In 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 […]
Posts Tagged ‘Office Communications Server’
Managing Certification Authority Certificates for OCS
Typically 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 […]
OCS Service Startup/Shutdown Order
Typically 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) […]
Disabling Communicator to Communicator calls with GPO
I ran into an issue at a client that they wanted the ability to turn off Communicator to Communicator voice calls for users. Even though OCS R2 with Mediation is in the environment, only those users that are Enterprise Voice enabled should be able to use Communicator as a voice client. Using the supplied OCS […]
OCS R2 Edge Topologies Explained
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 […]
OCS Dial-In Conferencing: Unable to Join Conference Calls
In 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 […]
A/V Edge Authentication Connection Errors
Just 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 […]
External Live Meeting Only with OCS
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 […]
Changing Passwords on OCS Service Accounts
Whether 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 […]
OCS Response Group Configuration Tool on Server 2008
When 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 […]
UC Virtual User Group Kickoff Meeting
The 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 […]
BPOS Introduces Office Communications Online
Microsoft 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 […]