PointBridge Blogs

Microsoft announced the Release Candidate for the upcoming Search Server 2008 Express on the Enterprise Search blog. I haven’t downloaded and installed it, but it sounds like it is a step up from the OOB WSS search.

A few days ago I wrote a quick post about installing the AddRule utility that allows you to create crawl rules for forms-based and cookie-based sites. The manner in which you create the crawl rule is to write a short xml document that contains the important access information that the crawler will need to login […]

While this may seem obvious to many people; it was not obvious to me. This little bit of confusion caused me to spin my wheels for a lot longer than I would like. Were it not for an accident, I would still be spinning those wheels. A quick backgrounder: If you would like to use […]

…is not a good idea. In a production deployment a second server should be built using the desired server name, and then all OCS users moved over to it. Or a temporary staging server can be stood up in order to rebuild the original server. Either way, simply renaming an Office Communications Standard Server 2007 […]

Today I downloaded a SharePoint virtual machine from Microsoft. When I tried to import it to VMWare I got the error that says “source format was not understood”. I google the error and didn’t come with an acceptable solution. So I did the next logical thing, I open the VMC file for the Virtual Server. […]

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. […]

Short 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 […]

In a future blog entry I plan to walk through many of the steps needed to setup a virtualized test environment running on a single, uni-homed host. Throughout the process I’ve used a combination of online articles and blogs with input from colleagues to try and find the simplest hardware configuration which would allow me […]

Here is the scenario for you. You are encountering an issue with a Microsoft product, and you find a KB that exactly matches your issue. The only problem is, it looks like the only way to get the patch is to call Microsoft, give them a credit card number or a EA or partner ID, […]

In 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 […]

Since upgrading from Windows XP to Vista Business at the start of this year I have learned to live with a few behavioral annoyances by either adapting the way I previously performed a specific task or digging up a workaround/fix. Alas, there are still two specific issues that continue to drive me up a wall, […]

According to the Microsoft KB 931509 there is an instance whereby loading up a public facing site with IE7 will, in some cases, prompt the user to load the name.dll ActiveX control. I have been working on trying to solve this problem all day at a client, and now finally potentially have a working solution. […]