By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
June 25, 2010 at 2:08 PMWe've recently assisted a number of clients in Exchange 2007 à 2010 upgrades. In each case, they've been using ISA or TMG to publish external Exchange services. For the most part, it's been easy to find information on the subject: the MS Exchange team has a really nice write up on the ISA configurations for 2010 upgrade; ISAserver.org has a good write-up in general on ISA and Exchange; Elan Shudnow has a post or two on the subject; and there's always technet. All the info is helpful, however my
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
June 24, 2010 at 11:27 AM
The SAN cert strikes again! I have a new mantra: don't ever use SAN certs with OCS. I know, I know. "It can be done / you have it working / it's cheaper / it's supposed to work". I get it. But this week was the last straw for me and the SAN; specifically the SAN cert on the Edge server's internal interface.
The Problem
I've had this issue a couple times: when you place a call with your MOC client, you hear a few slow beeps before the call actually starts ringing. In general, this
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
March 24, 2010 at 2:36 PMWhile I'm not at VoiceCon this year, I've been following the developments there closely. Public info about Wave 14 (the next version of OCS) is starting to trickle out.
Some important info:
Support for new standalone IP phones being unveiled by Polycom and Astra. I've been _begging_ for MS to incorporate more standalone devices for a long time. These look promising.
Polycom's site has few pictures, but I found this pdf that gives you a sneak peek. Check out the "CX phones". Note the Cx
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
December 14, 2009 at 10:08 AMA client just had a nasty little issue with Rights Management Server today: it stopped working. Yeah, that's a pretty bad issue. As it turns out, anyone with RMS and Office 2003 will have this same experience. From the KB:
Starting on December 11, 2009, customers using Office 2003 will not be able to open Office 2003 documents protected with the Active Directory Rights Management Service (AD RMS) or Rights Management Services (RMS). Customers will also not be able to save Office 2003 documents p
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 7, 2009 at 3:02 PMAs a follow up to my previous post on the CWA PIN Length issue - I have something that solves the issue - for now. Of course it's not officially supported by Microsoft etc. etc. (MS says it will be fixed in Wave 14… grr!!!) but I think this a pretty clean way to change the display text.
It occurred to me that instead of messing with the ".resource" files (which were in some sort of binary format) that contained the offending string, we could just modify the bit of HTML that was calling
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 5, 2009 at 11:50 AM
(10/07/2009 - I've updated this issue in a newer post)
I noticed something odd a while back when we deployed OCS 2007 R2 for audio conferencing: that the webpage where users go to reset their PINs always says that PIN length must be a minimum of 5 digits.
Even if you have set your PIN policy in OCS to be less than 5 (in my case, 4) that text in the message never updates.
I'm no web development genius, but I figured changing a "5" to a "4" in HTML was well wit
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 1, 2009 at 2:21 PMGood news: OCS can now federate with lots of other vendors, including Google and IBM Sametime.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/oct09/10-01ucinterop.mspx
This is great news for the UC world in general.
More info to follow on how it actually works in production…
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
August 27, 2009 at 2:34 PM
I've been fiddling with QoS and OCS for the past few days and have some insights to share.
First important point is that OCS will support QoS via DSCP marking. But it is not enabled by default on any OCS servers or clients, but can be enabled. Microsoft has some pretty useful info on how to make that work. Straight from TechNet on the MS philosophy of QoS:
Although Office Communicator Server 2007 has been designed to work without any QoS framework, it is possible to configure the media sta
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
April 14, 2009 at 4:48 PM
I just learned something surprising today about OCS (not R2) and normalization. Eric Gleason, a friend of mine who is the OCS guru (among other responsibilities) at a customer, pointed this out to me today.
It all started when Eric and I had integrated OCS with a Dialogic and a Nortel. We originally (like 10 months ago) had OCS set up to send outside calls through the dialogic with OCS adding the 9 to get out, like this:
You dial: 555-1212
OCS sends: 9-555-1212
The gateway then rout
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
April 2, 2009 at 11:11 AMThere was a lot of talk at VoiceCon about taking a "Best of Breed" approach: use Cisco for the PBX, use Microsoft for e-mail, use SameTime to do IM (heck have ½ your users on SameTime, ½ on OCS), use google doc. Use openSER or asterisk or whatever! It should all work togther.
All of this sounds great: you "leverage your existing investments" e.g. keep around the suff you have and try to make it work together. How perfect! Now if we could just get everyone to sit down and make
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
April 1, 2009 at 4:51 PM
Cisco announced a new integration with OCS this week at VoiceCon. I got a chance to take a look at the new feature - it turns out to be a combination of a customized OCS Tab and an incarnation of the new Cisco extensible client framework. It's called CUCIMOC (Cookie Mock - that name has gotta change!) Cisco Unified Communications Integtraion for MOC. It allows your MOC client to integrate directly to Cisco Unified Communications Manger 7.0 without CUPS.
The integration is pretty slick lookin
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
April 1, 2009 at 10:23 AM
I discovered a bug with the R2 Dial-in conferencing… the good news is that it's being fixed by MS as we speak (I wasn't the only one to discover the bug!). There is a hotfix for the LiveMeeting client now. UPDATE: and now, thanks to a comment from Joel, I have the link to the Outlook plug-in hotfix as well. In fact, I believe that the hotfix for the Outlook plug-in is in fact the most important of the two.
Anyway, here are the details:
When you cancel a calendar appointment that was a conf
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
April 1, 2009 at 9:30 AM
That was Gurdeep Singh Pall, Corporate VP for Unfied Communications at Microsoft admonishing his competition for delivering multiple disparate products and calling them "Unified". He even made mention of competitors' need for duct tape to unify their platforms. While that quote was a general broadside against incumbent IP Telephony leaders, it was clearly aimed at Cisco.
I was actually pretty shocked at the direct shots he took at Cisco - I wasn't expecting this much heat to com
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
March 31, 2009 at 10:24 AMI'm mostly through the first day and a half of VoiceCon 2009 and have noticed a common thread running through the sessions: it's important to understand your customer's business. Duh! Well, actually it's pretty impressive that a technology conference - VoiceCon - is laying this out so clearly. The technology is taking a backseat to business. I started to hear that at VoiceCon in San Francisco, but now the message is focused and is being hammered home.
Kevin Kennedy, CEO of Avaya gave a really en
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
March 31, 2009 at 7:47 AM
RoundTable Changes Hands
Many of you may have heard this already: the Microsoft Roundtable is now the Polycom CX5000. All production, support, etc is now handed over to Polycom. I'm reading this as a signal for the months to come: MS will not be looking to get into the hardware game at all. The less hardware the better for them, I guess. This is obviously going to continue to be a major distinction from Avaya, Cisco etc.
OCS Endpoints from SNOM
The SNOM phones that are "OCS Ready&qu
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
February 27, 2009 at 1:44 PMI just finished integrating OCS R2 with a Cisco CallManager deployment. Everything was working as expected (this was an upgrade from R1).
But because this was R2, I was eager to test out the new OCS dial-in conferencing service. So I provisioned myself a bridge number and PIN and dialed in using a Cisco 7941 IP phone. And that's when I met the conferencing lady… and my troubles began.
Relationship Woes
The conferencing lady answered & prompted me for the conference ID. I entered my Bridge
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
February 25, 2009 at 8:28 AMIt works!!
(I'm tempted to just put an <EOM> here!)
I have to admit, I was skeptical that the AV edge server would actually work through NAT. The first I heard of NAT being supported was back in October on Jeff's blog. But even in Jeff's post, he pointed out some stuff that left room for uncertainty: "[NAT is] supported if the external firewall can be configured to filter inbound traffic with DNAT and outbound traffic can be configured with SNAT then. There is also a note that if IS
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
February 6, 2009 at 2:42 PMThere's a showdown brewing between Microsoft and Cisco in the UC space. Both companies offer a lot of different products, some overlap and some don't. I made a chart below to show where the products that do overlap stack up.
Note: I'm not making a judgment here as to whether or not the Cisco / Microsoft product is better - just how they align in the market space. Cisco Call Manager does many things better than OCS, and OCS does many things better than CCM or MeetingPlace.
Feature Cisco Product
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
February 3, 2009 at 4:32 PMR2 officially launches today. You can view all the PR stuff over at Microsoft & Jeff has linked to the launch site. There are some great videos about what people are doing with OCS here as well. If you do check out the videos, I highly highly recommend watching the Dassault systems video. It's a great example of people building their own UC-enabled apps with the OCS platform. If you don't want to wade through the site (which is quite nice) then here's the link to the 45MB video.
Anyway - as
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
January 20, 2009 at 1:27 PMOne of the best places to add value to an organization is in the way contacts with customers or partners is handled. For many - this is the call center / contact center. This is how sales are made, support tickets are resolved, new customers are discovered, current customers are retained.
Up until now, MS hasn't really had a hand in the contact center space. Several months ago, MS did acquire an ownership stake of the contact center giant, Aspect. But aside from that, there hasn't been much act
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
November 13, 2008 at 11:29 PM
UPDATE 1/20/2009: Good comments from both Andy and Chris below about Cisco's presence. Look for them to make a splash at VoiceCon Orlando 2009. As for Nortel, maybe their bankruptcy filing had something to do with the no-show?
VoiceCon wrapped up today. Two big surprises for me: Cisco had no booth; Nortel had virtually no presence at all. Cisco had a couple guys in some of the panels with what I'd say were mixed results. But they had no keynote speaker, no booth in the exhibit hall. There
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
November 13, 2008 at 11:52 AMGood news for UC at large: Here at VoiceCon, Microsoft and IBM have committed to having federation interoperability for Office Communications Server 2007 and Lotus SameTime – support for it will be official in Q1 of 2009. For OCS, this will be part of the R2 release, according to Eric Swift of Microsoft. There will be no additional charge from either IBM or Microsoft to make this happen. IBM are still working on federation interop with MSN, which is not yet complete. But for now SameTime / OCS i
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
November 12, 2008 at 1:37 PMAt VoiceCon, I've spent some time hanging around the Microsoft booth trying to squeeze those guys for information about R2. A lot of my conversation has centered around the devices available for OCS. I've blogged about this before, and so has Jeff. Overall the devices (headsets, handsets, speakerphones) provide a pretty good experience. But I've thought that there's room for improvement. And for me, it starts with the Tanjay (pictured below)
I got some good info about the Tanjay's future with
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
November 12, 2008 at 9:55 AMI can finally retract my earlier statement about OCS 2007 not really being a conference bridge. This is officially resolved in OCS 2007 R2. I saw a great demo of the audio conferencing at VoiceCon. And, not to sound like too much of a fanboy, but… it rocked.
I know what you're thinking: whoopdedoo: Microsoft can now do what any conference bridge has been able to do for centuries. And there is some element of truth to that: my well-known opinion is that the original version of OCS should have co
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
November 12, 2008 at 9:35 AM
Over and over, the presenters are stressing business integration. From Avaya to IBM to Microsoft to Nortel, it's the commonly stated direction of UC.
In one of the presentations yesterday, industry analyst Blair Pleasant laid out the four steps to UC nirvana (my words, not hers). They look something like the following:
1. IP communications (IP PBX, CTI)
2. Enhanced IP Communications (SIP ,interfaces, UM)
3. UC User Productivity (Presence, IM, Advanced mobility, Conferencing /Collab
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
November 11, 2008 at 9:51 AM
I've been prattling on about the need to integrate OCS into "business processes" for the past few months, and about how it shouldn't just be about replacing like for like functionality.
Let me diverge for just a minute from that thinking. Let's just say you needed new communications infrastructure: Would Microsoft be competitive from the cost standpoint? Well it occurred to me that sometimes, the product itself is the justification for the project.
So I took it upon myself to put
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
November 11, 2008 at 12:43 AMSo far VoiceCon SF has been great. And from an MS perspective it's been quite interesting. It's only the first day so no definitely conclusions yet. But one session was really informative and I wanted to recap and provide some insight. I sat in on a presentation that was about 3 hours long and consisted of 10 vendors:
Avaya
Cisco
IBM
Microsoft
Nortel
NEC
RIM
Shortel
Siemens
And each vendor had prepared a "response" to an imaginary RFP for a 2000 person customer wanting UC. While the re
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
November 7, 2008 at 3:31 PM
Adding Value with UC
How exactly can UC add value to the business?? It starts with asking some questions about the business:
"Could my organization increase revenue if we reduced the amount of time it took to close a deal? Enter an order? Update an order? Process a request? Resolve an issue"
"Could my organization increase customer satisfaction if we provided more timely and accurate information to clients?"
"Could my organization increase employee satisfacti
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
November 7, 2008 at 10:17 AM
My Definition of Unified Communications
Here's my new working definition
UC is using a single communications platform to increase productivity.
That's it. People in your organization aren't communicating as effectively as they could; figure out how much money poor communication is costing you… AND FIX IT!!
Maybe the fix involves a phone; maybe it doesn't. Maybe it involves video; maybe it doesn't. Or IM. Or LiveMeeting. Those specifics aren't immediately relevant; they only are relevan
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
November 6, 2008 at 11:24 AMI'm getting ready for VoiceCon, which kicks off next week. I'll be blogging everyday from the conference, focusing on what the UC roadmap looks like for the next 12-18 months.
Obviously I'm going to be paying close attention to Microsoft at this conference. But I'm not really there so much to check out the new widgets, gadgets and tweaks to OCS – although that will be cool. The two things that I've got my eyes on: 1) what are Cisco, Avaya, Nortel, Siemens saying about Microsoft; 2) who's follow
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 17, 2008 at 4:38 PMI've been using Exchange 2007 UM for quite a while now. It's been great. I have had one qualm though: it drives me nuts that when I receive a forwarded VM from a co-worker, I can only open it with Windows Media Player because it's like a regular e-mail with the WMA attached. It doesn't have the built in media player control and the "Play on Phone" option is missing. Until now! Here comes the science…
Here's what a message looks like when it's forwarded normally:
All I can do is click
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 15, 2008 at 4:54 PM
Let me take a minute (or several minutes) to address the dreaded "No phone system connection" (alternately, the "Cannot connect to the phone system") error when you are doing Remote Call Control (RCC)
When you are integrating Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 with Cisco Unified Presence Server (CUPS), the default, generic message on communicator is "No phone system connection". It looks like this:
Here's what you need to know – USE THE CUP
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
September 22, 2008 at 12:09 AMLCSKid brings good tidings: the management pack for OCS 2007 is now out.
Hurray! This was a missing link in the case for Microsoft UC. I like that OCS gives you the ability to manage and provision users w/ several different feature (voice, video, conferencing, IM, presence, LiveMeeting) from a single place and a single application. But now you can monitor it all just like any other application in your MS environment. Ease of implementation, plus ease of administration, and now: ease of managemen
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
September 15, 2008 at 5:12 PMI'm really happy that Microsoft now supports "Direct SIP" connectivity with CallManager v. 4.2, 5.1 & 6.1. What this means is that you do not need a 3rd party voice gateway to connect to CallManager. Whohoo! Although I've been running CCM 5.1 and OCS with Direct SIP for almost a year now, it's nice that there is support for it. And now I can feel "safe" recommending it to customers.
In order to be officially supported, you need to have the exact version of CCM that I link
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
September 11, 2008 at 4:58 PM
OK- this has been building up in my mind for a while now and I think it's time to just start saying it: OCS shouldn't be considered as a "PBX Replacement" now - or ever. <gasp!> Do I not believe that OCS is a reliable voice platform? No way - quite to the contrary. My gripe is that if you are thinking of it as a PBX replacement only – you are missing the boat.
It's too low of a bar and frankly misses out on the visionary aspects of OCS. OCS is a communication and collaboratio
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
September 4, 2008 at 11:34 AMI noticed this a while ago, but for some reason didn't look into it until it really drove me bananas; which is now. When you use the OCS client "search" bar, you can search for people by name in your Outlook client, GAL, or any Public IM (PIC) contacts you've added. Like this:
From the GAL:
From my Outlook Contacts:
But look what happens when I try to do it with a federated contact:
Nada. It will only bring him up if I start typing his full SIP address:
I'm not totally
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
August 6, 2008 at 6:52 PM
By now, most people are used to thinking of e-mail as "discoverable" material for audits; whether the audits are Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPA, SEC, or any other type of regulatory audit. And most companies that are bound by such regulation, as well as many who choose to self-regulate, have a stated policy about e-mail retention.
But there is a new twist to auditing and compliance: Voicemail. Historically, voicemail has been a separate appliance with recorded messages stored on the applian
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
August 5, 2008 at 9:49 PMI've posted quite a few times about Office Communications Server 2007, Cisco CUPS, Cisco CallManager and remote call control. I've had some bumps and bruises along the way, but now I am happy to report that… it works! CUPS and OCS are now playing nicely.
The magic ingredient? Upgrade to CUPS 6.0.4.
One of my customers who had been having issues with OCS and CUPS finally got a copy of CUPS 6.0.4 and much to my relief, this fixed all the outstanding issues. Today I successfully verified that cal
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
August 1, 2008 at 12:35 AMUp until now, RIM/BlackBerry has not released a client that works with OCS 2007 (although they've had an LCS 2005 client for some time). But quite recently, RIM have posted a BlackBerry client for OCS and it's available on the RIM site. Out at a customer, we downloaded the client, installed on their BB devices and tested things out. And it works really well. No major kinks really. But I did learn a few things on the way.
What I learned about OCS and BlackBerry
You need CWA. I had never w
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
July 18, 2008 at 5:02 PM
If you've made the mistake of goofing up the webfarm FQDN question during the OCS setup, you know it can be a pain. The trick, as I've complained about before, is that when the OCS installer asks people to put in the "External Web Farm FQDN" lots and lots of people get confused and think that "Web Farm" refers to the Web Conferencing / LiveMeeting aspect of OCS. But it doesn't – it's just referring to the Address Book, Group Distribution Expansion, and LiveMeeting Content D
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
July 18, 2008 at 4:24 PMFor those that haven't tried it, I'm happy to report that deploying OCS 2007 in a resource forest works very well. I had one little problem that I'll address at the end, but first a few words about why you might go this route at all. There are a few reasons why people want to deploy OCS in a resource forest, one that I don't always agree with, and one that I can't argue with.
Fear of Schema Extensions
For some reason, lots of people are still worried about the schema extensions required by cer
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
July 18, 2008 at 3:35 PMA tip for enjoying communicator Phone Edition with Office Communications Server…
It's fairly well documented that you may have some problems logging into a Tanjay/Polycom CX700/Nortel/WhatEverYouWantToCallit communicator Phone Edition if you try to login like this:
Sign-in Name: matt.mcgillen@corp.contoso.com
UserName: matt.mcgillen@corp.contoso.com
So the docs say to not log in with the UserName as I show above. It says to use it in this format:
Sign-in Name: matt.mcgillen@contoso.com
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
July 18, 2008 at 2:20 PMI just ran into an odd error installing Office Communications Server 2007 in a pretty restricted AD. I wasn't around for the initial install / schema extension, so I'm not able to verify what permissions were or weren't applied to the installation account, but it seems like something kept the service accounts from being assigned the proper rights. Here's the scenario:
Forest Extended for the OCS schema: OK
Domain Prepped for the OCS schema: OK
OCS installed on the Front End: OK
Front End Activ
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
May 13, 2008 at 4:46 PM
A while ago, I posted some thoughts about OCS as a conference bridge and commented on some shortcomings. In the months in between I've had a lot of conversation with people about the topic and figured it was about time to revisit the subject.
First off, I should state that OCS 2007 itself, in its current form, still doesn't have a mechanism to let outside callers dial into a bridge number, enter a passcode, and join a conference in progress. So no change there, then.
Now for the update:
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
May 12, 2008 at 4:46 PM
I recently delivered a webinar on the business and technical benefits of Office Communications Server: OCS 2007 In Action Presentation
As I went through my preparation for the presentation, I realized that what I was really doing was creating a presentation that addressed the most common questions and concerns I've heard from various people/customers.
A lot of customers still really don't have a good understanding of what OCS is. And that's not shocking: OCS is a really big product that ad
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
May 12, 2008 at 4:35 PMWhen I was troubleshooting some hosted LiveMeeting connectivity issues for a client, I decided to run a sniffer trace of the whole process. It turned out to be really useful to see how the client connected – especially what ports and protocols are used. Below is a step-by-step of what I saw happening. If you do the same, you'll see different IPs and servernames (MS uses pools), but generally see the following traffic pattern:
1 User clicks on meeting invite from within Outlook
2 Traffic to and
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
May 9, 2008 at 4:54 PMI've posted quite a few times about the Cisco CUPS and OCS integration. I last left off awaiting a Beta copy of CUPS 6.0.3 to see if it would resolve my major issue: original calls being put on hold when an admin answered a second call.
And I've got an answer: CUPS 6.0.3 definitely does fix that issue! Now for the bad news: it pretty much breaks every other aspect of the integration. At a minimum here are some symptoms:
calls placed by IP phone can't be controlled by MOC client (transfers, holds
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
May 1, 2008 at 3:40 PM
Let's say that you are going to deploy OCS for a 50 person organization with the following requirements:
Internal and external IM (like PIC or federation)
Integration to your PBX
Archiving
Internal and external LiveMeeting / voice conferencing / audio conferencing
To meet these requirements, you need, at a minimum
OCS Standard Edition Server
OCS Mediation server
OCS archiving server
OCS edge server
Now let's face it: 4 servers for 50 people is a decent amount of hardwar
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
March 19, 2008 at 1:39 PMThis is a common scenario: someone calls you, and wants to speak to a co-worker of yours. Since you know that the co-worker is not in, you would like to transfer the caller to your co-worker's VoiceMail. But you don't want to transfer, have it ring 4 times, then go to VM. You want to transfer directly into VM. It would be great to be able to do this:
Hit transfer
Dial * then the 4 digit extension of the user you are trying to transfer to
Hit transfer to put the caller through to the VM box
Here'
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
March 19, 2008 at 8:44 AMI've been doing a lot of research into how you can extend OCS using the SDKs that MS makes available. Before I launch into my take on it, I have a couple points about the SDKs
There are lots of SDKs
The SDKs are very, very good – they are the building blocks that OCS itself was written with
I am shocked at what you can do with the SDKs
If you want details on all the different SDKs and what they do, visit Joe Calev's blog
What I wanted to do in this post is to give you an idea of what kinds of
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
March 17, 2008 at 4:32 PMI wanted to take a few minutes to provide an incomplete review of a couple of the new OCS-compatible IP phones. I've been using 2 different ones here at PointBridge:
The "Tanjay" – aka the Polycom CX400 / Nortel 8540
The "Catalina" – aka the Polycom CX200
I'm not going to rehash all the bells and whistles and technical specs… that stuff is all over the web. What I thought I would do is list out what I see as the strengths and weakness, having used these for a few months now.
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
February 8, 2008 at 9:50 AMI've had this pop up twice on me now, so I'm thinking that it's worth blogging about… When you create a dialplan in Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging, don't use a dot or space (e.g. "dialplan1.exum" or "Chicago
Dial Plan for UM Users") While spaces or dots will work just fine for normal UM usage, you will run into problems when you try to integrate with Office Communications Server 2007.
As most people know by now, you need to do a few things to be able to send missed OCS c
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
January 30, 2008 at 1:05 PMHere at PointBridge we have a group that works overseas in Pune, India. And since we use LiveMeeting and OCS internally we thought it would make sense to use OCS to save on international calls to and from India. But note: we don't have a dedicated WAN connection to Pune: it's all over the Internet.
After about a month or so, I got a report that the calls weren't going so well. The quality was hit or miss; when it was good it was good and when it was bad, it was unbearable. For the most part, mem
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
January 30, 2008 at 12:28 AMI've written a bunch on my OCS 2007 CallManager 5.1 and Cisco Unified Presence Server (CUPS) 6.0.1 integration. For the most part – it's all working great. My previous posts talked about resolving issues with shared line appearances (where your extension is on multiple phones). I was happy to clear that up. But now – I'm faced with an even trickier issue.
The problem
You have a user, Hillary, who has a secretary (let's call him Bill) and they each have Hillary's phone number (1600) on their pho
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
December 21, 2007 at 4:22 PMI just ran into an interesting aspect of an Office Communications Server 2007 integration with Cisco CallManager & Cisco Unified Presence Server. I posted the following anecdote in on the technet forums in bits and pieces, so I thought I'd put it here as well.
I have an OCS Ent pool integrated with Cisco CUPS 6.01 and Cisco CallManager 5.1. I have RCC enabled for most users and it it was working really well. There was one hitch, though: if a user had 3 phones with his/her extension on it, I
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
November 18, 2007 at 6:45 AMI have been burned 3 times by OCS when trying to bind multiple IP addresses to the same NIC. Here are the three scenarios:
Trying to use the same NIC for the internal and external IP address on the Edge Server
We had only 1 available nic, so I put both internal and external IPs on the one NIC
Communication failed totally – couldn't get an external user to sign in from the outside through the edge
Finally got another NIC for the server. We split the IPs to different NICs
Success.
Trying to use
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
November 18, 2007 at 6:22 AMSince I lasted posted on the subject, I've come up with what I think are all the possibilities.
You can change the users SIP ID to match their AD account name. This makes it so that:
NT Account name is domain\jimsmith
SMTP Address is jsmith@domain.com
SIP ID is jimsmith@domain.com
CallManager userID is jimsmith
Under this scenario, RCC works and Communicator works. The problem now is that Outlook and Sharepoint now don't have any presence information. The reason is that Outlook and Sh
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 25, 2007 at 11:12 AM
I came across something interesting with the CUPS to OCS integration… In OCS, you have a SIP ID for each user; it's usually best to have that match the SMTP address. So it would be something like: Jim@domain.com. That'd be the SIP and SMTP addresses. No problem there. And this can even be different from the NT account name. So jim@domain.com could be logging in as domain\jimsmith and have things still work.
HOWEVER (what would be the point of a blog post without a good "however"?)
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 22, 2007 at 3:36 PM
UPDATED WITH NEW LINK to CISCO DOC
I've just finished up a CUPS-to-OCS 2007 integration. We are using CUPS 6.0, Cisco CallManager 5.1, and OCS 2007 RTM. We have implemented Remote Call Control (RCC) and presence.
This lets you do a few really, really, cool things:
Look up any user in your corporate directory and dial them from your OCS client
Click on a contact in OCS and have it direct your Cisco IP phone to call their Cisco IP phone
See a user's status as "in a call" whe
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 22, 2007 at 2:27 PM
Just recently, I've integrated Office Communications Server 2007 and the IP-PBX PBXNSIP (http://www.pbxnsip.com). The integration went really well: I pointed the mediation server to the PBXNSIP's IP address, configured all the OCS dial plan and voice components (normalization rules, usages, policies, routes) and very quickly was able to route calls from OCS to PBXNSIP extensions.
I wasn't able to make outside calls initially – I could only call the internal PBXNSIP extensions. When I tried t
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 22, 2007 at 2:04 PMShort version: you can't have non-alphanumeric characters in a user's display name if you want the user to be reachable by an Exchange AutoAttendant.
Long version:
Today I was configuring an Exchange 2007 UM Auto Attendant for a customer and came across something interesting. The Auto Attendant (AA) had speech recognition enabled, so I should have been able to say "Bob Smith" and have it direct me to Bob's phone number. Well, my AA worked for everyone except the mythical Bob Smith. All
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 5, 2007 at 10:57 AMIn a previous post, I had linked to a whitepaper that I found on the Microsoft site that went into some detail about Office Communications Server 2007 and Quality of Service (QoS).
At the time, it was the best doc I could find out there. However, there is a newer document that goes into a lot of detail about QoS, networks, and what the Microsoft approach to it all is:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/a/3/3a367b0d-4fff-44c5-9125-3ac5c037f195/OCS_QoE.doc
This is definitely the
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 4, 2007 at 2:28 PMBriefly… If you are trying to install OCS and you would like to configure the service accounts with a password containing a " or a space: your install will fail. Kind of strange… I changed the password to not have the quote mark and it worked.
Matt
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 2, 2007 at 11:23 AMHere's something to be aware of when installing Exchange 2007 into an existing Exchange 2003 environment: once you've run /prepareAD /prepareSchema etc., if you previously had no global message size limits,
Exchange 2007 will impose a 10MB size limit on all messages. Even before installing the first server role, the schema & AD updates do this.
Yes, it is documented in a KB http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb310771.aspx but it took me by surprise because it's not mentioned in any
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
September 25, 2007 at 11:33 AMEthan M. brought an interesting point to my attention. He had scheduled a LiveMeeting though Outlook and invited an outside (non-employee) person to the LiveMeeting. When the person tried to join, they got an error message saying "you do not have permission to join the meeting". See the screencap below:
Now this was strange because this is the error you normally see when you've forgotten to allow anonymous participants in your LiveMeetings. I checked the following places:
Edge Serv
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
September 21, 2007 at 10:20 AMAfter a bit of trial and error, and some help from PSS, we at PointBridge now have a fully function Office Communication Server 2007 environment! The implementation went quite well, with the exception of one spot: getting audio and video conferencing to work with external users.
For some reason, we couldn't have LiveMeeting 2007 bridge in the audio and video of people who were outside the network. I tried for a long time to get it to work, but users kept getting the following error:
Voice and Vi
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
August 31, 2007 at 10:34 AM
We have Office Communication Server 2007 (OCS)live and in production here at PointBridge. It is co-existing nicely with Live Communication Server 2005 (LCS). There was only one hang-up at first: LCS users couldn't see OCS users' presence. It was a one-way thing though; everyone on OCS could see all the LCS users' presence no prob. But for the LCS people, anyone who had been migrated to OCS showed up as "status unknown" or "unknown status". This was not cool at all.
It tur
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
August 17, 2007 at 3:14 PM
Feature Comparison of LCS and OCS
With the recent release of Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS), I thought it might be a good idea to compare it with its predecessor, Live Communications Server 2005. As with my Exchange UM vs. Unity matrix, I can't find many good comparative studies out there, so I figured this would be a good place to start.
Overall, the main difference between OCS and LCS is that OCS is aimed squarely at the central nervous system of most organizations: communication
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
July 10, 2007 at 11:37 AM
There is a lot of chatter about QoS and how you "don't need it" to effectively use OCS as a voice platform. The logic behind that seemingly crazy statement is that MS has commissioned a test by Psytechnics (http://www.psytechnics.com/page.php?id=060307§ion=newsandevents) that showed voice calls using Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007 were of a higher quality than those using Cisco CallManager & Cisco IP phones… on a network with no QoS, nonetheless.
At first, the n
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
July 9, 2007 at 5:04 PM
Note- this post was written in 2007, prior to OCS R2. OCS R2 in fact IS a conference bridge, and a good one at that.
Most people who travel in OCS/LCS circles know that OCS 2007 includes a bundled version of LiveMeeting. This allows people to collaborate with powerpoint/whiteboard/chat/desktop sharing. Also, the bundled LiveMeeting allows people to communicate with voice/video. So far OCS seems like the ideal collaboration platform, and in many cases, it is.
Well, there is a fly in the ointm
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
July 9, 2007 at 4:52 PM
I've been looking around for a feature comparison between Cisco Unity Unified Messaging and Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging. There doesn't seem to be one out there, so I put together an incomplete matrix comparing the two UM platforms. There are a lot of features to add to the list, but I figured I should at least start putting some of them down on the blog. Any comments with additional comparisons are welcome.
If I had to boil the comparison down to 1 tagline it would be this: "Microso
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
June 27, 2007 at 1:49 PMI was trying to integrate Exchange UM, OCS and an audio codes gateway today & stumbled across something kinda quirky.
If you are trying to get UM and OCS integrated, you need to enabled TLS on your UM dialplan. That's easy enough (set-umdialplan -identity MyDialplan -voipsecurity SIPSEcured)
What they don't tell you explicitly, though, is that when you enabled TLS for one gateway/diaplan, it forces all dialplans/gateways to use it (current and future).
I found this out the hard
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
June 19, 2007 at 9:58 AM
There is a cool feature of Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging that allows you to click on a voicemail message in your outlook inbox and have it played to your cell phone /desk phone /home phone. This comes in handy if you want to listen to the message but you don't want to play it over your PC speakers (or if you don't have PC speakers).
If you click the "play on phone" button, you will normally get prompted for the phone number to dial:
Well, here is the bad part. Th
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
May 22, 2007 at 4:56 PM
The purpose of this doc is to give an example as to how to configure a AudioCodes IP gateway for use with an Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging demo. I've looked around the web and I've looked at AudioCodes' own documentation. It's all kinda fuzzy, so I thought I'd write my own How-To and save people the trouble. The docs on how to set up a UM server are pretty straightforward, but getting the gateway seemed like a bigger mystery.
My Environment
In my scenario, I have:
An Exchange 2007
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 Practice Manager - Unified CommunicationsMatt McGillen is the practice manager for Unified Communications at PointBridge. He has over 10 years of IT consulting experience, focusing mainly on the government, legal, financial and health care s... [more]
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