Chief Architect's Corner

This blog closing down

2009-10-31T19:23:00.002Z

This is the last post I will be making in this blog, which is now closing down as I head off for pastures new. It’s been fun to post here but life moves on.

In future, my posts on the subject of OCS are to be found posted to my technical blog: Under The Stairs at http://tfl09.blogspot.com. I also post PowerShell Scripts to my other blog: PowerShell Scripts Blog at http://pshscripts.blogspot.com. Some existing posts will be left here for a while, but will gradually go or move to my technical blog as appropriate. Eventually I’ll remove this blog, so adjust your short cuts and RSS feeds.

For those of you how have read this blog I thank you and for those who have communicated via this blog double thanks.

As the words in the song go: What a long strange trip it’s been!

Back Home after TechEd

2009-05-19T11:07:00.001+01:00

Well – TechEd NA 2009 is over, and I’m home. The talk went pretty well. I received an overall score 3.77 out of 4 which was above average and above the UNC track’s average too. Pretty much as to be expected, my VM blew up as I started my first demo – thankfully I had all the demos pre-captured so was able to recover simply from that. 75 minutes on SIP was way too short – I wonder if I can convince MS to do an entire day on SIP for TechEd EMEA?

Updates for Communications Server 2007 R2 (almost SP1!)

2009-05-06T16:20:00.001+01:00

Microsoft has released a set of 13 patches for OCS 2007 R2. You might think of this as SP1 for OCS 2007 R2 (but that’s not the say MS is marketing it). Irrespective of what they call it, this set of patches is probably worth adding if you are deploying R2. As ever with patches, check the details to see if your systems are affected by each of these patches and which ones.

Due to the complex nature of OCS Deployments, patching is hard as there’s not just a single patch you can apply to all systems – you have to apply some patches on some systems and other patches on other systems. For example, an OCS 2007 R2 SE system needs 9 patches, while the Edge Server needs three. So plan this carefully as, at the least, you’ll need some service outages to apply the fixes.

The KB article: List of available updates for Communications Server 2007 R2: April 2, 2009, lists all 13 patches and describes which patch needs to be installed on which server role. You can drill down into each of the 13 individual patches – each has its own KB article. Most of these KB articles explain the issues resolved by the patch. KB 967675 that describes the fix to the Mediation server does not contain details of the fixes, but that’s probably just a doc error that will get fixed soon. For each individual issue, there’s a link to (another!) KB article describing the specific issue in more detail which include the symptoms of the (resolved) issue.

All in all, this is a useful update and well packaged. Next time though, couldn’t we have a mondo-patch (R2PatchAug09.exe for example) that you must apply to every related OCS system. That would help with the deployment and could reduce support calls especially from organisations deploying distributed Enterprise pools.

Technorati Tags: OCS 2007 R2,OCS,patch

TechEd Talk Preparation

2009-05-06T00:19:00.001+01:00

I’m just counting the days till TechEd NA. As I noted earlier, I’m giving a talk: UNC404 SIP: Naked in All Its Glory, which is a 400 level talk on the protocols that support OCS 2007. The allotted time of 75 minutes is inadequate to convey everything about all the protocols, let alone do all the demos. I could easily spend several days talking about all this (oddly enough, I do spend days talking about this stuff on a regular basis). Unfortunately, I’ve been pretty ill – at home with pneumonia but on the mend – thank heavens for good antibiotics! I will be well enough to travel and speak, but I doubt there will be much partying this year for me!

I’ve spoken at multiple TechEds over the years and kind of know what expect. But this year, the TechEd Organisers are going to even more extraordinary efforts on quality. My deck has been reviewed twice by the product team and I’ve had two dry runs. Today, I have some speaker coaching. As a trainer, I find all speaker coaching to be worthwhile and today’s session was particularly good. We spent a long time working on the areas of public speaking where

The bad news is that my deck is due tomorrow – and the deck I submit is the deck I have to present (no exceptions). After today’s speaker coaching, I want to tear it up and re do it (but there’s certainly not time). But the deck is strong, and with the benefit of the last deck review and the speaker coaching, I’ll have a good presentation. In some ways, that’s not a bad thing – it means I can rehearse what I’ll be saying, rather than changing stuff at the last moment and not quite getting it right. When the talk is all completed, I will post the final deck and the demos for those who are interested!

I wonder if attendees know just how much work a TechEd talk ~~can be~~ is!

Technorati Tags: TechEd

TechEd Talk – continued

2009-04-21T22:19:00.001+01:00

My talk for TechEd 09, “SIP Naked in All Its Glory” is moving forward. Yesterday, I had a dry run rehearsal, using Live Meeting. It was nerve-wracking, but a very useful experience. I got some great feedback on the talk and learned a bunch about how to setup my laptop to do the demos.

This talk is all about SIP on the wire – looking at how OCS 2007 uses SIP and related protocols. The thing that came most clearly out of yesterday’s rehearsal is that I could easily spend a WEEK talking about all this stuff- if not more!

TechEd Talk!

2009-04-15T11:22:00.000+01:00

I am super excited that I’ve had a talk accepted for TechEd North America. I submitted a number of talks, but only one got accepted: SIP: Naked in All Its Glory.

The talk will look at how OCS uses SIP, as well as a short discussion of TCP/IP, TLS, SDP and RDP. The talk will also look at the many extensions that MS has made to these protocols (as I noted over on my technical blog). The talk spends time looking at the key tools (i.e. WireShark and Snooper) as well as examining a number of network captures. Serious 400 level geekness!

I’ve got the talk nearly done and am working on my demos. Next week I have two dry-run rehearsals in front of an on-line audience. MS are also requiring me to have canned demos just in case anything goes wrong. If there’s something around this topic that you’d like to see added, feel free to ping me!

Sadly, my talk is right at the end of the conference – last thing on the Friday. If you’re around TechEd – I’ll also be hanging out on the UC booth.

Technorati Tags: TechEd US,SIP,OCS

OCS 2007/2007 R2 User Awareness and Training Materials

2009-04-14T00:44:00.001+01:00

I’m just back from a week in Redmond, attending OCS Voice Ignite 1.2 – an advanced training course in OCS and Voice. A fantastic week – serious geek heaven!

One interesting thing that was released last week was the UC 2007/2007 R2 User Awareness and Training Materials. These are a set of tools to help speed the usage and adoption of UC technologies inside your organisation. There are things llike posters, door hangers, quick reference cards, etc to help both IT Pros and End Users get to grips with UC.

If you are planning or involved in a deployment of OCS these materials may be very useful!

Technorati Tags: UC,OCS 2007 R2

OCS 2007 R2 E-Learning from Microsoft

2009-03-04T13:08:00.001Z

Microsoft has just released a new E-Learning collection entitled: Collection 10051: Exploring New Features in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2. This collection “collection” includes two E-Learning clinics (aka 1-hour modules):

This collection provides a brief overview to what’s new in OCS 2007 R2 and is at around the 150 technical level – it concentrates on the key features of R2 but not dive too deeply. The first clinic looks at what’s new in R2, while the second clinic looks at how you can deploy and migrate to R2.

And a nice feature – these are free.

Technorati Tags: OCS 2007 R2,OCS R2,e-learning

Managing OCS 2007 R2 from the Command Line

2009-02-23T17:20:00.000Z

Greg Stemp and Jean Ross (who use to be The Scripting Guys), have written a good article on TechNet: Office Communications Server: Managing OCS 2007 R2 from the Command Line.

This article looks at how to use LCSCMD to do useful stuff with OCS. As usual with Greg and Jean’s stuff, the writing is good, and examples are most relevant. And for OCS wanabe-gurus, there are a couple of cool bits of information I’ve not seen elsewhere (application IDs for example). Well worth a read and a bookmark!

However, LCSCmd.Exe is not the only Command Line tool. The (ex) Scripting Guys have forgotten PowerShell! There’s no mention of PowerShell in this article at all, which is a curious omission. Or possibly the by-product of a word count limit on TechNet).

I’ll write more on this soon over on my Technical Blog: Under The Stairs.

Technorati Tags: OCS

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 is completed

2008-12-22T20:47:00.001Z

I have it on good authority that Microsoft has completed their work on OCS 2007 R2, which is due for launch in Feb 09. As of now, it’s not reached MSDN but I’d expect is fairly soon. Allegedly, it’s build 6907. Note that it’s 64-bit only!

Although coming just 18 months after OCS 2007 RTM, R2 is more than just a service pack – it both introduces some cool new features e.g. Attendant Console3, Dial-in Conferencing Support, a much improved CWA and persistent chat to name a few.

I am hoping we’ll see a OCS 2007 R2 Ignite in the new year.

Technorati Tags: OCS,OCS 2007 R2

Edge Planning Tool for Office Communications Server 2007

2008-12-04T10:18:00.001Z

One of the biggest support call generators for OCS 2007 relates to deployment of the Edge Server. OCS’s Edge Server role can be complex to deploy mainly due to the combination of roles, ports, and IP addresses involved. To help you to deploy your Edge, Microsoft have produced the Edge Planning Tool for Office Communications Server 2007. This is a free download!

The Edge Planning tool produces reports you can use to get your Firewall/DNS/etc folks to do the right thing.

A nice tool.

Technorati tags: Edge, OCS, OCS2007, Office Communication Server

OCS Voice Ignite – Back on the Road

2008-12-01T08:58:00.001Z

Technorati tags: OCS, OCS Voice Ignite, Microsoft

I’m in Paris this week, and plan to be in Bangalore next week on OCS Voice Ignite. This week, I’m attending the updated version of this cool 5-day technical training session. Next week, I’ll be running a Voice Ignite event at Microsoft’s Technology Centre in Bangalore.

I can’t say much about this training, since it’s covered by NDA. But I can say a) it’s pretty cool training with what looks to be good labs and b) it’s a must if you are seriously going to deploy OCS Voice in your enterprise.

If I can get permission, I’ll post more details.

RampUp – Free Developer Training From Microsoft

2008-11-14T12:41:00.001Z

If you are a developer, Microsoft has some new free training. Microsoft explains Rampup as: “free, online, community-based learning program, with a number of different tracks that will help you build your portfolio of professional development skills. Ramp Up has a solid foundation of premium technical content from subject-matter gurus, and provides easy-to-access content in a variety of forms that guide you in learning the important skills. Join Ramp Up (it's free!) and help advance your career”

The current offerings and current web site are clearly a work in progress. The site is a little clunky with the integration between MSDN and MS Learning being less than totally seamless. There’s a lack of discoverability, little integration between this training and the MSDN Library content and the material is not bang up to date. But that’s just work that needs to be done – the free training is still of benefit.

I’ve suggested that the next course to go up on the RampUp site should be PowerShell for developers. We’ll see if MS take me up on this suggestion.

So if you’re a developer, why not head on over to the new Ramp Up site and sign up?

Technorati tags: Rampup, training, Microsoft, PowerShell

Office Communications Server R2- 64 bit only!

2008-09-04T13:17:00.001+01:00

The news is out: Office Communications Server Team Blog - the next release of OCS requires a 64 Bit OS (x64). This decision was made some time ago, but was only externally announced Last Friday (the Friday before Labor day – a great day to bury news).

For OCS this makes a lot of sense. Running on the X64 OS enables significantly more memory to be allocated. There’s also some evidence that says X64 is a more secure platform. However, there are some real downsides. For OCS 2007 customers, there’s no direct or easy upgrade path – you need a new OS install and a fresh install of OCS 2007 R2. And for those of us doing training, etc, there’s the very real downside that you can’t run x64 apps like OCS 2007 R2 in either Virtual PC or Virtual Server. We’ll either have to use Hyper-V (which is not very laptop friendly), or move over to VMware Server/Workstation. Currently, I’m probably leaning towards VMware as it’ll mean I can run OCS R2 on my laptop without requiring an OS Upgrade. Although MS have not said anything in public, I’m hoping there will be a 32-bit version of the product for training, as is the case with Exchange 2007.

MS has also announced shipping of the beta for OCS R2 although as of this morning, it’s not available on TechNet or MSDN. Hopefully this will be out soon.

Technorati tags: OCS R2

Authentication Cisco Switch Login using IAS

2008-08-30T14:48:00.001+01:00

I’ve been playing around the past couple of days with setting up a Cisco 2960 switch to use MIcrosoft’s IAS (aka Radius) to do authenticate logins based on Active Directory. This has not been all that easy as I’m no Cisco guru (yet) and the Cisco manuals were less then helpful to me.

But after a lot of trial and error, and some googling I managed to get both telnet and SSH to login against Radius. The IAS setup was relatively easy – just add a policy, adjust the profile a bit and Radius authentication could work. Getting the switch setup was a bit more tricky.

Starting from a bare switch (no startup-config), here’s the configuration I used that worked against my IAS box:

! setup fundamental stuff
hostname oslo
ip domain-name gktrain.net
enable password cisco
username tfl password 0 line
!
interface vlan 1
ip address 10.1.1.10 255.255.255.0
! Setup HTTP stuff
ip http server
ip http client username http
ip http client password oslo
! ssh/telnet basic setup
! first – generate keys
! note the key length is on a separate line to enable copy/paste
crypto key generate rsa
512
ip ssh time-out 120
line vty 0 15
transport input telnet ssh
password line
login
! Now Setup Radius to authenticate
aaa new-model
radius-server host 10.1.1.100 auth-port 1812 acct-port 1813 key cisco
! Setup server group for simple addition of more servers
aaa group server radius Radius-Servers
server 10.1.1.100 auth-port 1812 acct-port 1813
aaa authentication login TRAuthlist group Radius-Servers
aaa authentication login TRAuthlist group Radius-Servers
aaa accounting connection TRAuthlist start-stop group Radius-Servers

line vty 0 15
login authentication TRAuthlist
transport input telnet ssh

That all seems to work relatively well – however I am not seeing any accounting records being sent to the Radius Server, despite the configuration above. I guess that’s a mystery for another day

Technorati Tags: Cisco,IAS,Microsoft,SSH,Telnet,2960

More on PowerShell Plus

2008-08-29T12:48:00.001+01:00

I wrote about PowerShell Plus on Monday over on my personal blog. I’ve been using it this week to create additional MSDN samples. I have to say that it’s a seriously good product. Like all betas, there are some minor niggles, but the product itself is very much on the right side of very good!

Some features I particularly like:

Debugging support – in the script editor, you can set break points easily and intuitively. When at a breakpoint you can get/set variables, etc.
Code Signing support – this is nice. You easily select a code signing cert (or generate a self signed cert!) and apply it. PowerShell Plus then signs the script whenever you save.
Learning Centre – there is some great info here.
History is ‘smart’. You can view history and click on individual lines in the history and have them executed.
Intellisense – this is something I find very useful in Visual Studio and it’s equally valuable here!

I first got PowerShell Plus working on my XP Laptop, and today have set it up on my main X64 Windows Server 2008 workstation. It’s not so good on XP, as there are some missing APIs, but on Server 2008 it rocks. I suppose it works well under Vista (i.e. better than on XP), but I do not use Vista here so can’t comment.

All in all, this is an excellent product. When I first saw it and started playing with it, I wasn’t so convinced of the price point. But at US$79.00 (the price for beta testers) I think this is about right.

One niggle over price, it’s actually US$79 plus a US$15.8 “maintenance” charge. Personally, I’d prefer to see a single price (i.e. US$79) and a free update policy for each version. That is, version 2.1, 2.2 upgrades from 2.0 being free, but when Idera bring out a Version 3, then there’s an upgrade cost. They probably make the same amount over time, but it feels a bit dirty to ask for maintenance up front. And if they do need to bundle that extra charge, then why not just charge US$95 for the package and bundle the maintenance for ‘free’.

This is a good product, whether it’s US$79 or US$95! I will probably end up getting the RTM version!!

Technorati Tags: PowerShellPlus,Powershell,Idera

Microsoft Office Communicator Auto-discovery Mechanism

2008-07-17T17:04:00.001+01:00

It seems to be a day for writing about auto-discovery, the process whereby an application, in this case Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC), can use a limited amount of information to automatically discover the users’s OCS Server. Auto-discovery is based on MOC’s use of DNS resource records to obtain the necessary information. I’ve been reading the formal published specificatin in the absence of bed-time cocoa. Note that this mechanism is used by a MOC client to find an OCS server, and is different from Exchange’s auto-discovery service that enables Outlook to find an Exchange server. The OCS mechanism is simple and easy, while the Exchange service is more complex.

Using auto-discovery, MOC first obtains what the specificatin calls the Address-of-Record, aka the SIP URI. This could be something like sip:tfl@gktrain.net. From the AOR, MOC needs to determine a target domain (the spec just calls this domain). In this case, gktrain.net is the target domain.

The SIP URI has to obtained through user input. The user inputs his SIP URI (minus the “SIP:” scheme id, as well as AD credentials (in most cases these are the same, a UPN such as tfl@gktrain.net).

For fun, here’s a PowerShell script to get and display the target domain from the AOR

# Get-DomainFromAor.ps1
# gets the domain from the AOR and displays result
# Thomas Lee - tfl@psp.co.uk
 
# Specfy an AOR
$AOR = "sip:tfl@gktrain.net"
 
# Get target domain
$domain = ($aor.split("@"))[1]
 
# Display results
"AOR           : {0}" -f $aor
"Target Domain : {0}" -f $domain

Having discovered the target domain, MOC’s auto-discovery then synthesises a series of DNS queries, and sends these to the local DNS server – one at a time until a successful query result is obtained (or not). If a query is successful, then the information in that query is used to find the user’s OCS server. If no query is successful MOC can log the user in.

As an alternative to auto-discovery, of course, the user can enter the server details manually. In that case, MOC used the manually entered information and does not attempt auto-discovery. To simplify the user experience, and reduce support costs, you should implement DNS-based auto-discovery.

There are two types of synthetic DNS queries that are used by MOC: synthetic SRV record queries and synthetic A record queries. Synthetic SRV records search for an SRV resource record that in turn points to the A record. Together the SRV and associated A record specify the IP address and port number that MOC uses to connect to an OCS Server for the target domain. Synthetic A record queries look for an A record that has the IP address of an OCS Server. MOC uses this address, plus a specific per-query port number to attempt the connection to an OCS Server for the target domain.

The MOC auto-discovery mechanism attempts the SRV queries first, and the A record queries next in an attempt to find an OCS Server. For clients conneting inside the organisation, the discovery should take just one query (and response). For external clients, e.g. connecting from the internet via OCS Edge services, there will be more.

The specific order that queries are conduced are as described below.

Order of Synthetic DNS queries

As noted, Synthetic SRV queries are attempted first. If these are not successful, the synthetic A record queries are used. Here is the order:

(SRV Queries first)

_SipInternalTLS._tcp.<target domain>

If this query is successful, DNS returns one or more SRV resource each with an associated A record. MOC uses the first SRV record, and it’s associated A record. Both DNS round robin and SRV Record priority settings are be used to semi-randomise or to bias the order the SRV records are used.
MOC takes the host name and port contained in the returned SRV record and the IP address specified in the associated A record to attempt to negotiate a SIP over TLS (over TCP) connection with OCS.

_SipInternal._tcp.<target domain>

If this query is successful, DNS returns one or more SRV records and an associated A records MOC uses the host name and port contained in the the SRV record and the IP address specified in the associated A record.MOC uses the first SRV record, and it’s associated A record.Both DNS round robin and SRV Record priority settings are be used to semi-randomise or to bias the order the SRV records are used. MOC takes the host name and port contained in the returned SRV record and the IP address specified in the associated A record to attempt to negotiate a SIP over TCP (i.e. insecure) connection with OCS.

_Sip._tls.<target domain>

If this query is successful, then the steps shown for query 1 above are taken and a TLS connection is attempted.

_sip._tcp.<target domain>

If this query is successful, then the steps shown for query 2 above are taken and a TCP connection is attempted.

(A Record Queries next)

_sipinternal.<target domain>:443

If this query is successful, then the MOC Client attempts a TLS connection to the IP Address specified in the returned A record, over port 443.

_sipinternal.<target domain>

If this query is successful, then the MOC Client attempts a TCP connection to the IP Address specified in the returned A record. NB: The formal spec does not specify a port number, but it is believed the connection attempted is over port 5060. Cites pro/con and corrections are most welcome.

sip.<target domain>:443

If this query is successful, then the MOC Client attempts a TLS connection as per query 5.

sip.<target domain>

If this query is successful, then the MOC Client attempts a TCP connection as noted in query 6 (with same note).

sipexternal.<target domain>:443

If this query is successful, then the MOC Client attempts a TLS connection as per query 5.

sipexternal.<target domain>

If this query is successful, then the MOC Client attempts a TCP connection as noted in query 6 (with same note).

And just when your head explodes, there’s a bit more. Since DNS response times are not predictable, and DNS responses are not reliable, the auto discover mechanism does a bit more than just try these in order.

As I noted, the client first tries to complete the SRV record queries. The client uses the queries in the order shown above to attempt to construct a list of candidate servers and once this list is complete, it begins attempting a connection. If queries 1 and 3 (TLS) above are completed and are successful before query 2 (TCP), then the client adds the TLS entries from both queries and ignores the TCP entries. If query 2 completes first, MOC waits till query 1 and 3 complete before moving on.

One potential security risk is DNS Poisoning, for example by a hacker returning a ‘bad’ SRV record (ie pointing to a rogue server). The MOC client ignores responses whose domain/subdomain is different from the calculated domain. Thus if a query returned an record pointing to a server called ocs.fakedomain.com MOC would ignore it.

After getting the results of the SRV queries, the client will move on to the A record queries. As a general rule, SRV records are used for internal clients, while A records are used for external clients. BUT: given this is DNS, you can use some, any or all of these various records as you choose (or indeed none of them and use manual configuration).

A final note for larger enterprises. If you have a large enterprise, you may have multiple pools and therefore multiple SRV or A records are returned. In this case, MOC’s list of servers to try are dictated by the order the RR's are returned and the first record might be a valid OCS server, but the user is not homed on that server. OCS handles this via the director function and can re-direct the client to the users’s correct home server. The director function is separate and independent to the auto-discover mechanism

Best Practices

The best practices I can recommend are:
- Keep it simple, and just use the minimum of DNS records. There’s not need to populate ALL these A records for MOC auto-discovery.
- For internal clients, the only SRV record you need is _SipInternalTLS._TCP.<target domain>. Set the port in the SRV record to 5061 and the host record to the FQDN of your OCS Server.
- For external DNS, just use SipExternal.<target domain> and ensure that your edge servers and firewalls open up just port 443.
- Where possible, avoid the use of SIP over TCP. If you are considering using SIP over TCP, consider the security implications very carefully.
- Remember that other components of OCS (e.g. the DVT) may require different records to work properly (I’ll blog about this more, when I get a chance).
Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting OCS auto-discovery is for the most part simple – ensure you have the correct records are in DNS and that these are properly configured.

Some things to look out for:
- Assuming you follow best practice, can you resolve _sipinternaltls._tcp.<target domain>.
- Is the sip target domain actually spelt correct in the AOR (eg tfl@gktwain.com vs tfl@gktrain.com)
- In the SRV records, is the port number correct (5061 for TLS, 5060 for TCP).
- In the SRV records, is the name of the host correctly shown (OCS-STB.Gktrain.NET vs OCS-STD.GKtrain.Net).
- Does the SRV’s host name point to an A record that exists.
- Make sure you have at least some records – preferably following recommended best practices!
You can use the client’s event log to see failed DNS queries – this shows AOR problems when you see a lot of records missing in the event log. It can also mean that the SRV records are missing or incorrectly specified.

If I get the time, I might try to write a PowerShell script to construct the synthetic queries, execute them and report on what’s found. Had enough yet? :-)

Technorati Tags: OCS,DNS,auto-discover

Exchange/Outlook Autodiscover Feature

2008-07-17T11:09:00.001+01:00

I was browsing the TechNet library today, and noticed an article on troubleshooting Error 0x8004010F, when occurs when Outlook 2007 tried to download the OAB from an Exchange 2007 server. The article is OK, if you understand what it’s saying, but like many articles can be confusing.

When you run Outlook on a domain joined computer, Outlook can make use of the domain information to access the active directory and obtain Service Connection Point information - i.e. details of where Exchange is, and this information in turn can help Outlook to locate your correct Exchange server (and download the OAB).

In some cases, e.g. when the machine is not a domain member, this process does not work. To cater for this situation, Microsoft has provided another way to obtain the relevant data making use of DNS.

But first some background. Windows services can use the Service Publication feature to advertise themselves using AD objects, in particular service connection points (SCPs). A client application, e.g. Outlook 2007, can use the SCP information to bind to a service, in this case to Exchange 2007’s Client Access Server and then discover details about the Outlok user. This feature is known as Exchange 2007 Autodiscover.

As per the Autodiscover white paper, Exchange 2007 registers a SCP in AD for each server running the CAS role. These SCPs contain the serviceBindingInformation attribute (holding the FQDN of the CAS server in the form of: “https://cascookham1.gktrain.net/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml) and the keywords attribute (containing the AD sites to which this server is associated. i.e. the AD site the which this CAS server resides).

Outlook uses this information to access the autodiscover web service. Outlook first contacts the AD to retrieve all the relevant SCP objects. Outlook first tries to find a CAS server in its site and if this is not successful, it tries to find any CAS server in the forest. The white paper describes the creation of in-site and out-of-site lists and how these are used to locate the CAS Server.

Once Outlook then uses the SCP records to contact the autodiscover service on the CAS, based on the contents of the the serviceBindingInformation attribute noted above. When Outlook queries the autodisover service, the service queries the AD to obtain connection settings and URLs for all Exchange Services. The service then returns this information to Outlook in an XML document. Outlook then uses the information to locate the appropriate configuration information and connection settings for Exchange.

When running Outlook on a non-domain joined machines, this basic process doesn’t work, since the computer is not able to access the AD. In such cases, Exchange provides a second method to help Outlook to locate the autodiscover service and obtain the relevant autodiscover information (i.e. to obtain the autodiscover.xml file).

If the normal SCP method fails, then Outlook determines the name of the SMTP mail domain (it’s on the right side of the user’s e-mail address). If my SMTP mail address is tfl@gktrain.net, then the relevant domain is gktrain.net. Outlook then constructs two URLs based on this domain and tries each of them. These URLs are

https://<smtp domain name>/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml (in this case, https://gktrain.net/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml)
https://autodiscover.<smtp domain name>/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml (in this case https://autodiscover.gktrain.net/autodiscover/autodiscover.xml).

So if you are using Exchange and Outlook and seeing this error – then setup the appropriate DNS records in your corporate DNS to facilitate DNS based autodiscovery. The white paper also looks at issues around SSL certificates, connecting to the autodiscover service form the Internet and how to deploy and manage this service in both enterprise and hosted environments.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007. Outlook 2007,autodiscover,dns,0x8004010F

Communications and Collaboration: How Voice Powers OCS 2007

2008-07-04T16:29:00.001+01:00

Technorati Tags: OCS,SIP,RTP,ICE

Found this nice article online today. Entitled Communications and Collaboration: How Voice Powers OCS 2007, the article takes a look at how calls are made and secured using OCS. OCS makes use of SIP as well as RTP and ICE to make the call, something the article makes very clear.

OCS Exam Assessment – There Isn’t One

2008-06-26T21:03:00.001+01:00

In my OCS Learning plan, updated today, I break the bad news that the OCS Exam Assessment, which Microsoft learning had been meant to develop, will not now happen. After several months of trying to find out where the assessment was, I got the bad news that MSL is not going to proceed with it. Sorry if that’s not the answer you wanted.

Today’s learning Plan update also lists two additional NNTP newsgroups that you might find useful.

Technorati tags: OCS, Assessment, OCS Learning Plan

Office Communications Server - To UDP, or not to UDP, that is the question…

2008-06-05T00:23:00.001+01:00

The question “why doesn’t Microsoft support SIP over UDP” comes up a lot in the OCS training I run. It’s a hot topic at times, all the more so since the RFC requires (“must” vs “should”) UDP support. I’ve offered up the main reason – security, plus the nature of UDP vs TCP. It’s convinced some delegates, but sadly not all. To try to help answer this question, the OCS team have produced a great summary of this reasons in their post entitled To UDP, or not to UDP, that is the question…

Whilst the first and third reasons cited (security and the fire/forget nature of UDP) was obvious, the issue of fixed UDP packet size had not occurred till I read their post. Looking today at some network traces of a client logon, there are indeed some large-ish XML files included with the SIP traffic. Use Snooper to take a look! And the level of support for SIP over TLS/TCP was surprisingly high.

Thanks for a great summary!

Technorati tags: OCS, UDP, TCP, Microsoft

Chief Architect's Corner - Linked to by the OC Team Blog

2008-06-03T15:16:00.001+01:00

I just noticed today that the Microsoft OC team's blog points here to: Chief Architect's Corner

Cool!!

Technorati tags: Microsoft, blog, Office Communications Team

OCS Learning Guide

2008-05-26T18:08:00.002+01:00

I wrote about the OCS Learning Guide yesterday, in a post entitled OCS Learning Guide And an OCS Blog Feed. Two interesting things:

I had a comment regarding the Resource Kit and whether it was a bit OTT for someone only wanting to pass the exam. Fair point I suppose. Although if you know what's in the Resource Kit book, you should have no problem passing the exam. And to really, really know OCS, you end up knowing most or all of what's documented!

As part of the learning guide update, I setup an aggregated feed of all the blogs listed in the guide. Thus far, blogdigger hasn't picked up any articles from the feeds. I'll find a solution in the coming days!

[29 May] - this feed is now working!

[30 May] - I've removed the VOIP magazine from the blogdigger feed. Whilst interesting, it's probably not core to what this feed was meant to be!

Technorati tags: OCS Learning Plan, OCS 2007, Microsoft

OCS Learning Guide And an OCS Blog Feed

2008-05-24T16:57:00.004+01:00

Last autumn, I developed an OCS Learning Plan for Microsoft, for use at IT Forum in Barcelona. I later expanded it and published it here on this blog. The guide is now updated with new links to the exam's preparation guide, and some new blogs.

As part of the update, I created an aggregated blog feed at Blogdigger - the link to the on-line feed is: http://groups.blogdigger.com/groups.jsp?id=5591. If you have an existing RSS reader, Blogdigger also publishes the OPML for this feed set. Let me know if you'd like to add (or remove) any of these blogs.

Technorati tags: blog, OCS, OCS Learning Plan, learning, Office Communications Server 2007

OCS Voice Ignite - Copenhagen (and more to come)

2008-05-24T14:54:00.001+01:00

I'm now back home in the UK after finishing the first GK-Solo' Voice Ignite session in Copenhagen. The first set of VI events were big, with up 100-200 in the room. The latest sessions are smaller (16 in Denmark). The Copenhagen event was run by myself and my colleague Jon Branstrom from Sweden. We had delegates from Norway, Finland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Denmark - so quite an international crowd. The laptops worked OK, but they reinforced the fact that running OCS, and AD, and Exchange on even the latest model high spec laptops does not deliver great audio performance with Virtual PC. I'm looking forward to testing out OCS more fully on Hyper-V to see if it's any better.

So now I have some time off before moving on to Reading UK for the next Voice Ignite event. After that, it's off to Paris and possibly to Reston Virginia. I can't wait! These sessions are long, in-depth and give rise to lots of great discussion and networking amongst the delegates.

Thus far, all these Voice Ignite events are not generally open to any and all. Sadly because we'd love to have a few more delegates. If you want to go to Voice Ignite - ask your Microsoft partner account manager, or the OCS Product manager in your country. They have the power to get you on, whereas I really don't.

Technorati tags: OCS, Voice Ignite, Microsoft, Global Knowledge

OCS Voice Ignite - Phase 2

2008-05-19T13:58:00.001+01:00

I'm in Copenhagen this week, running the first of the Phase 2 Voice Ignite sessions. The initial phase of VI involved re-deliveries in 6 cites (Orlando, Barcelona, Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, Paris and Scottsdale). These were big events at big venues mainly taught by MCS consultants and a few GK folks. Phase 2 is smaller regional re-deliveries. We've here in Copenhagen for the first of these (Reading UK, Paris and Austin Texas are the other three of these that are booked thus far).

The biggest issue with these regional re-deliveries is setup. With phase 1, we had support from Microsoft's TSG team (and 1st class they are too). For the the phase 2 deliveries, we're on our own. Like every first run of deep rich training, we've had issues (power, the wrong cables, etc) - nothing we can't and didn't solve. Just more stress!

But - with these challenges behind us, we're now steaming ahead with the training and folks seem to be pretty happy.

Technorati tags: OCS 2007, Voice Ignite, Office Communications Server 2007, Global Knowedge, Microsoft

Getting the Tanjay Working

2008-05-15T19:57:00.004+01:00

One of the cooler aspects of Microsoft's Office Communications Server is the Tanjay telephone device. Tanjay was the code name for what technically I should now call the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Phone Edition phone. Tanjay is, however, so much less typing.

The Tanjay was one of three hardware device types that Microsoft developed for OCS. These, and more, are now sold by third parties. In addition to the Tanjay, there was the following code-name devices:

Catalina – this was a USB handset to provides a more familiar phone experience for Office Communicator users. The Catalina is effectively a fancy mike/speaker attached to your PC via USB. Polycom make one of these.
Anacapa – This is a blue tooth headset that can be used for receiving Office Communicator calls. This device is a USB dongle which speaks Bluetooth to a serrate headset (the pairing is done at the factory). To the host this is just a USSB speaker and mike - so no flakey BT drivers to load! Nortel make one as do Plantronics.

At present, there are two models of the Tanjay on the market: the LG Nortel 8540. The other is the Polycom CX700. In theory they are meant to be broadly equivalent and are priced similarly at around US$600.

I've got a pair of the LG Nortel devices and managed last week to finally get them working. The whole process is rather convoluted and very hard work, but do-able.

There are two main parts to getting the phone working are:

Basic connectivity - getting the phone out of the box and able to make/receive basic calls.
Configuring and configuring device updates - to get the most out of the Tanjay, you need to update the bios.

To some degree, you have to get basic connectivity working before you can get the device updates to work.

The steps required to get basic connectivity established are:

Configure DHCP
Configure DNS
Configure NTP
Configure DHCP
Configuring Certificates
Testing it

Configuring DHCP

The Tanjay device gets it's IP address information via DHCP. You need to setup your DHCP servers with sufficiently sized scopes that contain the following DHCP Options:

Option 3 - Router (IP Default gateway for the phone)
Option 6 - DNS Servers (one or more DNS servers)
Option 15 - DNS Domain Name (default domain name for the phone)
Option 44 - WINS/NBNS Servers (One or more WINS servers)
Option 45 - NBNS Node Type (set to 0x8).

In my case, my devices shipped with beta firmware (which worked but needed to be upgraded). The WINS server is used for the beta code and in particular to enable the phone to find the DC via NetBios (for DCs on remote networks). The RTM firmware now uses DNS for name resolution via option 6 where the phone is in the domain specified with option 15.

You also need to configure DHCP to support Option 119. This allows the device to have multiple domain names the device should the device can't for some reason, resolve a domain controller using the DNS servers specified via Option 6

Configure DNS

In operation, the Tanjay is just a Office Communicator client. It has to register to an OCS server and use that Server to negotiate phone calls.

The Tanjay uses a combination of SRV and A records to find the OCS resources. You may need to add 4 different groups of records (in addition to the DNS RRs implemented by AD):

NTP - you need a SRV record that points to the FQDN of the time service (see later for setting up NTP). This has the format:

_ntp Port:123 <FQDN of NTP Server>

Internal SRV records - you need potentially two SRV records to your internal DNS Server, These enable the Tanjay to discover internal OCS resources. The first (_SIP._TLS.<sipdomain>) is for TLS connections and the second (_SIP._TCP.<sipdomain>) for TCP connections. For both records, the host has to be either you SE Server FQDN, your EE Single Server FQDN, or a FQDN Pointing to the hardware load balance. The ports are the normal posts (5061 for TLS, 5060 for TCP). These in turn resolve to the A record with the relevant IP address (or VIP address for the HLB).
External SRV records - you need potentially two SRV records to your external DNS Server, These enable the Tanjay to discover external OCS resources
A record(s) for your SIP Domain. In your internal DNS, you need an A record for SIPInternal.<sipdomain> which points to your OCS FE server (or HLB).In your external DNS, you need an A record for SIP.<sipdomain> that points to the Access Edge server

Configure NTP

The Tanjay uses NTP to get updated time - synchronised time is a requirement for Kerberos authentication. The device uses the UDP SRV record noted earlier to locate the relevant NTP server. Your NTP server can be any NTP server, but my preference is for it to be a DC.

As I understand it, the Tanjay can use the Internet and can access external time servers (e.g. time.windows.com). Some organisations block NTP externally or have Tanjay devices that are operating in networks that are not attached - and for these situations, we need to configure a local NTP server.

To configure NTP, look at KB article 816042 - How to configure an authoritative time server in Windows Server 2003.

Configure Certificates

This Tanjay uses X.509 digital certificates to create the TLS tunnel for connection OCS. To get your Tanjay to log in securely, it's necessary to get your Root CA cert into the trusted root store on the phone. This proved to be a very major pain.

In my case, I first loaded the certificate onto a temporary share on the DC. Then I logged into the Tanjay using a domain account. To to that, you need to exit from the phone app (aka Domo), and use native WinCE features. You have to set the owner User ID, Password and domain. This may sound simple, but when you get the relevant dialog on the screen, the soft keyboard pops up neatly obscuring the screen (and no way to move the darned soft kb). But once you get the credentials entered, you can use the network to download this cert to add it to the device root CA. For testing, you might create a short user name with a very short password!

If you are using the Tanjay externally, you will typically need to use a public cert for your Access Edge. Note that the set of public Root CAs trusted by default by the Tanjay is more limited than the full Windows client - so choose your cert provider carefully. And check that you don't need to export your CA's root cert to the device as well as the internal CA cert!

You also need to configure your domain so that clients autoenroll for the Root CA Certs, which makes some of the pain go away.

Testing it

Once you have all the above items configured, you can get your device to make/receive calls, advertise and view presence, etc. You need to reboot the device (I just turned the power off and on). As the phone comes up, you can see it getting an IP address.

After may trial and errors, it took me around 3 hours to get this far. Due to time constraints, I did not have time (that day) to get the update server working, but I'll report on that in Part 2 of this blog post. And in closing, I would like to personally thank Dennis Herzig of Global Knowledge for providing the solid and feature rich Virtual Image environment that has made this all possible!

Technorati tags: OCS, Tanjay, OCS Phone Edition, NTP, DNS

Planning Tool for Office Communications Server 2007

2008-03-06T21:31:00.000Z

Planning for OCS is a lot of work for any large organisation. There are loads of questions to ask and a number of answers to find. Microsoft has created a Planning Tool that asks the questions and helps to find the answers. Once the tool has gathered the information, it draws a recommended topology

The Planning Tool for Office Communications Server 2007 is a free download. It's a WPF application so will need the later versions of .NET

Technorati tags: .net, OCS

Reflection on Voice Ignite

2008-03-03T02:27:00.001Z

Over the past few months, I've been lucky enough to have taken part in 5 of the OCS 2007 Voice Ignite events: Orlando, Barcelona, Sydney, Kuala Lumpur and Paris. As I compose this blog post, I'm en route to a Train the trainer GK is running in North Carolina (USA). With 30,000 miles in the air, and weeks away from my home and family, it's been a long engagement.

Many people, when seeing the list of cities, and hearing about some of the truly great hotels we've stayed at on this tour think "wow - cool". And they are at least partly right. Hotels like the Westin in Kuala Lumpur have been truly outstanding, and getting an upgrade into United's 1st class cabin makes long journeys a lot easier. But at the same time, there's been flight delays, lost luggage, and far too many hours stuck en transit. The 7 hours spent in Air China's business lounge in Beijing was not one of my life's best moments.

But it's been an incredible tour. I've had the real pleasure in meeting folks from different cultures, with different world views. I've seen some incredible sights: sunset at Sydney Opera house has to be a highlight, along with drinks at the top of the AMP tower. KL was a fantastic place (despite lost luggage), and both Orlando and Paris featured some good sushi.

The most important thing for me was meeting and working with the passionate folks attending and delivering. Folks who truly enjoy working with and deploying OCS 2007. As part of my warm up, I got the delegates to stand up and shout "I love OCS". It was a unique moment. And the look on some of their faces when they "got it" and hearing the room reverberate with "cool" whenever I said "PowerShell" - priceless.

I learned a lot about the product during this tour. I am pretty sure I helped a lot of delegates to understand the product better and I'm very hopeful that my enthusiasm for this product was contagious.

Thanks Microsoft for putting this event on - you really did all the right things by your partners. You gave them the information and the passion they need to be successful. Thanks to the delegates for asking the hard questions which helped us all to learn more and understand this great product even better. Thanks too to the presenters, both from Microsoft and from Global Knowledge. They helped us all to learn, and were incredibly generous with their knowledge and experience. And finally, thanks to my wife and daughter for allowing me so long away from home.

So with the tour now a memory, I have the TTT to look forward to, plus hopefully some smaller events to deliver. As Jerry and the boyz sang: "What a long strange trip it's been".

Perhaps my best moment of all was seeing my daughter's face light up as I came through the door. Daddy was home, and that is a good place to be

Technorati tags: OCS 2007 Ignite, Microsoft, Global Knowledge, United Airlines, Air China

Voice Ignite Paris - And The Beat Goes On

2008-02-27T08:11:00.001Z

Another week, another Voice Ignite session. This week, we're in Paris, with another full session. 120 partners, customers, and Microsoft folks all here and eager to learn more about OCS and Voice.

As I've mentioned before, the content is NDA, but I've had permission to disclose the outline for the event:

Monday
0 Welcome & Overview
1 Microsoft® Unified Communications Vision, Scenarios & Architecture
2 Legacy Voice Overview
Lab Session 0 Learning Environment Set-up
Lab Session 1 SIP Protocol
3 Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging Architecture and Topologies
4 Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging Deployment and Configuration
Lab Session 2 Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging & IP-PBX (CCM) Integration
Lab Session 3 SIP Client Integration with Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging

Tuesday
5 Voice Deployment Scenarios & Features
6 Voice Design
7 Location Profiles, Normalization, and Routing
Lab Session 4 Internal Calling (Dial Plan 1)
Lab Session 5 Inbound Calls (Dial Plan 2)
Lab Session 6 Legacy PBX and Analogue Phone (Dial Plan 3)
Lab Session 7 Outbound to PSTN at Redmond Location (Dial Plan 4)

Wednesday
8 Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 Voice Architecture and Topologies
9 Configuring Voice Capabilities
10 Deploying and Managing Microsoft® Unified Communications Devices
Lab Session 8 Second Location (Dial Plan 5)
Bonus Lab Frankfurt Location and Alternate Class Of Service (Dial Plan 6)
Lab Session 9 Data Network Requirements
11 Remote Access
12 Voice Security
13 Certificates, Ports, DNS Requirements
Discussion Panel Group

Thursday
14 QoE Server
15 Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 System Administration
16 Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 Troubleshooting
17 Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 & Microsoft® Exchange
Lab Session 10 Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging - Integration and Troubleshooting Tools
MIR Make it Real – Scenario

Friday
MIR Make it Real – Solution
Lab Session 11 Make it Right
Demo Lab Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 Dial Plan – AudioCodes/Dialogic/Cisco
18 Conferencing-Audio/Video/Data
Lab Session 12 Web Conferencing and Edge Server Deployment and Troubleshooting Tools
19 Call to Action and Finale

Now that's what I call great training!

Technorati tags: OCS, Voice Ignite, Microsoft

Comparing Microsoft OCS 2007 to IBM Lotus Sametime 8.0

2008-02-19T14:27:00.001Z

The No Jitter web site has a really good article on Comparing Microsoft OCS 2007 to IBM Lotus Sametime 8.0. It's an in-depth and interesting comparison.

One "advantage" that is touted for Sametime is that it's cross-platform and runs under multiple OSs. This cross platform feature is both a strength and a weakness. On the plus side, it means you don't have to adopt Windows Server if you don't want or need to, you can use different OSs. But by being cross platform, there are two significant downsides. First, it means a lot more testing has to be done to ensure that new features run on each supported OS. This can potentially slow down the rate at which IBM can pump out new features. Secondly, it means that optimising it for a given platform is harder (since IBM has to do more work across the different OSs. It might also mean that Sametime is less optimised than Microsoft's offering. And by developing for many different OSs, it must cost IBM more in development, testing and support.

Microsoft only has one platform to code to, thus OCS can be more optimised to take full advantage of the Windows platform.

This cross platform vs uni-platform argument has been around for years, and we see it all the time in the database world. Typically this results in the customer being somewhat limited to specific the OS versions that IBM will support - they can't support ALL the versions of Linux or Unix. And it inevitably means the testing matrix is much more complex (and costly).

I'm not for a moment casting doubt on IBM's ability to test across multiple platforms. I'm just pointing out the difficulties and risks inherent in their (laudable) cross platform strategy. And here has to be a cost there, and ultimately it is the customer who pays for this open-ness.

I'd be interested in feedback on just how portable and optimised Sametime is!

Technorati tags: OCS, Office Communications Server 2007, IBM, IBM Sametime

Windows PowerShell Training for IT Pros

2008-02-19T12:33:00.001Z

Desmond Lee, in a blog article Windows PowerShell Training for IT Pros is rightly complaining about the lack official courseware for PowerShell thus far.

His post notes some great from Sapien. Turns out, this training is being offered by Global Knowledge across Europe. We have a class coming up at the end of March in the UK (see: http://www.globalknowledge.co.uk/Default.aspx?page=461&coursecode=GKPS for more details). We are also running additional classes in Copenhagen in April and May. We'd be happy to take this training to you, or have you come to us!

Desmond is also not quite right about PowerShell official MOC training - MSL is indeed working on a course just now, course 6434. Actually I should probably say Global Knowledge is working on this!

Course 6434 is planned to be available by the end of the 2nd quarter of this year. It is a 3 day class and there's a beta being delivered by one of the courseware developers (i.e. ME!) in Dublin on April 1-3. If you are interested, let me know and we can organise a booking! I'll post a web reference when I get it.

Technorati tags: Powershell, Microsoft, Global Knowledge

OCS Voice Ignite Tour Hits Paris (25-29 Feb 2008)

2008-02-17T11:40:00.001Z

With 4 of the 6 OCS Voice Ignite events completed, the Voice Ignite tour rolls on to Paris. We're holding this next event at Le Meridien Etoile, 81 Boulevard Gouvion Saint-Cyr in Paris.

The Voice Ignite events thus far have been great. Sydney was cool (and very wet!!). Kuala Lumpur was warmer, drier and a lot of fun to boot! The KL event was held at one of the best locations I've been to in a LONG time - the Westin Kuala Lumpur is worth flying around the world to stay in.

I'm now in Munich for a day (part of the conditions of a round the world airline ticket) after the long flights from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing to Munich. In a few hours, I will be home for a week of rest before heading on to Paris for Round 5.

For NDA reasons, I've been told I am not able to blog any details of the content for this fantastic event. But that hasn't stopped others from doing so! Over on Joachim Farla's blog, he's got an article entitled Unified Communications: OCS Voice Ignite Tour within 1 week... which lists what he claims to be the contents. Now for NDA reasons I can't really comment other than to say two things: first the contents he lists are what any competent and capable training course would cover and second, Voice Ignite is much better than just capable and competent!! Oh - and Make It Right is not on Thursday, it'll be on Friday (and you'll need your wits about you if you want to win the prizes on offer for doing well on this exercise)!

Voice Ignite has been a fantastic journey. As The Grateful Dead sing: "What a long strange trip it's been." We've seen some great cities, met some great Microsoft partners and have dived deep into the product. It doesn't get much better than this.

I really hope that someone from Microsoft Learning comes along to the event to see just what great training looks like . Oh and please take the results back to Redmond and incorporate them in 5179's B-Rev!

Technorati tags: OCS Voice Ignite, Office Communications Server

OCS and Enhanced Presence

2008-02-16T18:39:00.002Z

A key feature of OCS is presence which we can define as information that indicates a user's availability, willingness, and capabilities to communicate using OCS. When you login to Communicator, you can set you presence to levels such as busy, or away. You can also publish that presence so that other users can see your presence information. This facilitates and optimises collaboration - there's no point in trying to communicate with someone that has Do Not Disturb set for example. Presence information is actual a set of individual categories of information and is communicated to/from OCS using XML.

OCS 2007 implements what is termed "enhanced presence". With enhanced presence, an XML schema defines the structure of enhanced presence data. This date is represented by the value of a category instance as XML elements and attributes. The schema helps an application create, parse, and validate the enhanced presence data before it is published or subscribed to. Most users will never be aware of the underlying architecture of presence, or will ever see the XML. Developers, on the other hand, can use this information to create enhanced presence aware applications.

Microsoft has published details of enhanced presence in the downloadable document entitled Office Communicator 2007: Enhanced Presence Model White Paper. Developers or other OCS geeks can find more information in very recently published Unified Communications Enhanced Presence Schemas for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. The former is a Word document, while the latter is an MSI that contains a help file and a set of XSD (XML Schema Definition) files.

Technorati tags: OCS, Enhanced Presence, XML, Microsoft Office Communicator

Regular Expressions With OCS

2008-02-15T06:19:00.001Z

OCS Voice uses regular expressions as part of phone number normalisation and phone routes. In teaching OCS, I'm finding that many delegates really get confused by regular expressions. The Regular-Expressions.Info site has a really useful Regular Expressions Reference - Basic Syntax guide. It may help you get regular expressions.

Technorati tags: regular expression, OCS

Around the World With OCS Voice Ignite - continued

2008-02-12T04:35:00.001Z

As I noted in a recent post (Around the World With OCS Voice Ignite), I'm taking part in the OCS Voice Ignite tour. Last week was Sydney where were were ensconced in Darling Harbour. The venue was great, and the content was even better. This week we're in the wonderful city of Kuala Lumpur.

My trip to Sydney (LHR-LAX, LAX-SYD) was greatly improved by upgrades - entering a 747 and turning left is the only way to fly! Thanks to an unknown friend of a friend for those upgrades! The only downside was the unscheduled stop at Honolulu for fuel and the lack of laptop power across the Pacific. Nevertheless, the service was excellent, and the 4000 bonus miles United offered us as compensation helped.

Sydney is a great city - although it rained most of the week (I've seen drier days in the monsoon!). But the audience was great and we all had a lot of fun. I was sorry to leave, but Kuala Lumpur beckoned. The flights to KL (SYD-BKK-KUL) were OK too. We were a bit late into Bangkok, but that just meant less time waiting. The flight down to KL on Lufthansa was stunning - a band new 747 (it had less than 400 flight hours said the stewardess). Think of the smell of a new car, very comfortable seats and a great crew.

Then the curse of all world travellers - I got to KL, but my luggage did not. When you travel as much as I do, lost luggage is something that is just going to happen sooner or later. And when it does, KL is the place to have it happen. The hotel and Lufthansa were great. The airline was very apologetic and gave me US$200 in local currency to buy some new stuff while they found my bag. And the hotel (The Westin) made it very easy - they called the airport every 4 hours and kept me fully informed. Fortunately the bag turned up last night and I've got a few Ringits spare to help the enjoyment of KL.

I feel very, very lucky on several levels. First I'm getting to work with a very rich content and very knowledgeable speakers. Second, we get real world labs with great hardware (I'm pretty biased though as Global Knowledge built the labs). Finally, we get to meet passionate and committed OCS fans and get them the real answers to the very real issues they and their clients face. Oh - and this week at least, we get the best breakfast buffet I've EVER seen in my entire life.

It's a shame that the content is under NDA - which means I can't share much of it (and the Voice Ignite sessions are now fully booked so I can't suggest you book onto a session). I think and hope that there will be more deliveries on a regional basis - but I've had nothing confirmed. Watch this space - or take a look at Devin's blog as noted in http://cacorner.blogspot.com/2008/02/voice-ignite-sydney.html which provide some insights to this great content.

Thanks to the OCS team for allowing me to have this wonderful experience.

Technorati tags: OCS, Voice Ignite, Microsoft, Global Knowedge

Office Communications Server Team Blog

2008-02-08T02:20:00.001Z

I've enjoyed reading the posts on the OCS Team Blog, at http://communicationsserverteam.com/default.aspx. Two recent posts (OCS Visio Stencils and the PowerShell Script for retrieving Archiving data) are excellent. It's excellent to see a product team blogging great information.

One thing I noticed - this site uses Community Server, a product developed by Telligent! For more details of this cool product, see http://communityserver.org/. A nice product - and a great team that will go the extra mile to give their users better tools!

Thanks!

Technorati tags: OCS, Community Server

Office Communications Server 2007 Visio Stencils

2008-02-07T22:35:00.001Z

For those of you that use Visio, and want to draw OCS related network diagrams, the US Product team have just released Office Communications Server 2007 Visio Stencils. You can get these directly from the Microsoft Download site.

Thanks to the UC team for these, and to Kevin Engman for the heads up.

Technorati tags: ocs, visio, microsoft

Voice Ignite - Sydney

2008-02-06T06:16:00.001Z

I'm in Sydney this week, helping out with Voice Ignite. Due to the NDA nature of this training,I'm not able to blog much of the detail. However, one of the delegates is doing some live blogging about the even. Take a look at (e)Mail Insecurity.

Technorati tags: OCS, OCS Voice Ignite

OCSPedia.Com

2008-02-06T06:10:00.001Z

I just stumbled over OCSPedia.com, an interesting site for OCS Admins. It contains some good summaries of OCS components.

Worth book-marking and looking at for more information on OCS.

Technorati tags: OCS

MSDN Library Community Content - Now In 2nd year

2008-01-28T18:37:00.001Z

Just over a year ago (Dec 7th 2006), Microsoft turned on the community content feature of the MSDN site. This allowed users to add content to the library. year later, and there are 5700 topics with community content, and 4213 contributors. If you navigate to the root of the MSDN library (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/default.aspx) you can see the statistics.

Thus far, I've added over 120 samples - using PowerShell with a variety of components, including COM, WMI and .NET. I enjoy being one of the top contributors! I wonder if anyone over at Microsoft has noticed!

Technorati Tags: MSDN Library,community content,PowerShell

Around the World With OCS Voice Ignite

2008-01-26T17:00:00.001Z

There's a great line in Out of Africa which goes something like: "When God is very angry with you, he gives you what you ask for". With that in mind, I'm off this week to fufill a long standing ambition of doing an around the world trip. It's long been something I've wanted to do. Some might argue I've done it before, having travelled to both Sydney and Tokyo travelling east and west. But this time, I'm doing it west bound - in just over three weeks.

On Wednesday I fly to Sydney, via Los Angeles for the Sydney Voice Ignite session. The following Saturday, I fly to Kuala Lumpur (via Bangkok) for the Kuala Lumpur Voice Ignite Session. Then it's off to Munich via Peking to teach the official Microsoft courseware, and then a week in Paris doing Voice Ignite again.

Technically, the RTW flight ends after Munich, as I go home for 24 hours before heading back to Paris. But it's still a monster trip - just over 26,000 miles on 3 weeks (Paris is probably going to be a more civilised train trip).

The OCS Voice Ignite event is some awesome technical training. If you are considering OCS and you can get an invite, then come along. But be warned, it's a long week of highly technical sessions combined with real-world labs. And to finish it off, you get to both design an OCS voice solution, and fix a broken installation! It's a lot of fun, as well as being very deep. Attendance is by invite only - so ask your Microsoft rep to get you on. Having said that, I suspect that these next three events are likely to be full. I would really love to be able to get this material and teach it in smaller classrooms to our EMEA customers - we'll see if this is possible.

I'd love to provide a more detailed look at the content, but currently it's NDA. What is not NDA, however, is that this stuff rocks! I can't wait to teach this!

Technorati Tags: OCS,OCS Voice Ignite,training

Home from Voice Ignite - Tired and My Head Hurts

2007-12-16T21:58:00.001Z

It's been a great week in Orlando at Microsoft's Voice Ignite event 5 hard core technical days on Office Communication's Server and the voice component. We looked a huge range of topics presented by great individual presenters, augmented by some outstanding hands on labs - my head hurts (but in a great way). Microsoft's OCS team (and friends) did a really great job bringing this all together. I'll write more about these events when I can.

Technorati tags: OCS, Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft, training. voice, SIP

OCS Voice Ignite - going to Orlando

2007-12-03T22:12:00.001Z

Just got the final confirmation through today - I'm heading off to Orlando on Saturday to attend the OCS Voice Ignite event that I wrote about recently. This appears to be 5 days of deep, deep technical OCS voice stuff. I've started looking at the labs and they look interesting. I can't wait.

I'm hoping that in the longer term, we can run this training at Global Knowledge across EMEA. It would be great to be able to have this training as deeper dive than we'll be getting in the 5179 training (5 days training trumps 2, and training with real telecoms hardware doubly trumps that without!).

It looks like I'll be helping to re-deliver this in Barcelona and I may also be Australia bound to help re-deliver parts of this seminar in Sydney. So it looks like some fun travel coming up soon!

I'm super excited!

Technorati tags: OCS 2007, Voice Ignite

Unified Communications Developer Portal

2007-12-01T12:03:00.001Z

Microsoft's push into the world of Unified Communications continue with the launch of the Unified Communications Developer Portal. This MSDN portal is part of the Office Development Center, and is designed to feature links and resources for developers wanting to get into UC.

The featured document as I write this entry is the Unified Communications API roadmap.This is a key document given that there around 8 separate sets of UC related APIs! The portal also links to some blogs and web casts.

The contents of the portal are a bit thin today, nevertheless this is a great site for developers (and admins that secretly want to be developers!) to learn more about developing in the UC space.

Technorati tags: MSDN, Microsoft, Unified Communications, Unified Communications Developer Portal

Thomas Lee's OCS Learning Plan - as published by Microsoft

2007-11-25T14:00:00.001Z

I see that Microsoft has published my OCS 2007 Learning Plan - you can get this from Microsoft's Learning site. What's been published is an earlier version of my OCS Learning Plan that you can see here on this blog. I'm trying to keep my entry up to date, and will shortly be putting up a link to this post in the links to the right.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, OCS, OCS Learning Plan, OCS 2007

Download details: Office Communications Server 2007 Security Guide

2007-11-25T11:50:00.001Z

Microsoft has published The Office Communications Server 2007 Security Guide, a 42-page document describing the security aspects and features of OCS 2007.

You can use this guide as a starting point to help secure and maintain a secure Office Communications Server 2007 deployment. This guide provides general guidelines and best practices for assessing and managing the most common security risks. Additional product and security resources are listed at the end of this guide. As new threats and solutions arise, outdated documents, solutions, and methods should be replaced with new ones.

The guide addresses the following:

Common Security Threats
Office Communications Server Security Framework
Addressing Threats to Your Core Infrastructure
Addressing Threats to Your Internet Boundary
Addressing Threats to On-Premise Conferencing
Addressing Threats to Enterprise Voice
Addressing Threats to the Office Communicator 2007 Client

This is a must read for all OCS admins!

Technorati tags: OCS, Office Communications Server 2007, OCS Security Guide, Security

Microsoft’s Unified Communications (UC) Voice Ignite

2007-11-23T19:07:00.001Z

Voice Ignite - now this is cool! This is a (brilliantly developed!) 5-day technical workshop for Microsoft partners who are "proactively mobilizing their IT, Networking, and Telecommunication professionals to deliver Voice over IP solutions to customers".

This is an invitation-only no-fee event is based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 unified messaging (UM) and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. For more details see the web site at: Unified Communications: Microsoft’s Unified Communications (UC) Voice Ignite.

I think I'm going - so hopefully I'll see some of you there.

Technorati tags: OCS, OCS Voice, OCS Voice Ignite, Office Communications Server, Microsoft, Global Knowledge

Office Communications Server 2007 Deployment Validation Tool

2007-11-18T18:49:00.001Z

A common issue in VoIP deployments is that administrators only find out about problems with audio quality after a user reports a problem. To help admins, Microsoft has released another neat OCS download - Office Communications Server 2007 Deployment Validation Tool. The Deployment Validation Tool simulates audio traffic to help you identify and resolve audio issues.

Technorati tags: OCS, Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft

PIC Licensing for OCS

2007-11-08T21:59:00.001Z

I had an interesting comment on this blog recently - it asked questions around the Public Internet Connectivity licenses and whether they were still available.

I passed the question to some great folks in Redmond and got a pretty clear answer: PIC is still alive and being sold. Rumours of its demise seem premature.

My Redmond contact also pointed me to the Office Live Communications Server PIC page which should answer all the relevant questions.

Technorati tags: OCS Licensing, PIC, OCS 2007

Polycom - CX Product Family for OCS 2007

2007-11-04T12:30:00.001Z

Technorati tags: Polycom, OCS, Office Communications Server 2007, Tanjay

Polycom has launched its full range of OCS compliant devices, as you can see over at Polycom.com's page "Products - CX Product Family."

The CX family includes 4 devices

Polycom CX100 USB Speakerphone

Ideal for personal hands-free and headset-free conference calls, the CX100 is a full duplex USB speakerphone for use with Microsoft Office Communicator 2007.
Polycom CX200 USB Desktop Phone

With a handset, full duplex speakerphone and headset port, the CX200 is the best solution for most office workers seeking a USB desktop phone peripheral for Microsoft Office Communicator 2007.
» read more
CX400 Cordless USB Phone

Code named Catalina, the CX400 is a USB cordless handset for Microsoft Office Communicator 2007. It delivers a wire-free experience up to 30-feet from the base station.
CX700 IP Phone

Code named Tanjay, this device comes with a color touch screen and an embedded Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 client. Polycom suggest the CX700 is an executive IP phone for use with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.

Office Communications Server 2007 Quality of Experience Monitoring Server

2007-11-03T15:28:00.001Z

Microsoft has released the Quality of Experience Monitoring server and you can download it from the Microsoft download centre. Code named Budapest, the QOE server helps you to monitor an OCS 2007 installation,and provide some basic root cause analysis. Warren Barkley describes this neat product in more detail over on the Communications Server blog at: http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2007/10/31/23.aspx

For details of how to install, configure and use the QOE Server, refer to the QOE Monitoring Server Guide also on the MIcrosoft Download Centre.

Technorati tags: QOE Server, Office Communications Server 2007, OCS, Budapest

A Learning Plan for OCS 2007

2007-10-31T12:33:00.001Z

[Last Updated – 26 June 2008]

I was recently asked by Microsoft to produce a learning plan for OCS 2007. They are handing out a number of related learning plans next week at TechEd in Barcelona.

Due to the way that the learning plans had to be constructed, they seemed to leave out some of the richness in terms of learning material and content. So far as I can see, there's a LOT to learn about OCS, and a lot of different ways to learn it.

In this post, which I'll try to keep up to date moving forward, I look at more information than most people will never use in totality , but let's hope some of it is useful!

Microsoft Certifications	Exam 70-638 – TS: Configuring Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exams/70-638.mspx NB: this document is party in error - there is classroom training to support the exam. See Below.
Assessment(s)	AS052: Office Communications Server 2007 This assessment will not be being produced or released.
Microsoft Press And Other Books	Microsoft® Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit (http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/10482.aspx) This is a must have book for OCS fans everywhere! You can download three chapters of this book (Chapter 3 - Infrastructure and Security Considerations; Chapter 4 - Basic IM and Presence Scenario; Chapter 9 - Remote Call Control Scenario). See: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=407A3E40-350A-4E3D-B60E-C9505668B231&displaylang=en NB: this is probably overkill if you just want to learn the basics and pass the test. But it's a great resource if you really want to learn more about the product.
E-learning course(s)	Microsoft Learning has produced e-learning covering OCS. It's about on par with most of MSL based e-learning. The e-learning content is purchased as a "bundle", 5125, that consists of 4 separate e-learning titles. The actual e-learning titles in the 5125 collection are: Clinic 5126: Introducing Enterprise Instant Messaging Using Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (Beta) Clinic 5127: Introducing On-Premise Conferencing Using Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Clinic 5128: Introducing Enterprise Telephony Using Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Clinic 5129: Customizing Real-Time Communication with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 To get the full 5125 set, go to: https://www.microsoftelearning.com/eLearning/offerDetail.aspx?offerPriceId=111910
Instructor Lead courses	Microsoft Official Curriculum courses are as follows: 5177 - Implementing and Maintaining Instant Messaging Using Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. (1 day - level 200) 5178 - Implementing and Maintaining Audio/Video Conferencing and Web Conferencing Using Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. (2 days- level 200) 5179 - Implementing and Maintaining Telephony Using Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. (2 days - level 200) These classes were designed to be totally independent of each other. While they can be taken together, there is overlap. If you take them together, enquire if the CPLS will cater for this facet. An alternative to these MOC classes is the Ignite material. See http://cacorner.blogspot.com/search?q=Ignite for more details about Ignite.
TechNet Article	Connecting Users with Office Communications Server 2007 - this article presents an overview to OCS 2007. http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2007/09/OCS/default.aspx
Webcasts	Microsoft has produced many Web casts! First some intro ones: TechNet Webcast: Understanding Office Communications Server 2007 Architecture (Level 200) TechNet Webcast: Enabling External User Access in Communications Server 2007 (Level 200) TechNet Webcast: Overview of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (Level 200) TechNet Webcast: Implementing Instant Messaging/Presence and Conferencing in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (Level 200) TechNet Webcast: Understanding Call Routing in Office Communications Server 2007 (Level 200) TechNet Webcast: Migrating from Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (Level 200) TechNet Webcast: Office Communicator 2007 Customization and Extensibility (Level 200) TechNet Webcast: Compliance and Archival Capabilities in Communications Server 2007 (Level 200) And for some greater depth: TechNet Webcast: Configuring Office Communications Server 2007 with DNS, Certificates, and Load Balancers (Level 300) TechNet Webcast: Managing and Automating Communications Server 2007 (Level 300) TechNet Webcast: Mediation Server and PSTN Gateways in Communications Server 2007 (Level 300) TechNet Webcast: Nortel CS 1000 IP PBX Integration with Communications Server 2007 (Level 300)
Exam Prep Guide	The Preparation Guide for the Exams is at: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exams/70-638.mspx
Blogs	Blogs are a useful place to find out more information about OCS. Some useful blogs you might visit, in no particular order: OCS Team Blog: http://communicatorteam.com/default.aspx Communicator Team Blog: http://communicationsserverteam.com/default.aspx Thomas Lee’s Blog: http://cacorner.blogspot.com MSGoodies - OCS related posts UK UC User Group: http://mucuguk.org/blogs/default.aspx Mark Deakin's Blog (Mark is OCS PM in the UK): http://blogs.technet.com/markdea/default.aspx Joachim Farla's blog: http://unified-communications.blogspot.com Brian Spurlock's blog (Brian is an MCS OCS superstar) - http://blogs.msdn.com/byrons/default.aspx Jens Trier Rasmussen - http://blogs.technet.com/jenstr/default.aspx These blogs contain a huge number of useful posts. Consider using an RSS reader to read these blogs. As an alternative, I've created an aggregation blog online at http://groups.blogdigger.com/groups.jsp?id=5591.
OCS Documentation	The best documentation on OCS (and related components) is contained in the huge document library on the TechNet web site. For the full set of documents and up to date links see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb676082.aspx. Key documents useful for learning OCS include: Office Communications Server 2007 Planning Guide Office Communications Server 2007 Standard Edition Deployment Guide Office Communications Server 2007 Enterprise Edition Deployment Guide Office Communications Server 2007 Archiving and CDR Deployment Guide Office Communications Server 2007 Edge Server Deployment Guide Office Communications Server 2007 Voice Planning and Deployment Guide Office Communications Server 2007 Security Guide Office Communications Server 2007 Technical Reference
Virtual Labs	Take a virtual lab and play with OCS. You can sign up for free to play with OCS 2007.: Deploying and Configuring Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Enabling Users and Installing Office Communicator 2007 Configuring and Using Conferencing in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Using the Management and Troubleshooting Tools in Office Communications Server 2007 Configuring the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Unified Messaging Server Virtual Lab Compliance and Archiving in Office Communications Server 2007 NB: depending on where you are, and your Internet connection, you may not be able to get to these, or you may find them quite slow.
Mailing List	A Yahoo mailing list: Subscribe: OCS2007-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Post message: OCS2007@yahoogroups.com Unsubscribe: OCS2007-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com List owner: OCS2007-owner@yahoogroups.com
OCS Community	http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/OCS2007/
NNTP News Groups	Server: msnews.microsoft.com Newsgroup: Microsoft.Public.Office.Communicator, Microsoft.Public.Livecom.General, Microsoft.Public.Livecom.Developer
Other Web Sites	Microsoft UC Tech Center: http://www.microsoft.com/uc/tech.mspx OCS Learning Portal: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/ocs2007/default.mspx

Update History

1 Nov - turned plan into a table

2 Nov - updated format, added NNTP Newsgroup

3 Nov - added link to msgoodies OCS posts, separated out documentation from other web sites. Corrected link to Server team blog.

8 November - added useful comments from Arthur Pounder!

9 November - added Mark Deakin's blog

15 Nov - added Joachim Farla's blog

23-Nov - added link to Trika's blog article on OCS exam.

25-Nov - added link to this plan from main CA blog, and added in link to Security Guide.

23-May-08 - updated plan with new links to exam, courses, etc.

26-May-08 - fixed headings in two sections, and added note about use of Resource Kit.

9-Jun-08 – removed the UC team blog and the VOIP mag links – the former has not been updated for nearly a year, and the latter is not very OCS focused.

26-Jun-08 – noted that the OCS Exam Assessment will not now be being produced by Microsoft Learning. Also updates list of NNTP Newsgroups.

Technorati tags: OCS, OCS Learning Plan, Office Communications Server 2007, Global Knowledge

OCS Best Practices Analyzer

2007-10-29T07:57:00.001Z

Exchange 2007's best practice analyzer has had a huge success with over a million downloads. Microsoft has now created a similar tool for Office Communications Server 2007. This tool gathers configuration information from an Office Communications Server 2007 environment and determines whether the configuration is set according to Microsoft best practices.

You can get the BPA from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1B90993C-072A-4C84-B385-B76D23B2F27C&displaylang=en.

Technorati tags: OCS 2007, OCS BPA

SSL Shopper: Unified Communications UC SSL Certificates

2007-10-22T15:28:00.001+01:00

An interesting article(SSL Shopper: Unified Communications UC SSL Certificates) talks about the certs needed for OCS 2007. There are a couple of errors - OCS needs certs for TLS as well as SSL, and these certs are not really special, but just use the SAN (Subject Alternate Name) to allow you to use the cert to cover several domains.

The neat thing is the pointers to two companies that sell certs with SANs. They are not free and they do require validation. These certs could be useful for your Edge Servers which require a public cert.

Technorati tags: certificates, SAN, OCS

OCS 2007 Mailing List

2007-10-21T10:50:00.001+01:00

An OCS 2007 community and mailing list been setup using Yahoo groups. The Yahoo group's home page is at http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/OCS2007/. As for the mailing list:

To subscribe to the list, send mail to : OCS2007-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
To post a message send it to : OCS2007@yahoogroups.com.
To send a message to the list owner, send mail to OCS2007-owner@yahoogroups.com/

Technorati tags: OCS 2007, OCS Yahoo Group, OCS Mailing List, Yahoo

OCS Ignite

2007-10-20T15:06:00.001+01:00

I've been very lucky this past 6 months to have been able to run the OCS Ignite events around EMEA. I've met some great deletes, learned a lot about OCS and had a blast visiting our various countries to deliver this material. The two days of content are packed with labs, and some good content. As the labs were initially based on the Beta 3 version of OCS, we had beta issues to deal with too. The Beta material has now timed out, so we're continuing to run the training, but based on RTM.

As soon as we get more confirmed dates in the diary, I'll post more information about them.

Technorati tags: OCS training, OCS Ignite, OCS, Office Communications Server 2007

OCS 2007 Documentation Continues

2007-10-14T13:38:00.001+01:00

As Microsoft get ready to Launch OCS 2007, the important documentation continues to be produced. The Virtual Generations blog contains details of the latest MS documentation.

Get reading!!

Technorati tags: OCS 2007, documentation, Microsoft

What is Spam Over IM?

2007-08-22T17:50:00.001+01:00

In a number of documents on OCS (and LCS) , I've seen discussion of Spam over IM (SPIM). I've not really seen much decent discussion of it, other than it's an issue. Most of the material seems to assume you know all about SPIM.

A recent IETF RFC draft, http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-sipping-spam-05.txt provides some great background in SPIM and other malevolent IM related stuff. While this is
not yet an RFC, the material is useful for describing the issue.

Technorati tags: SPIM, Spam over IM, OCS, Office Communications Server 2007

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit Sample Chapters

2007-08-19T10:27:00.001+01:00

Microsoft has just published some sample chapters from the upcoming OCS 2007 Resource Kit. There are three chapters (Ch 3 - Infrastructure and Security Considerations, Ch 4 - Basic IM and Presence, and Ch 9 - Remote Call Control). Each chapter is available in both XPS and PDF format (with PDF being smaller in each case).

You can get the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit Sample Chapters here.

Technorati tags: Office Communications Server, Office Communications Server Resource Kit

MUCUGUK - Unified Communications User Group in the UK

2007-08-09T08:41:00.001+01:00

If you are in the UK and are interested in learning more about Unified Communications, there is a user group you may be interested in. User Groups are a great way to meet with other like-minded people to learn more. The MUCUGUK user group has a web site you may find useful.

Technorati tags: OCS 2007, OCS UK User Group

OCS 2007 Ignite Training - EMEA Here We Come!

2007-05-20T10:51:00.001+01:00

As noted in a recent blog post, Microsoft, assisted by Global Knowledge in EMA, is rolling out OCS 2007 Ignite training across EMEA and around the world. Ignite is an intense 2-day hands on workshop, being delivered at locations across EMEA. Thus far there have been two major events in EMEA(London and Amsterdam) with a smaller event in Munich which I taught. The MS run events are shown at https://www.ustechsregister.com/ocsignite/CitySelect.aspx.

Next week, I take OCS Ignite to Copenhagen and in June I'll be delivering OCS Ignite workshops in London, Wokingham, Belgium and in twice in Amsterdam. And hopefully we'll be able to run a few more - if you can't get a place, ask your Microsoft account manager for more events! For Microsoft Certified Trainers, I'm hoping to run some on-line TTT events later in the summer.

The training is intense (starts at 8:30 and finishes up at 6:00 or later) and covers the key OCS functions including integration with Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging. Due to the complexity and reach of OCS, this training is at the 200 level - there just is not time in 2 days to go any deeper!

I hope to see you at one of these workshops.

Technorati tags: Office Communications Server, OCS, OCS 2007, OCS 2007 Ignite, Ignite, Global Knowledge, Microsoft, Exchange Unified Messaging

The Dangers of Linking to Content

2007-05-17T15:17:00.001+01:00

In my technical blog, http://tfl09.blogspot.com, I routinely link to content that I think might be useful to others. This is a great way to make use of the great resources on the Internet. However, I've just had an interesting wake up call! Last autumn, I wrote a article about a neat diagram to explain RAID and included a link to the diagram.

Yesterday, I got mail from Mark Hions (the guy who pointed this diagram out to me in the first place) saying the image that I was linking to was no longer, how should I phrase this, for family or office viewing.

The site, which I won't link to again, was sickedank.com. The site used to have a picture, raid.jpg. You can probably work out the full URL, but don't (and certainly don't do so at work!).

I did not include the graphic on my site, I just pointed to the sickedank.com site. I guess that the owner of the site got tired of the extra traffic and substituted a rotating profane picture in place of the earlier RAID diagram. It kind of begs the question as to why the original diagram was put up if the site owner did not want the traffic, but that's a separate question. In the mean time, I've updated the blog entry and am unlikely to return to this guy's site.

It would appear that I'm not the only person that links to content - content whose owner is unhappy with being linked. In a recent Security Watch, Russ Cooper notes that John McCain had an issue. In his email report, Russ says: "

Sen. John McCain’s MySpace page was altered, but nobody touched it directly. The author of his MySpace template decided to get some retribution for McCain not crediting his work, and so he improperly configured the images on the page.

It started with Mike Davidson, author of McCain's MySpace template, getting miffed that McCain hadn’t credited him for creating the template. Then, to top it off, images on the McCain page were actually referencing images stored on Davidson’s server. As a result, every time McCain’s page was loaded, Davidson’s bandwidth was chewed up in the process. So Davidson changed some images on his own computer, which in turn were pulled up by McCain’s template and displayed on McCain’s page.

It's a perfect example of how a little lack of knowledge can cost a lot more than you can expect. McCain’s people should have ensured they knew where every single link was pointing, and that they controlled, or had a contractual agreement about, each one. How would they have known, for example, that one of the foreign links weren’t pointing to malware or a phishing scam? Clearly, they never checked.

As Russ suggests, linking to content you do not own or that you do not have contractual rights to point to can be dangerous. In my case, the article and link are months old and are not likely to be seen. And I linked to something I thought useful.

The lesson here is clear - be careful where you link!

Technorati tags: Russ Cooper, ENT

OCS 2007 Training in EMEA

2007-05-13T10:51:00.001+01:00

Starting tomorrow in Munich, I'll be running a series of 2-day workshops on Office Communications Server 2007. Dubbed the "Ignite" tour, this training is two long long and combines presentations and hands-on labs (roughly 35-40% talk, 60-65% hands on - and 100% brain pain!). The goal is to introduce you to the basics of OCS and to give you some hands on experience.

As I noted in February, OCS 2007 is a HUGE product - adding enterprise voice and self-hosting of Live Meeting capabilities onto the chat and present functions provided by the earlier Live Communications Server 2005 product. The Ignite Workshop is 2 very long and intense days. This material is designed as 200-level providing a good overview of the product. We'd love to go deeper, but in 2 days - that's really not possible!

Over the next couple of months, I'll be re-delivering this training in Munich (14-15 May), Copenhagen (24-25 May), Amsterdam (11-12 June and 14-15 June), Brussels (21-22 June) Wokingham (25-26 June) and finally London (28-29 June).

Technorati tags: OCS 2007, Ignite, Office Communications Server

OCS 2007 Customer Airlift

2007-02-18T16:51:00.002Z

I'm just back from an exciting and interesting trip to the US to attend the OCS 2007 Customer Airlift. The airlift was 4 days of content about OCS 2007 - it was like drinking from the firehose. And to make the torture more powerful, they issued no PowerPoint slides - so I have to remember stuff - that's not fair!

Much of the detailed content was NDA, but the key OCS talking points are:

OCS 2007 should ship this year. No definite release date was offered by Microsoft, but I'm guessing over the summer, possibly announced at TechEd Orlando.
OCS adds two key features to LCS 2005: full VOIP and internally hosted Live Meeting. I want both of these features!
There's a new version of Communicator coming - which looks pretty cool. Naturally I want this too.
There is also some cool hardware coming, code named Tanjay. I first noted references to this in recent a blog post from Jonathan Ruckert's blog. And for some more information on Tanjay, see a recent post from Jim Burton. All I can say about Tanjay is that I really want one.
There are meant to be some regional re-training events. For EMEA, this includes London, Amsterdam and Paris. More details when these are available.
There will be MOC training on this product, although the details about courses are not yet finalised.

As I can, I'll post more details about OCS and the dates for the OCS road show.

OCS 2007 feels like it's ready for corporate deployment. LCS 2005 was a neat product, but it just implemented instant messaging and presence. OCS 2007 takes this to the next level, adding both VOIP to the desktop (think of Communicator as your phone) and locally hosted Live Meeting. In one lab, we setup an IM conference using Communicator, then with just one click, we were in an Live Meeting conference. Now that is both very cool, and highly useful.

The Tanjay devices are also very interesting. If you wonder why MS are pursuing this, take a look at James O'Neill's blog post, entitled The Phone is Dead #2 and this post from Darren Strange, entitled My deskphone is stupid. Sadly, both blogs disable new comments! After reading either of these two posts, the Tanjay makes perfect sense.

Technorati tags: OCS, Microsoft, LCS, Tanjay, VOIP, Live Meeting

Windows Cluster Training in London - March 6 - 9 2006

2007-01-22T14:06:00.001Z

We have partnered with Clusterhelp.com to provide their outstanding Windows Clustering training class in the UK. The class will be help March 6-9 2007 in our London training centre.The course will be delivered by Russ Kaufmann, a US-based Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) and recognised knowledge leader on the Windows Clustering services. The course will present advanced content that is presently not available through Microsoft Learning.

We are all very excited about doing this class and hope to fill up the classroom with excited students who will gain great insights into Windows clustering. To book your place, contact a Global Knowledge office near you.

Technorati tags: Clusterhelp.com, cluster training, Windows clustering, clustering, Russ Kaufman, MVP, Global Knowledge

Learning Something Every Day

2007-01-08T15:13:00.001Z

I try to learn something every day - something new and useful and which I can use to my advantage in the future. One neat way is to use Wikipedia's Random Page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Randompage. Another way I learn stuff is by investigating, and writing about new software.

Over the weekend I added a hit counter to this blog from histats.com. The justification for this was twofold: to demonstrate blog traffic to my colleagues inside Global Knowledge, and to help me understand the (growing) traffic the blog is actually getting. I also got to play a bit more with the Blogspot's blog template. I have made some small changes to the layout and hope these changes are for the better!

As will become more obvious as you watch the hit counter, this blog does not get a huge amount of traffic. Well not compared to blogs like Robert Scobles's blog. I've been using a few web/blog traffic exchange schemes to generate some new traffic and this is paying off in increased hits. But whether the traffic is longer lived is the interesting question!

For those of you visiting via T25, 10K and Blog Soldiers - welcome. Feel free to leave comments if you find this blog at all useful (or even if you don't).

Oh - the thing I learned today? This blog is hosted by Google, at http://tfl09.blogspot.com. In looking at the stats, I discovered Google has also created http://www.tfl09.blogspot.com so that when people type either form of address, they get to the blog! Thanks Google.

Technorati tags: blog, wikipedia, Google, traffic exchange, Global Knowledge

Microsoft Server Virtualisation Links

2006-10-04T15:29:00.000+01:00

Virtulisation is a hot topic these days. The market leader in virtualisation techniques is VMware, with Microsoft 2nd. Virtulisation provides customers with the ability to do server consolidation. If's also great in the training room where delegates can operate rich scenarios using multiple computers all from a single classroom PC.

The MS Virtualisation team publishes an excellent Windows Virtualization Team Blog. Fairly recently John Howard, a PM in the Virtulisation group in Redmond, posted some links with respect to server virtualization:

Windows Virtualization: Scenarios and Features

Windows Virtualization: Strategy and Roadmap

These links are to presentations delivered at WinHEC in the spring. Each of the links points to a PowerPoint slide deck.