Posts Tagged ‘Office Communications Server’

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 […]

Just 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I’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 […]

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 […]

Here’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 […]

In 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 […]

I 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 […]

It 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 […]

So 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 […]

There 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 […]