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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 7:20 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 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: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
March 16, 2010 at 11:52 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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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
June 3, 2009 at 3:44 PM One of the biggest cost-saving benefits of Office Communications Server 2007 has been the integrated Web Conferencing features, a.k.a. Live Meeting. Many companies currently pay for off-site host conferencing services like Microsoft's own hosted Live Meeting, or WebEx just to name a few. In the same way that R2’s Dial-In Conferencing can reduce costs by eliminating the need for a hosted phone bridge service, all versions of OCS can offer the same cost-cutting advantages by bringing Live Meet
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
May 29, 2009 at 8:53 AMWhether troubleshooting a problem or performing regular maintenance it is sometimes necessary to reset the passwords on the service accounts used by OCS. Best Practice Microsoft’s recommendation is to configure each service account to never have their passwords expire, but some organizations may have policies limiting or completely banning that type of approach. In most cases it is best practice to retroactively disable password expiration on each Active Directory User Account used by OCS, as
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
April 29, 2009 at 12:25 AMWhen deploying the Response Group service in Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and the Front-End services are hosted on a Windows 2008 Server there is an annoying little ‘glitch’ that rears it’s head during initial configuration. Basically, it doesn’t work. It apparently is not a problem with Server 2003 as I’ve not run across it before and some searching online turned up the same responses. It seems to affect Server 2008 due to the slightly different behavior of IIS 7.0. Once Agents , Age
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
April 24, 2009 at 8:50 AMThe newly formed Unified Communications Virtual User Group (UCVUG) will be hosting it’s first meeting next month and we’ve already gotten over 100 participants registered. Hence the name, it will be a virtual Live Meeting This open online community is neither affiliated with Microsoft or PointBridge and was started by Office Communications Server MVP Dustin Hannifin with help from some of the other MVPs. The initial meeting will include presentations by myself covering the new features in OCS 2
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
April 21, 2009 at 10:04 AMMicrosoft has just officially launched Office Communications Online functionality into the North American Business Productivity Online Suite - Shared (BPOS-S) offering. If you’ve already been using the Exchange, SharePoint, and Live Meeting services, then OCS is a welcome addition as now IM communication and Presence information is tied into the client application suite (Outlook, Office Communicator, Live Meeting). OC Online Features Since this is the initial offering of OCS in the hosted onlin
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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: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
April 12, 2009 at 8:00 AMJust a quick note worth mentioning: Microsoft has just released the downloadable version of the OCS 2007 R2 Product Documentation in the Complied Help Module (.chm) format. Anyone with a previous TAP/RDP version of the file from Connect should replace their with this updated copy as there are many new sections (the overall file size has nearly doubled) and appears to now match the online documentation. You can download the Communications_Server_2007_R2_Documentation.chm file here: http://www.mi
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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: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
March 25, 2009 at 12:50 AMHere’s a quick tip with a few ways to locate and identify wheter an installation of the Office Communicator client on a workstation originally came from an Evaluation, Volume License, or MSDN version. To determine which flavor of the client software is installed on the computer, locate the Product ID in the Help > About window in Office Communicator. The second grouping of digits will indicate the type based on one of three values shown below. (A full list of Microsoft Product IDs can be fo
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
March 1, 2009 at 11:57 PMIn following the approach started with the Edge Server Planning Tool Microsoft has recently released a complete Planning Tool for Microsoft OCS 2007 R2. The tool walks the user through a set of Yes/No questions asking which features or roles of OCS are desired, followed by how many sites comprise the network environment, how many users per site, etc. Here’s a brief layout of the tool with some sample responses: Audio and Video Conferencing Web Conferencing Communicator Web Access Enterpri
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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: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
February 19, 2009 at 12:37 AMSo this blog is sort of a follow-up to Matt McGillen’s original article on the same subject. During a recent OCS deployment I was configuring a Mediation Server against a IP-PBX system that is to be tested for eventual certification. In doing so I made sure to configure all aspects of OCS to strict best practice recommendations, including this specific one from the OCS 2007 Enterprise Voice Planning and Deployment Guide Configure Dual Interface Cards for Mediation Server To help ensure the p
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
February 11, 2009 at 10:36 AMThere have been a few minor changes to the Administration Tools for OCS in R2. Firstly, the original release of OCS would automatically install the associated OCS Management console snap-in on each server role, but in R2 the management tools must now be installed manually. (One caveat is that the Group Chat Server Configuration Tool is automatically installed on a Group Chat Server.) The primary way to do this is simply run the R2 Deployment Wizard and choose the Administrative Tools task on t
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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: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
January 29, 2009 at 8:42 AMJust a quick note here from Microsoft about the upcoming public launch of OCS R2: (There’s a link on the site right now that will conveniently add a calendar item and reminder to Outlook. ) The virtual event experience will be available at www.OCSR2LAUNCH.com on Tuesday February 3rd 2009. The event will open with a LIVE keynote hosted by Stephen Elop, President Microsoft Business Division, with customer stories and product demonstrations on February 3rd 2009, 09:30 -10:30 AM Pacific Time. Plea
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
January 28, 2009 at 11:44 PMLive Meeting 2007 has the ability to record meetings, capturing audio, video, and other shared content for archival and later viewing. When in a meeting the presenter can behind recording content and select where they want to save the output to. The main disadvantage with the recorded content has been the portability (or lack thereof) of the captured content. Live Meeting will save the recording across literally hundreds of files scattered through multiple folders. The Live Meeting Record
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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: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
December 10, 2008 at 8:11 AMAnyone who’s attempted to troubleshoot Address Book problems in OCS before has probably at least tried to open up the GalContacts.db file on a workstation running Office Communicator. Unfortunately it’s in some alien language with human strings dispersed among countless delimiters: This makes troubleshooting Address Book normalization operations kind of a pain. But luckily there is a registry setting available that can be configured on the client’s HKCU or HKLM key which will create a comma
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
December 6, 2008 at 6:51 AMBy now most everyone should be aware that AOL made a certificate configuration change earlier this week that affected PIC communications between OCS users and AOL instant messaging users. Here is the first released blog describing the fix: Office Communicator clients cannot communicate with contacts homed on AOL Well, I just found out that Yahoo will be performing emergency maintenance between 4:30PM and 4:30AM EST. The release I read didn’t specify if this was starting yesterday (Friday) or
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By: Jeff Schertz
Posted:
November 17, 2008 at 1:49 PMDmitry Polzin has created a Vista Sidebar Gadget for Office Communicator that helps better manage multiple conversation windows. You can download it from the Windows Live Gallery here:http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=2701d34d-ec6a-48ec-9ce2-a3932345f3a8 As with any gadgets the window can be either docked in the sidebar or dragged out into the desktop . The gadget’s title bar shows your current presence with the total number of active conversations (e.g. 6). You can also Minimize
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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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