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By: Jason Sloan
Posted:
January 5, 2012 at 2:23 PM
It's becoming more and more common to see Lync deployments with a single SIP domain in organizations that have multiple geographically dispersed pools. However, deploying Lync within this scenario can cause quite the confusion due to the different URLs Lync uses in each pool. Typically, you can only have one set of URLs for an entire SIP domain, regardless of the number of pools. The biggest problem: How do you keep conference URLs active for everyone else when one pool fails? In this article,
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By: Jason Sloan
Posted:
January 3, 2012 at 4:10 PM
Deploying Lync Server 2010 is a process I simply enjoy doing. When the presales and design sessions are complete, I'm ready to start the deployment process as quickly as possible. It never fails, however, that something always makes the deployment wheels spin as we get started. This blog post is a simple post, but nonetheless something I feel can help streamline a painful discussion point with a client; Extending the Schema.
First, let's quickly review a few important points of extending the
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
December 30, 2011 at 10:29 AM
With the recent release of the Lync Mobile client for Windows Phone 7, Android, and iPhone, I've seen numerous companies thrilled about the opportunity to extend Lync further within the enterprise! For companies interested in deploying Lync Mobility, the Lync Server Cumulative Update 4 is required. For deployment steps, I highly recommend reading the Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Mobility Guide and Jeff Schertz's blog.
After working with various customers to deploy the new Mobility service, occ
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
December 13, 2011 at 11:58 AM
Sunday night at about 7pm Chicago time, I downloaded and installed the Lync Mobile client for Windows Phone 7. In a sad reflection on what passes for excitement in my life, I had been checking about a few times an hour Saturday and Sunday; I probably hit the App Marketplace 50 times on Sunday before striking gold.
I quickly sent a message to the rest of the PointBridge UC team and a bunch of us began fiddling around with the new client.
First I should mention: you need to read and follow t
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By: Callie Jones
Posted:
December 6, 2011 at 10:40 AM
The beginning of December marks Microsoft Lync 2010's first anniversary. Two thousand and eleven has been a successful year for Lync, so let's take a look at some of the milestones Lync has accomplished in just 12 months.
About 3 million enterprise users use Lync 2010 for their telephony needs versus a traditional PBX.
Forrester research found the ROI on Lync is more than 300 percent, while companies could see a breakeven point as early as 7-8 months after deployment.
Lync has grown 25 pe
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By: Callie Jones
Posted:
November 9, 2011 at 1:59 PM
My previous company was like many organizations; we battled time zone barriers and needed to communicate with a mobile workforce. I used 5 different tools on a daily basis to communicate with my colleagues. In hindsight, especially as a Lync user now, it’s easy to see how much productivity was lost in those 5 disparate technologies. Setup hassle aside, the time my team lost trying to connect with each other was frustrating and took away from the time we needed to be collaborating and working.
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
November 4, 2011 at 9:19 AMI recently had the pleasure of working with one of our customers to implement Lync Server 2010 Enterprise Voice with Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) 7.1.3. The integration between the two systems went pretty smoothly. During our testing phase though, we uncovered an issue with ringback. When a PSTN user or a Cisco IP Phone user would dial a Lync endpoint, the PSTN user and/or Cisco user would hear silence (no ringback) until the call was answered by the Lync user or diverted to Exc
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
October 18, 2011 at 11:15 AMAs most people will have heard, Microsoft officially acquired Skype last week. There are precious few details about what the end-state is going to look like with Lync and Skype integrated; or even what Microsoft really plans to do with Skype. With so little information available directly from either party, I decided to read between the lines and try to draw some conclusions on my own.
Microsoft's Strategic Direction
With an $8.5 billion dollar price tag, Skype was the largest acquisitions ever m
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By: Rene Strawser
Posted:
August 18, 2011 at 6:36 PM
I ran into an issue recently that, although was a quick fix, there was not much information posted about it. The problem came during the configuration of AD FS for single sign-on with Office 365, when AD FS looks for the Program Data container to add the specific application and certificate information within Active Directory.
Error:
"You do not have sufficient privileges to create a container in Active Directory at location CN=f2e868b0-f4f5-4648-8dda-5a031d478753,CN=ADFS,CN=Micros
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
August 11, 2011 at 3:28 PM
Overview
Lync Server 2010 is extremely granular when it comes to routing voice calls. Lync administrators can configure a voice call to load balance between multiple PSTN gateways within a single site or failover to a PSTN gateway in a second site in the event the primary PSTN gateway fails. After numerous discussions with colleagues and clients, I thought I'd share my thoughts on the difference between the two configurations.
Table 1 below provides a voice routing overview. There are two
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
July 12, 2011 at 4:46 PM
One of the items I love about Microsoft Lync is the fact that I can plug my Lync certified headset (Plantronics Blackwire C420) into my laptop and instantly begin using it to make and receive telephone calls. This morning, I plugged my headset in to join a Lync Online Meeting and the audio started playing through my laptop speakers. As much as my colleagues love listening to me ramble, I thought I should try to resolve the issue…
If you by chance run into a similar experience, below are a fe
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
May 25, 2011 at 10:30 PM
Have you ever tried enabling a user for Enterprise Voice or Exchange Unified Messaging and received an error stating the action could not be completed due to a duplicate record? I've surprisingly ran into this issue more than once recently. Whether a telephone number was used for testing purposes and simply forgotten about or caused by inaccurate documentation, below are a few tips to quickly identify a duplicate telephone number in Lync Server 2010 and Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging.
Lync
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
May 10, 2011 at 1:36 PM
One of the very useful new features of Lync 2010 Phone Edition is support for LLDP (Link Layer Discovery Protocol) to allow phones to receive configuration information from the switches they plug into. If you have any experience with Cisco IP Telephony, you know that Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is used for similar purposes to assign voice traffic to a separate VLAN. This works great, but really only with devices (like Cisco phones) that speak CDP.
LLDP is an open standard that's been evol
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
May 3, 2011 at 12:51 AM
Recently, I had the pleasure of deploying a new Lync Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) at a customer site. If you're unfamiliar with SBA functionality, a SBA's primary function is to provide voice resiliency in office locations where direct internet connectivity to the main data center/central site is lost. I won't go on and on about the SBA feature set, so additional information can be found here.
Each SBA manufacturer (AudioCodes, Dialogic, HP, and NET) has their own flavor of initial inst
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
April 29, 2011 at 9:26 AM
There is plenty of documentation out there on how to install the XMPP gateway with OCS or Lync (references provided at the bottom of this post). This blog will not focus on the installation of the XMPP Gateway, but rather what to do if you receive TLS errors on the Lync Edge server when communicating to the XMPP gateway.
If TLS issues pop up on the Lync Edge server, odd behavior could be experienced with Gmail such as complete instant messaging failure, one-way instant messages, and/or unkno
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
April 7, 2011 at 3:58 PM
Microsoft provides documentation on how to create single common area phone accounts, but there is limited documentation on how to actually create the common area phone accounts in bulk. Below is a breakdown on the bulk account creation process.
Script Prerequisites
Create a New Client Policy to Support Hot-Desking
As indicated in the TechNet article, a client policy should be created to enable hot-desking on common area phones. The PowerShell command below performs the following function
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
March 9, 2011 at 3:23 PM
I was recently working with a colleague to determine how to control the behavior of the Lync client when joining Lync Online Meetings (e.g. https://meet.contoso.com/jdoe/XXXXX). If everything is set up correctly, everything magically works! Well what happens if you want to use the Lync Web App to join meetings (rare) or if the Lync client simply stops opening the Online Meeting URLs? If you find yourself asking this question, read on.
The following steps assume that Internet Explorer is the
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
March 4, 2011 at 10:51 AMI recently visited a client who was having a miserable time getting the Lync Central Management Store database created during the Topology publishing process. They kept seeing errors similar to below:
Error: Script failed (code "ERROR_CREATE_DB") when installing "CentralMgmtStore" on "lyncserver.company.com". For details, see the following log file: "C:\Users\adminacct\AppData\Local\Temp\Create-CentralMgmtStore-lyncserver.company.com-[2011_01_03][10_32_38].log&
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
March 3, 2011 at 12:29 AM
I am working with a customer to migrate their OCS 2007 R2 environment to Lync 2010. Initially, a single Lync Enterprise Front-End server was installed and placed behind a hardware load balancer. As there was only a single front-end server configured at the time, the internal and external web services URLs matched the Lync pool FQDN (lyncpool.domain.com). With the single front-end behind the HLB, everything worked great and we were able to successfully move legacy users with the Lync Control Pa
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
February 24, 2011 at 4:32 PMFebruary 2nd, 2011 was a great day in weather punditry. A lot of the country was blanketed in snow; Chicago was no exception. Businesses and schools closed, people were sent home, weather commentators and the blogosphere were busy generating nicknames:
Snowpocalypse
Snowmageddon
SNOMG!!
The SNOWotorious BIG
(I think that I lean towards #4, for what it's worth) Regardless of what you call it, most businesses probably assumed a large dip in productivity.
So how did this affect PointBridge?
I wa
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
February 22, 2011 at 5:21 PMLync 2010 gives users the ability to record both peer-to-peer calls as well as conference calls. It's a handy built-in feature in the Lync 2010 client:
However - I've noticed that there isn't a way to record PSTN calls:
I'm not 100% why PSTN calls wouldn't be able to be recorded. Maybe because they are G711? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but I suppose it's possible.
In the meantime, I've come up with a handy work around. While you are on the call, choose the drop-down menu
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
February 21, 2011 at 1:31 PMAt the beginning of the year, PointBridge moved to a new office in Chicago. As part of the move, we moved all of our collaboration/communication to Lync 2010. We used to have an OCS R2 <–> Cisco CallManager integration for voice needs. But now – it's 100% Lync for all employees. And I'm happy to report that it has been a huge success. So to all that wondered if Lync really is a PBX replacement, it is.
Well, actually, it's not totally fair to say that Lync is a PBX replacement; our PBX was
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
February 2, 2011 at 11:46 AM
I was recently at a client configuring Lync Dial-In Conferencing. All functionality worked within the Lync environment as well as between the internal Cisco phones.
When testing external PSTN access to the Lync Dial-In Conferencing bridge, I noticed that the call would connect with two-way audio but DTMF signaling was not being accepted. Below is a breakdown of the environment.
My first thought was to add the "dtmf-relay rtp-nte" command to the voip dial peer on the voice rout
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By: Keenan Crockett
Posted:
January 12, 2011 at 10:26 AM
When using the Communicator for Mac 2011 client with Enterprise Voice, there appears to be a bug with the graphical user interface. Once you enable a user for Enterprise Voice in OCS 2007 R2 or Lync, the calling icon in the Communicator for Mac 2011 client should automatically switch from a microphone to a telephone. Well, what do you do if the telephone icon never actually appears? Read on…
The interesting thing that we determined during testing was that even though the phone icon didn't di
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
September 13, 2010 at 11:09 AMDue to Microsoft’s announcement this morning I have added one final update to this blog. Microsoft has released product information and Release Candidate software for Lync Server 2010. More details can be found here: Presence Goes Green on Microsoft Lync 2010
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By: David Greve
Posted:
September 8, 2010 at 7:15 PM
Many organizations today have multiple offices throughout the country and sometimes extend globally. Often times, these offices will have groups of individuals that collaborate with one another based on teams, departments, or even project areas. The demands of collaboration across distributed environments can be challenging and it’s not uncommon for organizations to fly people cross country or around the world to improve productivity across these groups of individuals.
The cost of trave
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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: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
June 9, 2010 at 10:25 AM
In a follow-up to some of the features I briefly mentioned in a previous article here is a more in-depth look at some additional new features currently in the CS ‘14’ beta software which have been covered in various presentations throughout TechEd 2010 this week. I’ve just scratched the surface with most of these topics, but it should help explain what some of the buzz-words like SBV, CAC, and Registrar mean.
Enterprise Voice Features
Site Resiliency
With the addition of a ‘Site’ comp
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
June 7, 2010 at 10:41 AM
Right now I’m down at TechEd 2010 in New Orleans, LA where the keynote address is in progress. Microsoft has now officially lifted the Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) on all features and content which will be coming in the next release of Communications Server, which is still dubbed ‘Microsoft Communication Server 14’. The ‘14’ refers to the internal Wave 14 codename which has been used since the birth of this iteration of code.
I’m going to try and provide a very brief feature overview whil
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
May 17, 2010 at 1:03 PM
The purpose of this article is to serve as a lessons-learned addendum to the current primary resource for configuring OCS and GMail federation: the Communication Server team’s official blog post on the subject. Following the detailed steps in that article should get you to a working end-state, but if a specific deployment differs from the directions in any way, sometimes it is hard to tell which of the documented settings are recommendations and which are requirements. I will address each of
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
March 31, 2010 at 8:20 AM
As promised, Microsoft has released supportability statements for various Communications Server versions when used with Server 2008 R2 hosts and domains. Yesterday two TechNet articles were released to address both scenarios.
Server 2008 R2 Domains
Previously no version of Communications Server was supported when deployed in an Active Directory environment using either forest/domain functional levels of Windows Server 2008 R2. Upgrading to or installing Windows Server 2008 R2 domain contro
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By: Matthew McGillen
Posted:
March 24, 2010 at 3:36 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: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
March 16, 2010 at 12:52 AMI typically don’t repost links to existing documentation, but occasionally I run across items that are not too well known and I feel this is a prime example. Just when I though I had all of the OCS-related documentation stashed away in a folder I ran into an entire section on TechNet that contains some very detailed technical specifications for various Microsoft protocols used by Office Communications Server 2007 and 2007 R2. Microsoft Office Protocol Documents http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
November 10, 2009 at 11:22 AMThis week Microsoft has begun the process to migrate all the current discussion forums for Unified Communications-related topics into a single category. As with any migration there is both an upside and a downside to these changes. Most importantly, going forward it will be much easier for users to locate the correct forum in which to pose a question on a specific OCS-related problem they are experiencing as there are not many different categories across multiple sites with similar topics to c
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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: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
September 24, 2009 at 8:26 AMDuring the deployment of an OCS Communicator Web Access Server there is a setting that is not covered in much detail in the documentation: the Communication Server Listening Port. No default or suggested value is given, as shown by this screenshot of the virtual server creation wizard: This port is used by the Communicator Web Access Server to listen for inbound communications from other OCS servers. When an additional Virtual Web Server is added to the same host, as is common when both Int
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
September 22, 2009 at 4:39 PMThere are a pair of related Office Communications Server 2007 topics I wanted to expand on from previous blog articles that I’m still seeing come up quite often in both day-to-day projects and in the Microsoft discussion forums. One of them is centered around adding and supporting additional SIP domains. And because the two most common topics in OCS-related issues are Certificates and the Edge Server, it makes sense that deploying certificates on an Edge Server might just be the other topic.
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
September 17, 2009 at 9:18 AM
The typical OCS deployment these days is using Windows Server 2008 instead of Server 2003 for the host OS now since R2 and Server 2008 have been out for some time, so a certain issue has begun to pop up in some deployments. Basically, if an R2 Edge server is deployed on Server 2008 and three separate NICs are used for the three external Edge roles then some routing problems can typically be seen. Previously on Server 2003 this was not a problem, but something has appeared to change in the be
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
August 28, 2009 at 4:19 PMMicrosoft has just released a new white paper on using certificates with Office Communications Server. Although entitled “OCS 2007 R2 Deploying Certificates” it actually covers both 2007 and 2007 R2 versions of OCS. This is a very comprehensive document (just short of 100 pages) that covers everything from basic requirements down to specific scenarios like sample LCSCMD commands for requesting certificates for a reverse proxy. A number of the common problems and misunderstood areas have been a
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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: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
August 25, 2009 at 2:14 PMThese are some pretty basic notes, but worth calling out for the benefit of users new to the OCS Deployment Wizard. Troubleshooting deployment issues is pretty common and the logs are the best place to start from. During the various setup wizards in OCS each step typically concludes with a window reporting either successful or failed results. It’s recommended to review each log even if the wizard completes successfully as there could be one or more warnings worth looking into. Some warnings c
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
August 19, 2009 at 7:35 AMAlthough I find it best practice to deploy two separate certificates on an OCS R2 Communicator Web Access server, there are times when using a single certificate for both server-based MTLS and client-based SSL communications are the best approach, mainly cost if an internal CA is unavailable and all certificates are being purchased. The problem is that getting a single certificate to work for both roles will typically fail if you follow the current guidelines. The official OCS R2 documentation
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
August 13, 2009 at 11:04 AMIn a recent deployment OCS 2007 R2 Enterprise Edition was deployed to a physical server running Windows Server 2008 that began to exhibit problems immediately after the first reboot. Basically the server failed to respond to network traffic and was unreachable via RDP or other previously listening services after restarting. Upon connecting to the console locally the server had apparently dropped off the network, as indicated by the system tray Network icon displaying as disabled. After checki
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
August 5, 2009 at 10:17 AMTypically in a basic deployment there are times when Windows workstations and servers which are not members of the internal Active Directory domain need to communicate with OCS servers. This could be attempting to sign-in to Office Communicator installed on a test workstation on the internal corporate network, as well as a perimeter-network server (like ISA or and OCS Edge server) attempting an MTLS connection to an internal OCS server. This also applies to external workstations trying to sign
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
August 4, 2009 at 1:04 PMTypically when restarting services in Windows most people use the Services snap-in or the net start/stop commands, but the OCS Management console offers a simple way to stop and start services in a pre-defined order. I investigated the behavior of this to learn what the preferred order or service dependencies may be (if at all) within OCS. Unlike Exchange Server, where a number of services are dependant on others on the local system, none of the core OCS services are dependant on other c
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
July 2, 2009 at 11:02 AM
Byron Spurlock has a blog article that briefly talks about the different topologies for Edge servers in R2 but I wanted to go into a little more detail and highlight a few seemingly small, but important changes introduced in R2 that sort of flew in under the radar as all the other neat features in R2 took center-stage.
Pre-R2 Topologies
Firstly, anyone versed in OCS should know that when deploying an Edge Server you could select what roles you wanted to install, with a few limitations. The f
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
June 25, 2009 at 1:51 PMIn keeping with this month’s apparent theme of troubleshooting Live Meeting and Audio Conferencing problems for external users, I ran into yet another weird one. This time we have a pretty basic Office Communications Server 2007 R2 deployment with Enterprise Voice using a NET VX1200 media gateway with Cisco Call Manager 4.1. All OCS features are deployed and working with best practices followed for nearly every piece of the puzzle; no cutting any corners. The latest round of OCS patches have
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
June 22, 2009 at 8:11 AMJust a quick note regarding an error I recently ran across. A client was experiencing problems with Dial-In Conferencing after a recent deployment and during troubleshooting the issues I ran across this pair of errors in the Front-End server’s OCS event log: OCS Audio-Video Conferencing ServerEvent ID 32018“The Audio-Video Conferencing Server encountered an error when requesting credentials from the A/V Edge Authentication Service.” OCS Protocol StackEvent ID 14502”A significant number of con
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