UCSpot

Exchange FAXING

mitchroberson — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:48:18 GMT

So you want to receive faxes in your email. And because exchange 2007 says it will work you want to make it happen. Wow the neat thing is exchange will handle T.38 inbound faxing real well. The problem is how do you make it work. There are a lot of discussions out there about this. And it does work well. The big issues with this is how the fax call makes it to exchange UM.

So generally there are 3 ways faxes can be setup for a user.

user has a separate fax number going or associated with his mailbox.
User uses the same number as his extension
Fax number goes to a resource mailbox and it is then distributed or viewed by other users by attaching and viewing the mailbox.

Number 1 is probably the most common one and most widely used. Because number 2 the users phone rings and they pick it up and have to transfer it to their voice mail when they hear the fax tone. (this is cumbersome at best)

So generally when you setup number 1 you need to be sure that inband signaling is enabled on exchange. In SP1 it is turned off by default. to enable this find the globcfg.xml file located in \Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange\bin Change the EnabledInbandFaxDetection setting to true and restart the UM services.

Once this is complete you should be able to send fax calls to exchange and it should detect the FAX tones.

there may be some PBX configuration that is needed it just depends on the PBX.

Hope this helps

Time in a domain w32tm

mitchroberson — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:39:15 GMT

So is time important in a Microsoft active directory Domain? Well we all know the answer to that. YES it is Kerberos must have time with in 5 min. most people that deal with active directory know this. And for most people when the create the Domain time just works. So we often take if for granted. So why I am blogging about time on the office communications server 2007 blog? Well because time is important to many more things then Kerberos. Now I probably will not reference OCS in this post but just realize time is important.

I tend to think that time should be one of the first parts of a corporations Active directory design. Why you ask? Well have you ever worked anywhere that the time on phone on your desktop and the time on your computer were different? how about trouble shooting. When I trouble shoot I often pull logs from many different places. I even pull logs from wireshark using my computer. and I may not have time to review them for a day or two. I am often looking for time correlation of events. but if the time is off from my router to my switch to my phone system to my pc how can I correlate that the event happened at a certain time and know what effect it had on other machines or equipment.

How about companies that bill by the minute. have you ever seen a person take a call and take notes on their computer then the time on the notes be off from the time on the phone. This could cause many problems with billing and other things. So it is critical to plan time into your entire system. This is one of those areas you will here me complain about the Separation from the network team and the Active directory team. Both teams need to be consistent and pointing to the same thing across the enterprise. but often they do not talk and often they are pointed to different time servers or in some cases not even using a reliable time source.

So how should it look? you ask well in my opinion your core router should point to a time source on Internet preferably a resource pool of time servers. Then your PDC can point to the core router or point to the same pool of time servers. either will work. all the other domain controllers should be using domain Hierarchy. Remember if you move your PDC then you need to validate that time is pointed to the right place. using w32tm /monitor on a single DC will tell you what all the DC's are looking at for time. and will tell you what the PDC is looking at for time.

I have seen many environments that use the default and because the default time server is not available for what ever reason it reverts to the LOCAL time source or BIOS clock of the PDC. I am sorry but the CMOS clock to me is unreliable I have seen to many that were not correct or the battery's were dead and every time you lost power the PDC would start changing time on the rest of the machines causing major problems.

here is a great source of time information i have included 2 links one to ntp pools which is a good ntp source. and the other is to the Microsoft Technet article. .

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/technologies/security/ws03mngd/26_s3wts.mspx

http://www.pool.ntp.org/zone/us

hope this helps someone

OCS AV edge call flow while remote

mitchroberson — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 02:17:18 GMT

WOW I had an epiphany today. I have attended a couple of presentations by Allen Shen formerly of Microsoft. And some presentations by Laura Chappell and both of them inspired me to really look at what is happening with Calls and Call control for OCS. Allen tried to explain ICE, STUN, and TURN to us in a presentation at Tech Ed. Which was really good but I still had some questions and still was not sure about it.

If any of you attended this session or have seen one of allens sessions on ICE, STUN or TURN. then many of you realize it starts out very well but there is a point in the presentation where you become a little lost Generally this is when the lines start to cross. it is the same if you start to read the RFC's on those protocols as well. So I started last night trying to explain a little about the AV edge. And in the diagram it shows 2 users with voice traffic going through the AV edge server.

Well I wanted to see more about this so I could confirm some things for myself. I began sniffing traffic (Thanks Laura Chappell you created a monster my wife can't understand why I am going nuts wanting to get home to see what the sniffs look like) to see what is actually happening. So here is a synopsis of what I found and how I found it.

Let me explain what and how I tested this so far I will do more over the next couple of days. (it is so cool and so much fun to see how it all works)

user A is at home behind a nat firewall with in internal IP of 192.168.33.74 the Router has a Public IP of 76.34.37.65

User B is on a wireless aircard from sprint. with an ip of 70.209.48.141

OCS AV edge server for the user A OCS environment is 74.88.32.5

User B is a a member of another federated company so they are not members of the same company or the same OCS systems.

User B is calling user A

User B right clicks on the users and says make communicator call to user A.

user B begins sending sip traffic to his OCS server. I am not going to go through all this but ultimately the 2 access edges pass sip call control traffic back and fourth to each other at some point USER A sends back a list of possible IP's that user B may be able to contact him at. here is the list.

a=candidate:ji0XDiGUsQde1Fr4OZC9yqAwEIZBMAUavSjGXQkOfos 1 YPqc4I+bY14FUpKJh2Rtlg UDP 0.830 192.168.33.74 25856

a=candidate:ji0XDiGUsQde1Fr4OZC9yqAwEIZBMAUavSjGXQkOfos 2 YPqc4I+bY14FUpKJh2Rtlg UDP 0.830 192.168.33.74 56576

a=candidate:LRJGqNyquostNMw5jcDIBsW31GtYQ/cYw8fY2cWZ/Ek 1 V8p3r9V8NrclMS0ZNshlbA TCP 0.190 74.88.32.5 59722

a=candidate:LRJGqNyquostNMw5jcDIBsW31GtYQ/cYw8fY2cWZ/Ek 2 V8p3r9V8NrclMS0ZNshlbA TCP 0.190 74.88.32.5 59722

a=candidate:iIp3PUfo9f8PUICapk9cbvNixh3G//E0YcN/H1BS2uU 1 gJOKyEAWqEO3fRvwo7zibw UDP 0.490 74.88.32.5 52410

a=candidate:iIp3PUfo9f8PUICapk9cbvNixh3G//E0YcN/H1BS2uU 2 gJOKyEAWqEO3fRvwo7zibw UDP 0.490 74.88.32.5 55690

a=candidate:SwYcgzmLKxjngz0ly88fx3WyBfeLJyFpUSooOFbqiCw 1 AVJa9tLvi/OL7UAMrXtiQg TCP 0.250 76.34.37.65 64896

a=candidate:SwYcgzmLKxjngz0ly88fx3WyBfeLJyFpUSooOFbqiCw 2 AVJa9tLvi/OL7UAMrXtiQg TCP 0.250 76.34.37.65 64896

a=candidate:Kg7LyhMXrFauBM795AMdGHe12oSjdFMnYjThzovUlLY 1 T0uIkUWv0qOZXsAjK9NgDg UDP 0.550 76.34.37.65 4864

a=candidate:Kg7LyhMXrFauBM795AMdGHe12oSjdFMnYjThzovUlLY 2 T0uIkUWv0qOZXsAjK9NgDg UDP 0.550 76.34.37.65 27520

They are called A=Candidates notice there are 10 listed. these sometimes may be referred to as Candidate pairs. notice there are TCP and UDP pairs. once this is passed back to USER B then stun negation begins to take place. and ultimately different patterns are tried until it is finally determined which path is best to take. in this case User B was able to talk directly to USER A via UDP. So the sniff ultimately showed 192.168.33.74 talking directly to 70.209.48.141.

Because there are so many variables it is hard to say what the voice path is for each and every call. So if someone asks "What is the RTP traffic flow in OCS" the only answer that is possible is it depends. From what I understand so far I believe it is possible for voice traffic to be peer to peer in a multitude of situations. I will start a trace on a 3 person conference call via MOC next. but that may be a day or 2.

Thanks. hope this helps someone.

OCS Edge server deployment (understanding a multi-homed network card setup for the access edge)

mitchroberson — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 03:41:02 GMT

So you want to set up OCS to work remotely. you read the documentation and try to decide how you want to deploy the edge servers so you can have remote access. There appears to be a lot of confusion about what is needed and how it all works. so let me see if I can explain a little better.

in a small deployment that wants voice video, live meeting, IM presence to have remote access. here is what you need and what it does.

consolidated edge (this has the Access Edge, Web Conferencing Edge, and A. V edge installed on the same box)
ISA Server for Address book download, Group Expansion while remote, and Live meeting Content Download.

Access Edge, Web conferencing edge, AV edge, all consolidated on the same box. So you can have all 3 roles loaded on the same box but that brings some challenges that we will discuss shortly.

So what does each server and server role do at the edge. Now remember I am not trying to be extremely technical and my description may be a little off but the general traffic flow is correct and the general use of each server is correct

Access edge proxy's Call Control traffic back to the OCS Front end servers. it also proxies IM and presence traffic from remote users. So When a user is remote or federated all im and presence.nse traffic proxy's through the access edge no other server is involved in the DMZ.

Web conferencing Edge server is a proxy for live meeting traffic to the conferencing focus which is on the OCS front end server in most cases. However the initial setup of the live meeting session is initiated through the access edge. during the initial setup of the conference information is passed about the web URI for the live meeting server to the client so it can find the web conferencing edge server. during this same session initiation the web url to the ISA server for content download is passed to the client as well.

AV edge role is used for Voice and Video proxy so that a user that calls a remote user from inside will initiate the call. which will take advantage of the access edge to establish call control. from this, call control information is passed that tells both clients (the one inside the LAN and the one remote) to send all audio and video traffic through the AV edge. So what this means is all clients in the LAN need to be able to send traffic to the AV edge. an interesting note is that when a call is initiated internally then the call is peer to peer for the voice and video. When it is remote the video and voice must hit the AV edge. Also when a conference call is established a different path is followed. in a conference call all Audio, video is sent to the front end server so it can be mixed and sent back out.

ISA server

used to proxy the location of he Address book download files, Group expansion files, and finally live meeting content. So will live meeting work with out this in place and will MOC work with out it. Yes it will however for MOC you will not recieve new address book downloads while being remote. And Group expansion may have some problems but the client still works.

As far as live meeting this depends on what functionality you need. this is where any uploaded files would be located so if you want to upload PowerPoints for presentations then this is needed. also if you want to post handouts then it is also a needed resource. Some people suggest just opening up port 443 direct to the front end server but this is not supported not recommended and VERY Risky.

The diagram below shows the three roles on separate servers for simplicity I have left the ISA server out for the time being this will be discussed later. and this is only showing a remote user to internal user. I know my picture is not great. but hey I never claimed to be an artist or even a master at Visio.

Conducting Meetings with Technology

mitchroberson — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 03:03:31 GMT

So you finally have live meeting up and running and you start to tell everyone it is working and available. The boss takes you up on using it for a meeting and comes back saying this sucks. Now you begin to wonder if it is all it is cracked up to be. What do you do?

Since I work with live meeting all the time there are some things I have noticed that may make conducting a live meeting more successful.

Live meeting is not the same as having all the users in the same room.Nor is a confernce phone the same as having everyone in the same room. So why do people continue to treat it the same. this is just not possible have you ever been on a conference call when you are the remote caller and there are 10 other people in a meeting room with one of those cool polycom phones. And multiple conversations start up in the room YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW ANNOYING THIS is it is a complete waste of time. you can not tell who is talking and what is important. Live meeting is no different. so here are some ground rules to conducting meetings using technology this is not just about live meeting but the examples will use live meeting.

Set ground rules

only one person talks at a time
No pen tapping
No dragging your computer across the table (this is an ear killer)
No typing (set your computer in your lap and tap the keys lightly

Set 2 people up as the presenter. In case the real presenter is remote and loses connectivity. the other can quickly take over
Set a person up to help the remote users. have them watch the icons to see if status changes.
pre stage documentation
Setup the live meeting before hand have handouts ready make sure presentation is uploaded. Shareing your desktop powerpoint is a process killer.
Play with it before the first meeting
If video does not work well move on.
Mute everyone but he speaker initially
if you are a remote user mute your mic before you join.

These are just some of the guidelines I like to use. I will post more as time permits.

Vista Slow or Unresponsive (outlook 2007 unresponsive)

mitchroberson — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 02:55:54 GMT

All I have been fighting a battle with vista that has been killing me and many others. There are tons of posts about this issue but i think I have found it and it is an age long problem that has been around for years but we often forget about it.

How many of you have had the infamous I am typeing and it takes a while for the screen to catch up. or outlook hanging and saying "not responding" it seems now that I have found my problems. I was at a point that vista was almost unusable but I kept digging at it. and here is what I found.

First Turn off Aero it seems to improve things considerably. I did find going to classic view helped a ton. But I still had problems with outlook and other things.

Second I went into Anti-virus and excluded scans on ost's, pst's, and I excluded the outlook.exe executable.

I restarted my machine and what a surprise I have been functioning back at windows XP levels of speed again it is awesome.

Planning Tool for Office Communications Server 2007

randallneth — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 02:00:28 GMT

Microsoft has released a tool to assist in the design and layout of your OCS implementation. It will create topology designs and give recommended hardware requirements for your deployment.

Planning Tool for Office Communications Server 2007

Exchange UM connected to a PBX

mitchroberson — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:01:16 GMT

3/7/2008

Exchange UM with a PBX

When setting up exchange um some things need to be considered. on the initial setup page for the dial plan with in exchange there are sevral options. And if you are not careful and select the wrong option UM will not work. it is important to understand the options. In the URI type you have a choice for

telephone extension

Telephone extension is what you want to use when connecting to a PBX directly or a sip gateway directly. this may not always be the case but if you know what it is looking for then it will help you decide. for telephone extension it is simply looking to match the extension numbers. and that is all.

E.164

E.164 looks to see an e.164 number coming from the pbx or gateway. Which can be used in conjunction with a gateway that normalizes to e164 or in locations that already pass e.164 to the gateway.

Sip URI

Sip URI looks to match to a sip URI. (this is usually used when setting up OCS to exchange UM)

So to begin with when you create a dial plan you have the ability to select the URI type. In most cases if this is direct to the pbx or to a gateway it will be Telephone extension. If you select sip URI or tel URI it is possible for you to have some problems because of the way information is passed from the pbx.

i.e. 6554@10.1.1.1 which is how the pbx may send the information in the sip invite. with 10.1.1.1 being the address of the PBX. if you select sip uri or sip tel uri exchange will not be able to find this extension or person because the exchange sip uri's will not have the IP of the PBX in them (or at least they should not)

your sip uri should be your primary email address for best practice (even though some do not follow this) and your tel uri should be an e.164 number i.e. +19139559555 or +19139559555;ext=6554. and since neither will match the previous address with the PBX IP in it. Then the exchange server will return SIP/2.0 302 Moved Temporarily.

So for pbx to exchange you should select extension. so where does the secure verses non-secure come in.

your next selection allows you 3 options unsecured, Sip Secure and Secured. in most cases when you are configuring exchange UM to a pbx or gateway and not through OCS this will be set to unsecured.

Realize that when you set it to secured or Sip Secured you CANNOT HAVE THIS CO-LOCATED on the cas role or hub transport.

Exchange UM connected to a PBX

mitchroberson — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 16:00:06 GMT

3/7/2008

Exchange UM with a PBX

telephone extension

Telephone extension is what you want to use when connecting to a PBX directly or a sip gateway directly. this may not always be the case but if you know what it is looking for then it will help you decide. for telephone extension it is simply looking to match the extension numbers. and that is all.

E.164

E.164 looks to see an e.164 number coming from the pbx or gateway. Which can be used in conjunction with a gateway that normalizes to e164 or in locations that already pass e.164 to the gateway.

Sip URI

Sip URI looks to match to a sip URI. (this is usually used when setting up OCS to exchange UM)

So for pbx to exchange you should select extension. so where does the secure verses non-secure come in.

your next selection allows you 3 options unsecured, Sip Secure and Secured. in most cases when you are configuring exchange UM to a pbx or gateway and not through OCS this will be set to unsecured.

Realize that when you set it to secured or Sip Secured you CANNOT HAVE THIS CO-LOCATED on the cas role or hub transport.

Call forking update

mitchroberson — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:05:37 GMT

Call forking and Simultaneous ring are pretty much synonymous.

Call Forking and Simultaneous ring are they the same?

mitchroberson — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:02:52 GMT

in a previous post I talked about call forking. So this week some presentations I went to started talking about simultaneous ring. Whet I discussed this with the presenters I found that sometimes these 2 terms are synonymous. However some times they are not.

from My understanding True Simultaneous ringing is where you have 2 devices with totally different numbers. When someone calls your extension or DID it comes into the PBX and then your desk phone rings and your cell phone rings near simultaneously. the big key to this is that the numbers are different.

for Call forking it generally is referred to in situations where you have a desk phone and another device with the same phone number. i.e. desk phone and Microsoft Office Communicator. Both the desk phone and the MOC client have the same extension. The PBX forks the call to both devices at the same time and when one is picked up the other is released.

Now it all depends on who you talked to as to the definition. I will try to find more detail over the next couple of days.

thanks

Call Forking and Simultaneous ring are they the same?

mitchroberson — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:02:27 GMT

Now it all depends on who you talked to as to the definition. I will try to find more detail over the next couple of days.

thanks

OCS Designer - Update

randallneth — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 06:23:00 GMT

After working with the Microsoft Office Communications Server Team we have come to the resolution that the OCSDesigner included with the resource kit does not and will not work. Even though resource kit tools are generally released without support Microsoft went above and beyond to attempt to resolve the issue. I would especially like to thank Tom Laciano, Sr. Program Manager with the Unified Communications Team for all of his assistance. (http://blogs.technet.com/toml/)

OCS Designer

mitchroberson — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 05:04:45 GMT

Apperently there are some problems with this tool that is available in the resource kit. So far we have not been able to get it working either but we are trying some different configurations over the next couple of days in an attempt to get it working. Once we have a solution we will post on this blog.

Cisco Routers now on the supported list for OCS Gateway

mitchroberson — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 05:01:01 GMT

I just found that on the OCS PBX and gateway compatibility list that Cisco now has 2 routers listed the compatability list specifically lists supported IOS. Now I have not tested this yet but will be interested to see how well it works.

This should be a great feature for Cisco and Microsoft. See the link below it has a link to the cisco documentation but it is a little misleading because it does not take you right there. You may have to select "Cisco Voice Gateways" Then look for Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 version RTM to Cisco IOS Voice Gateway using SIP with T1 ISDN They also have a guide for E1 as well.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb735838.aspx

Additions to the Single server migration

mitchroberson — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 04:02:51 GMT

One thing I left out that is very important is that the autodiscover service and some of the other services will cause certificate errors in a single server install that may have 2 seperate names and that you can not use Subject alternative names with the certificate. The best thing is to have split brain DNS setup. and then follow the steps in the article below.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/940726

The biggest thing is that you have to have the split brain DNS setup. what this means is that if you have a domain name of Company.com on the internet. But your internal domain name is company.local then you need to have a zone setup on your internal DNS server for Company.com.

If you do this be sure that any information you have out on the external DNS zone is copied to the internal zone. because your pc's will not be able to resolve any host in company.com that you have not setup.

Exchange 2007 Single server migration from 2003

mitchroberson — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 03:42:00 GMT

WOW what a week. I recently had to do an exchange 2007 single server migration from 2003 to 2007 it was great but there are some things that one must think about when doing this kind of deployment. one of the most important pieces is certificates. if you are putting multiple roles on the same server ie. mailbox/hubtransport/Clientaccess then you really need to think about certificates in depth.

when you have a domain that is named differently then your external domain name then you may have some issues with TLS especially if you are using outlook 2007. if your internal server name is exch.domain.local and your external is webmail.domain.com then you may have an issue maintaining TLS internally for owa and for autodiscover.

in order for outlook anywhere to work over the internet with tls the certificate has to match the website name you use. i.e. webmail.domain.com so if you purchase a public certificate they only allow subject alternative names for the same domain you are purchasing in most cases. So now when outlook tries to connect with TLS on the inside of your network. it will fail or come up with an error.

you can turn off the use encryption for outlook 2007 and it will keep you from getting the popup. So you just need to plan your deployment well. There are many steps to a migration and I will try to list some of the got you's this week.

Call Forking and Deploying OCS Voice

mitchroberson — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 03:41:00 GMT

had an interesting question this week from someone that comes from a traditional Telephony back ground about call forking and the need for it. The reason this is interesting is that in the traditional phone world call forking really was not an option that was used (in most cases not available). when you bought a new phone system you did sort of a flash cut. you might have 2 seperate phones on your desk for a couple of weeks but once fully deployed it was a CUT that happened over night. And you were on the new system. However OCS is not a PBX or a complete PBX replacement

Now I am not from Microsoft so this is purely opinion but Call forking does matter for Microsoft today because OCS is not a PBX and there are some functions that work better on a PBX things like call centers and the multi-line capability are all things that a PBX does better today. And really you have to still have a PBX today with OCS. So why would I want to purchase new phones. Why not take advantage of my current investment. So many want to have a call go to both the PBX phone and the OCS client. and in order to do that you either have to do call forking or have seperate extensions for OCS and do simultaneous ring which does work now. However call forking is not quite there yet we have to wait until the PBX vendors support it. Which will hopefully come soon.

Stand alone Office Communications Server (OCS)

mitchroberson — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 03:40:00 GMT

As I said in the previous post Microsoft has done of good job of painting the picture of how OCS works with in their planning guides however it can be confusing because they talk about connectivity to the PBX and being able to send calls to the pbx and your ocs client. This is cool and will work eventually when you pbx vendor starts supporting it.
However today Microsoft only supports Standalone OCS. Now this does not mean they want you to replace your pbx because OCS is not supported as a PBX by itself. what this means is that TODAY you can deploy OCS in a method where all calls to ocs users go to OCS, and all calls to pbx users go to PBX users. but not both.

What this means is that if all your calls go to the PBX then at the pbx a route pattern would have to be established that will send all inbound calls for ocs users across the connection to from the pbx to the OCS media gateway. The intersting thing is you can set up OCS to do outbound calling much easier and do not have to worry about the inbound routing.

So basically you would replace all of your phones with OCS compatabile phones for the users on OCS that are enabled for enterprise voice.

Why is this not supported?

Well the biggest piece has to do with call pickup. Lets say a call comes in and it rang both devices i.e. ocs client and Desktop phone that is associated with the PBX. If I pick up the call on my ocs client there has to be some way for the PBX to know the call has been picked up so it will quit ringing the pbx phone. plus there are some other communications type things that need to be done but this gives you the idea of why it does not work yet. from what i understand microsoft is working with many of the PBX vendors to allow this to take place.

OCS Planning Guides

mitchroberson — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 03:39:00 GMT

All of the OCS planning guides are out and they provide some pretty good insight into proper planning for OCS. However they can be a little confusing because they talk about stuff is not out yet. So some people become confused as to what can actually be done. i.e. Stand alone deployments vs. Co-existense vs. Remote Call Control.

Each of these topics are somewhat clouded because they talk about what can be done with OCS. However some of the features are not available until your pbx is updated or a new gateway is released. The biggest problem I see is that there is much confusion about co-existense. Standalone works just fine however it seams that peoples definition of co-existense is a little off.

Some people think that if they have OCS and there PBX up and talking back and forth then they are in a co-existense state. Co-existense to some means that when i dial your extension it will ring both Office communicator, Your Tanjay phone, and your PBX phone then when I pick one up the ringing will stop on all the others. to some Co-Existense means that you can transfer calls back and forth between the 2 and that is all you need.

Over the next couple of days I will try to help clear this up and point people to some blogs that really do a good job of explaining what is currently supported and what is not.

Microsoft UC Voice Ignite

randallneth — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 03:37:00 GMT

Just returned from the week long Microsoft UC Voice Ignite in Orlando. It was a great event with excellent content on integrating Exchange UM as well as plenty of information on OCS integration with PBX systems. More information on the event to come.

Here are a couple of great blogs by some of the Microsoft staff and a blog from Thomas Lee the Chief Architect of Global Knowledge:

http://blogs.technet.com/jenstr/default.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/toml/default.aspx

http://cacorner.blogspot.com/

Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit Tools

chrisschott — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 03:34:00 GMT

The Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit Tools provide a set of deployment and technical reference information for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. The set of tools and documentation in the Resource Kit Tools can be used as a complement to the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 documentation or as stand-alone tools.

The tools and documentation in the Resource Kit provide technical information and best practices for integration with the Active Directory services. Additionally these tools and documents improve your ability to manage the configuration and maintenance of the Office Communications Server 2007 technologies.

Bulk/Single Move Users Script (moveusers.wsf)
The Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Single/Bulk Move Users script, Moveusers.wsf, is used to move users from one computer running Office Communications Server 2007 to another. This script produces an ANSI file as output. It can accept an ANSI or Unicode file as input for bulk user moves and can accept a SIP URI and a destination pool as input for single user moves.

ArchivingCDR Reporter (ArchivingCDRReporter.exe, ArchivingCDRReporter_Config.xml)
This reporting tool has built-in SQL queries to retrieve and view information from the Archiving and Call Detail Records (CDR) Backend. The tool enables the user to view Office Communications Server 2007 usage reports based on the Archiving and CDR tables.

ABS Configuration Tool (absConfig.exe)
ABS Configuration Tool is a graphical user interface application that enables administrators to configure AD attributes and WMI settings, related to ABS.

CheckSPN (checkspn.vbs)
This script was designed to allow non-domain administrators to install Office Communications Server and to verify that the Service Principal Names have been configured correctly, identify duplicates, and correct any errors.

Contact Import Tool (Importcontact.exe)
This tool imports contacts from MSN Messenger to Microsoft Office Communicator 2007.

LCSVerifyClean (LCSVerifyClean.vbs)
This tool verifies that your computer is clean of LCS/OCS product binaries, registry keys, and WMI classes.

OCSTrustEntry Tool (OCSTrustEntry.vbs)
This tool can be used to manage trusted server or service entries of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.

Enterprise Voice Route Helper
Route Helper is a graphical user interface application that helps visualize, test, modify, archive, and share voice routing configuration information. Route Helper is an alternative to the MMC snap-in for viewing and modifying Enterprise Voice number normalization rules, location profiles, voice policy, and routes.

InstantUr (InstantUr.exe)
The InstantUr.exe command-line tool works like an offline User Replicator. It can be used during in-place upgrade to propagate user and contact objects in active directory to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 database before importing their data.

DbAnalyze (DbAnalyze.exe)
The Dbanalyze.exe command-line tool enables you to gather analysis reports of the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 database.

LcsDeny (LcsDeny.exe)
The tool helps administrators manage the deny domains list on Office Communications Server 2007, Access Edge Server. The tool can download the list of domains into the WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) configuration from HTTP or HTTPS URLs. The tool can also save the WMI configuration into a local XML file. The tool can add and remove a specific domain to or from the WMI list of denied domains. It can also check whether a domain is present in the list of denied domains.

Topology Designer
This tool, which is based on the Microsoft Office Visio drawing and diagramming software, enables the user to visually design a deployment configuration and generate an XML file that can be used to import the settings during setup.

LCSDiscover (LCSDiscover.vbs)
This tool can be used to discover Active Directory topology and computer settings of Live Communications Server 2003, Live Communications Server 2005 SP1, and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.

LCSError (LCSError.exe)
Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 command-line script tool, LCSError.exe, helps troubleshoot event log errors that do not display descriptive text. The tool attempts to map the error code to a description of the error. When possible, it prints the cause of the error and recommends a resolution.

SIPParser (SipPar.dll)
The Netmon SIP parser can be used in conjunction with Netmon to capture SIP traffic on the network for SIP call flow verification or for troubleshooting.

Snooper Tool (Snooper.exe)
The Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 protocol analysis tool, Snooper.exe, can help you analyze SIP and C3P protocol logs, including those generated by OCSLogger.exe.

SRVLookup (SRVLookup.exe)
The DNS SRV Record Lookup tool fetches and parses DNS server (SRV) records for a domain and can be used for scripting or quickly examining a domain’s records.

Usage queries for Public IM Connectivity (PICStats.sql)
These example SQL queries can be used against the rtc database of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 to report statistics related to public IM connectivity- users who are on the contact lists of your enterprise users. These queries are provided for demonstration purposes only. Modification of these queries is not supported.

WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) samples

Web Conferencing Content Tool (Microsoft.Rtc.Server.DMInsider.exe)
A GUI-based application that administrators can use to view Web conference contents and compliance logs.

Web Conferencing Content Tool (dmdel.exe)
A command-line application that allows administrators to delete content for conferences happened before a given date. This tool can be used in conjunction with the automatic conference content clean-up process by the Web conferencing server.

Web Conferencing Content Tool (dmhash.exe)
A command-line application that computes the hashed directory name of an organizer. This tool is useful for administrators to move user conferences when user’s SIP URI changes.

Certificate Helper (CertificateHelper.exe)
This tool can be used by the administrator to get the serial number and issuer information in the format that is acceptable by the WMI provide used by Office Communications Server 2007.

Click the link below to download your copy of the Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b9bf4f71-fb0b-4de9-962f-c56b70a8aecd&DisplayLang=en

OCS Trial software out for download.

chrisschott — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 03:32:00 GMT

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, formerly called Live Communications Server, delivers streamlined communications to help you find and communicate with the right person, in real time, from the applications you use most.

Click the link below to try the 180-day evaluation Copy

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=663e5ef7-2288-46b0-9142-b2135a8fbdb9&DisplayLang=en

Click the link below for the Office Communicator 2007 Trial

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=7f5ab627-2d34-470d-9393-8b3ede6fe3c4&DisplayLang=en

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