Dmitry 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 […]

Yes, you read this correctly: In a single-server Edge deployment a private IP address is now supported on the A/V Edge Role. It is still recommended to use a public IP address and is still not supported for scaled Edge deployments, but through some magical alignment of the stars (or more likely some work by […]

My home lab server is starting to get so many virtual servers to hold all the products I’ve been testing that I decided to deploy Windows Server Update Services 3.0 in order to help manage all the updates, as well as to learn yet another product. The setup and configuration was pretty straight forward, but […]

Microsoft has just released a really neat tool that threatens to make obsolete all of my OCS Edge-related blog material 🙂 Seriously, as complicated as it can be to design and configure an Edge deployment when reading through the deployment guides, the Perimeter Network white paper, blog articles, and any other resources this tool can […]

In a previous blog entry I covered how to use object filtering with the Microsoft Notes Connector. There was a reason I ran into that situation in the first place which was planning a migration from Notes to Exchange using the Notes Connector, but with a catch: I had already created new accounts in the […]

The most common reasons I have seen for uninstalling Office Communications Server 2007 from an environment are typically to remove a pre-release beta version or test deployment, or to start from scratch after a botched deployment. In either scenario it’s often desired to completely remove all aspects of OCS and start fresh. This approach is […]

I’ve run across a couple situations where enabling users for OCS via the Management Console proved to be a bit cumbersome, typically when wanting to only select a certain subset of accounts among a list of thousands. So I set off to figure out how to easily perform the same action by manipulating the AD […]

When configuring OCS user settings in bulk there are a limited numbers of options one can change when using the Office Communications Server 2007 Management Console. A range of user accounts can be selected and some options can be enabled/disabled like: Enhanced Presence, Federation, External access, PIC, and archival behavior. You can also set EV […]

Although deploying Office Communications Server 2007 for use internally is quite straight-forward, things begin to get complicated when adding in the components used for external client connectivity. The most misunderstood portions of deployment seem to be the correct configuration of the reverse proxy, and the networking configuration of the Edge Server itself. OCS Edge Server […]

Here’s something I’ve run across a couple times while helping clients configure Exchange 2007, as well getting it wrong the first time I set it up in my test lab. If you are trying unsuccessfully to use the new Managed Folder Mailbox Policy feature in Exchange 2007 to move items from default folders into a […]

The current Office Communications Server 2007 documentation doesn’t go into very much detail regarding the configuration and behavior of Phone Normalization in the Address Book Service. I won’t be going into any details regarding customization of normalization rules and how they operate, as the purpose of this blog entry is just to understand how to […]