? Understanding how expiration in conferencing flows.

Office Communications Server did not store conferences and their content indefinitely. Pure to make sure no disk space is lost and performance is not affected. When a conference is scheduled it will get an expiration date. The conference data record is deleted when conferences expire. All content associated with the meeting is deleted within one logical process. No the organizer or participants can join the meeting from that moment.

Within the RTC database in OCS a low priority thread (stored procedure) searches for conference that meets the all of the following criteria:

- Expiration time associated, expiration time has passed, or no expiration date is specified, six months has passed since last recorded conference activation

or

- the conference is not currently active.

When no expiration date is specified the maximum grace period (six months) is used as expiration time.

Example (1):

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Example (2): Object Dependencies of ConfExpireConference

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2 comments:

Happy said...

Good explanatory note..but it will unnecessary complicate the scenario if one have to go through all that hassles. See our www.rhubcom.com turbomeeting is compatible with both of Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 and Office Communications Server 2007 ..So its just wanna a cake walk to just register, get the link and join on schedule.

Terry Hardy said...

The remote access software from Proxy Networks that I run WILL allow you to record your conferences. If this is the issue you are facing, I would suggest an upgrade so you don't have to rely on external sources to make a record, you can just do it yourself!