There's nothing more satisfying to a PM than shipping a product. Today, we shipped the beta for Office Communications Server 2007 R2, in record time after shipping OCS 2007 last year. It is a great achievement for the team. Today brings back memories from my earlier days, when Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 had recently shipped and we were all gung ho about Office Communications Server.
Source: link
As a part of the broad initiative across Microsoft to support 64 bit versions across many of its product lines, the next release of OCS will support 64-bit operating systems only. This decision will help meet customer demand and is a natural progression of the product that aligns with the same approach taken by the Exchange team (with Exchange 2007) and the SharePoint team (with SharePoint 2007) to support 64 bit operating systems only.
For the next release of OCS, Microsoft will support deployments on 64 bit operating systems - Windows Server 2003 x64 (R2) and Windows Server 2008 x64.
Based on customer feedback, Microsoft’s goal with the next release of OCS is to simplify deployments by reducing the number of servers needed for deployment. Customers are also telling us they are pushing the limits of existing hardware with their “mission critical” communications solutions.
By leveraging x64 hardware, we are able to use inexpensive memory to support more concurrent processing of real-time media streams (audio, video, conferences) on smaller number of servers. With the change to x64, we can simplify and consolidate OCS deployments while supporting additional capabilities in the 64-bit server hardware is broadly available in the market today and is offered by major hardware vendors. The benefits of adopting 64 bit hardware are not limited to high scale OCS customers.
The majority of server hardware being sold today is x64-based and many businesses are already enjoying its advantages and will not need to purchase new hardware to deploy the next release of OCS. Customers who are using 32-bit hardware systems to run OCS 2007 will need to upgrade to x64 systems to install and run the next release of OCS.
The OCS team is continuing work on the next release and we look forward to sharing more details as soon as we can…stay tuned!
Sean Smith, Sr. Network Engineer with CorVel, shares a little bit of his experience on deploying Office Communications Server 2007 at his company.
In this short interview, Joe talks about some of the testing he has been doing with Office Communications Server 2007 in a Virtualized environment.
Interview with Peter Schmatz (Office Communications Server team). Peter discusses things like the Best Practice Analyzer for OCS and other integration items.
File Name:
OCS_Archiving.doc
Version:
1.1
Date Published:
8/22/2008
Language:
English
Download Size:
993 KB
This document guides you through the process of deploying Office Communications Server 2007, Archiving and CDR Server. Information provided in this document includes:
File Name:
OCSEdgePlanningTool.msi
Version:
3.0.6362.81
Date Published:
8/20/2008
Language:
English
Download Size:
1.5 MB
The Edge Planning Tool asks questions about your proposed or current edge server deployment. The tool uses your answers and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 best practices to generate the following reports:
Within a couple of weeks from now we become official StartReady Technology/Solution Partner to extend our broad services of Unified Communications! Especially the Unified Communications and Collaboration projects are absolutely amazing. e-office will help your organization within 20 days to deploy a complete UC environment. A little tip:
Stay tuned on our public MOSS website http://microsoft.e-office.com to see how we fix that.
StartReady stands behind the value and quality of its solutions. Therefore, we allow companies to familiarise themselves with our products the first month free of charge.
What does 'Try Before You Buy' entail exactly? .gif)
Very simple: You have the option during the first month of the contract to terminate the agreement (without obligation).
We will pick up the appliance again free of charge.
Conditions:
Contact me if you like to try this out. joachim.farla@e-office.com
File Name:
RTCBPA.msi
Version:
3.0.6362.80
Knowledge Base (KB) Articles:
KB954048
Date Published:
8/15/2008
Language:
English
Download Size:
867 KB
The Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Best Practices Analyzer Tool is a diagnostic tool that gathers configuration information from a Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 environment and determines whether the configuration is set according to Microsoft best practices. You can install the tool on a client computer that runs Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, or on a server that runs Office Communications Server 2007.
Note: Although you can install the Office Communications Server 2007 Best Practices Analyzer directly on the computer that runs Office Communications Server 2007 Server, we recommend that you install and run this tool on a client computer.
The tool uses set of configuration files to gather information from the Office Communications Server 2007 environment. It compares this data against a set of pre-defined rules for Office Communications Server 2007, and reports potential issues. For every issue reported, the tool provides the current configuration in the Office Communications Server 2007 environment, and the recommended configuration.
With the proper network access, the tool can examine your Active Directory and Office Communications Server 2007 servers to do the following:
This month we had some discussions about the new DisableIM function in the registry to make sure a user cannot sent IM messages to other users or automated services in MOC.
Congrats to my MVP-buddy Jeff Schertz who discovered that the registry subkey wasn’t corrent. Scott Oseychik from Microsoft has corrected the subkey described in the KB-article.
So basically how do you activate this functionality:
1. Install the Communicator 2007 update package that is dated July 2008. For more information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
954439 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/954439/) Description of the update for Communicator 2007: July 2008
2. Configure the DisableIM registry entry. To do this, follow these steps:
2a. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK.
2b.Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator (the old value in the KB article was HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Communicator)
2c. On the Edit menu, point to New, and then click DWORD Value.
2d. Type DisableIM, and then press ENTER.
2e. Right-click DisableIM, and then click Modify.
2f. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK.
2g. Exit Registry Editor.
Note After the DisableIM registry entry is set to 1, the following statements are true:
Result:
;-)
Language(s):
English.
Product(s):
Microsoft Office Communications Server,Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.
Audience(s):
Developer.
Duration:
90 Minutes
Start Date:
Tuesday, July 22, 2008 12:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada)
Event Overview
After completing this lab, you will be better able to understand the steps required to build a voice response application using Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server, create and work with dynamic grammars in voice response applications, and build applications that support dynamic navigation of line-of-business data.
Registration Options
Event ID:
1032383678
Source: OCS Team Blog more info at Unisys
Unisys recently put out a press release announcing the UC Hosted Trial, and I wanted to give some additional behind-the-scenes information on what we’re doing here. This is a system managed by Unisys that lets Microsoft and Unisys field sales sign up our customers for a trial of Microsoft’s unified communications technologies, including Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. We’ve been using the trial both internally and externally for several months now, and it’s gotten some great feedback and customer usage – nearly 800 30-day accounts have been created. In this post, I’m going to talk about what the trial is in a bit more detail and how it all works.
The UC hosted trial is designed to give customers the ability to experience firsthand the power of Microsoft’s UC products without having to download or install a trial version of the server software in a lab environment. All the end-user features available from Exchange Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007 that we could possibly offer are available in the trial. Participants in the trial use Outlook 2007 for mail, calendaring and unified messaging and Office Communicator 2007 for instant messaging, web conferencing, and voice calling, with everything working against Microsoft software running in Unisys’ Reston, VA datacenter. Participants can have up to 20 accounts on the trial and the trial lasts for 30 days.
All this is made possible through the great remote access capabilities of Exchange Server and Office Communications Server. Both products fully enable users connecting remotely from the server infrastructure. In a typical company, this may be people working from home or on the road. We use the same elements in the hosted trial, as without them we would either have our total user pool be limited to those working in the Unisys data center or all participants would need VPN access – neither are particularly compelling options for a trial designed to be both easy to use and worldwide in scope. Unisys has ‘edge’ components for Exchange and Office Communications Server deployed in their data center’s DMZ, and that allows anyone with an account to connect up from anywhere in the world. Even better, when companies deploy Microsoft’s UC products, they’ll have the same great remote experience – it just works, on the LAN at corporate or on the Wi-Fi network from your hotel in Taipei.
Moving on with the deployment, Unisys has these systems running on their ES-7000 line of servers, with one cell dedicated to Exchange, one to Office Communications Server, and others to the variety of ancillary products (SharePoint Server, System Management Server, Reporting, etc.) that are use for other services, administration and maintenance. The solution is conservatively sized for about 5,000 concurrent users, and essentially we’re way over-provisioned on the hardware front – the Unisys servers are designed for scale and it handles the workloads like a champ. And of course, reliability hasn’t been an issue for us at all.
What really matters though is how this translates into the trial participant experience. This begins with provisioning, or when a Microsoft or Unisys sales person creates the accounts on the hosted trial using a web form. The sales person enters in the names of the participants and optionally their work phone numbers, or uploads a simple spreadsheet with the same information. A custom workflow process developed by Unisys then kicks off and creates all the user accounts, their mailboxes and their settings for Office Communicator. This single process to create a user in our “faux enterprise” is one of the great benefits of Microsoft’s UC products for real enterprises as well. One can quickly link Exchange and Office Communications Server with other business processes such that automating the creation of a user’s communications resources is linked right into Active Directory and can be automated along with account creation. So no more waiting to get a new employees phone turned on!
The provisioning for our trial also creates a “sandbox” in Active Directory, ensuring that while there are many trials going on in the server at once, participants can only see accounts created for their company. Because Office Communications Server 2007 doesn’t support multi-tenant hosting capability, this required some pretty fancy Active Directory footwork - once again a statement to the power of the platform, but more so to Unisys’ excellent custom coding work.
So now that there are accounts provisioned on the trial, the Microsoft or Unisys sponsor gets an email from the provisioning system with all the account information for the newly created users. The sponsor just forwards those mails to the participants who then download and install the client software - Outlook 2007 and Office Communicator 2007, both of which are available in 120 day trial downloads. After signing in, they get a fully functional messaging and communications environment. They can send email, instant message, make voice and video calls, collaborate and much more….
Connectivity to the phone system is one part of the trial that we’re quite proud of because it lends a lot to the experience. In the trial we offer inbound calling to trial users using Exchange Unified Messaging’s Auto-Attendant feature – by dialing a single number you can reach anyone in the trial just by speaking their name. Then for US-based customers, we also have enabled making outbound phone calls to any phone number in the US. This is done using SIP-PSTN Gateways from Quintum Technologies LLC, a subsidiary of Network Equipment Technologies – their press release on the hosted trial can be found here. Since the Quintum Tenor gateways are qualified in the Microsoft Open Interoperability Program, it was a snap to plug them into PRI lines from the carrier serving the data center and connect the gateway into the OCS deployment. In addition, voice quality is consistently great – whether listening to messages over Exchange UM or forwarding calls to your cell phone.
So now the participants are up and running on the trial and doing things like using Exchange Server’s smart calendaring capabilities to schedule conference calls on Office Communications Server. The Microsoft or Unisys sponsor can now communicate with them in a totally different way – using Federation. The Hosted UC Trial is federated with our corporate deployments of Office Communications Server, so sponsors can add their trial participants to their Office Communicator “buddy list”, see when they are online, and communicate with them using an encrypted connection through the internet. Even better, these calls use the same great sounding wideband audio codec as internal calls, and can include video as well. So now an audio-only conference call that used to be run on a bridge can now include IM, video and web collaboration.
While we certainly are happy that the trial shows off our products quite well, this really highlights the great work our partners do. The expertise at Unisys and Quintum made this trial possible, building on our UC platform and turning it into a great solution - just like our hundreds of UC & voice partners do every day for deployments worldwide.
So if you have had any interest in Exchange Server 2007 or Office Communications Server 2007 but the issues of finding lab space, hardware or time to install the server software has prevented you from checking it out, then definitely ask your Microsoft or Unisys sales person about the Hosted UC Trial. In less than a day, you and your colleagues can experience all the great end-user features that Microsoft’s unified communications products have to offer. And once you do, use that federated link to send me an IM or make a video call and let me know what we can do to make the trial better! I’m at sip:jastark@microsoft.com
Jamie Stark
Sr. Technical Product Manager
Microsoft Unified Communications
File Name:
HMC_4.5_Help.zip
Version:
HMC
Date Published:
8/11/2008
Language:
English
Download Size:
4.0 MB
HMC 4.5 brings together powerful Microsoft enterprise products such as
Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services, and
now gives you Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, which
manages all real-time communications such as instant messaging (IM)
and audio and video conferencing.
Other new features and enhancements:
• Exchange Server 2007 SP1: Web-based OABs and resource mailboxes
• Windows SharePoint Services: multi-tenant People Picker functionality
• Provisioning capabilities have been expanded: Microsoft Provisioning System (MPS) cross data store integration procedures and Individual Information Worker (IIW) tenant model
at this moment I'm out of office. I will return on the 18th of August. Lots of upcoming news after this summer. Nice Speech enabled applications completely integrated with MOSS and OCS presented in the new TaaS (Telephony as a Service) event organized by e-office and interoute.
More solutions for our working environments in the 21st century. Also our new UCC packages which make your organization ready within 20 days to use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007. Stay tuned on the corporate website of the Microsoft Team of e-office for more technical information.
e-office will become Value Added Reseller (VAR) for StartReady UC appliances! We can deploy this UC appliance worldwide in every state and city!
For everyone happy holiday and stay tuned after the summer period. Greetz Joachim Farla, Marc Wetters and the whole Microsoft Team of e-office m.
For a connection between the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and OCS2007 we need to install BES 4.1 Service Pack 6 and choose to install the BlackBerry Collaboration Service and select Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 during the installation of SP6.
Some prerequisites are that Message queing is installed on the Windows 2003 SP1 or higher. Office Communicator Web Access is required. Enhanced Presence needs to be turned on in OCS. Windows authentication should be used in IIS. Form based authentication is not supported.
You need to install OC client 2.1.10c on the BlackBerry Smartphone.
Choose to install the BlackBerry Collaboration Service and select Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007
Fill in the OCWA host and choose for HTTPS and HTTP. HTTPS is recommended both for security and stability of the connection. When HTTP is choosen the collaboration service will open up 3 concurrent connections, where HTTPS will open up only 1 concurrent connection.
Look at the final screen of the SP6 installation. We now have a BlackBerry Collaboration Service installed!
If you ever would like to change the OCWA hostname or change HTTP to HTTPS, then go to the BlackBerry Server Configuration panel and go to the Collaboration Service tab.
Now the BES is all setup for the OCS 2007 connection let’s try to log on to the communicator client on the BlackBerry.
Fill in the correct credentials and sign in.
![clip_image001[4]](http://lh4.ggpht.com/joachimfarla/SJdv49ARZJI/AAAAAAAAB0E/aI7PRVVq77k/s1600-h/clip_image001%5B4%5D%5B2%5D.gif "clip_image001[4]")
The client is connecting
We’re connected to OCS!
Now let’s chat with someone.
Let’s look at the other options available during a conversation.
And some more options for example call the person you are chatting with..
Specials thanks to my colleague Robert Nijbroek who work for the BlackBerry support team at e-office. All credits to his work for writing this article. Connect with him at linkedin!
The MVB-baby is born! On the 25th of July we (Priscilla Pille and Joachim Farla) became parents of Tygo Finn Farla (First name: Tygo). We are very happy and proud. You can email Tygo on tygo.finn@live.nl (sorry for the Dutch lines ;-)
and now the end result: (deep sleep sssssssst ;-)
and wake up
It’s absolutely an amazing feeling to have this little guy! Everyone who support us thank you very much.
Downloading BlackBerry Client for use with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 v2.1.10
By completing and submitting the form below to Research In Motion Limited and/or its subsidiaries or affiliated companies ("RIM"), you consent to the collection, use, and disclosure of the information by RIM in accordance with RIM’s privacy policy, which can be found at http://www.blackberry.com/legal/privacy.shtml,: (i) for RIM’s internal use; (ii) for the purpose facilitating your download of RIM software; and (iii) to allow RIM or any one of its authorized business partners to provide you with information on RIM and/or BlackBerry products and services, if you have so elected.
Source: here (Just fill in the form and there you go).
In the next post we will explain how to prepare your BES server to fully support OCS functionality on your Blackberry’s.
File Name:
UCUpdates.exe
Version:
1.0.522.101
Knowledge Base (KB) Articles:
KB952693
Date Published:
7/30/2008
Language:
English
Download Size:
10.8 MB
Download here
