What's Unified about it?

CS '14' - what's new in Video

Andrew Sniderman — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 20:26:00 GMT

I do love me some video. At TechEd last week, the NDA came off CS '14', the successor to OCS that will ship later this year. Whats new for Video?

VGA conferences. This is the biggie - in R2 we're limited to lower resolution CIF video for multiparty (you can do VGA and HD for P2P).
Roundtable video - now the Polycom CX5000 - the 360 degree room view video strip is avaiable directly in Communicator in addition to the primary or active speaker video. In R2 this only works in the Live Meeting client.
New UI - Communicator '14' has undergone a big makeover and video gets its share. Alpha-blended controls (those semi-transparent controls/labels you see in most web video today) show you who's video you're watching and also let you pause and pop out the video window. The pop out capability is particularly nice as you can now go full screen in VGA on a second monitor and get the full two screen video conf experience - one screen for data collab; second screen for video.
CAC - bandwidth concerns gave some IT Departments pause in rolling out video. CAC isnt specific to video - but does give you granular controls on how much bandwidth you'll allow on a particular link for video - both on a per-session and all-up basis. CAC also allows for edge failover so you can go across the internet for video if your internal links are oversubscribed - very slick.

On the video interop front, couple of new things to call out as well although not specific to 14:

OCS Video Interop article on technet - from me :-) over on NextHop.
UCIF - meant to raise the bar on interop solutions. UCIF website here; this site has some more info on it.

RDP + PSOM - NetMeeting = R2 appsharing

Andrew Sniderman — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 03:33:00 GMT

Some history - LCS2005 let you do appsharing from communicator via the netmeeting client. Netmeeting used T.120 underneath as a data conferencing and appsharing protocol. Worked pretty well for a handful of people - didn't scale well past a dozen or so but people really liked having that appshare button to click on in the Communicator dialog window. NetMeeting was tough to use without putting up directory servers or Exchange Conferencing Service so this worked well for the ad-hoc small meeting use case.

We moved away from NetMeeting in Vista and so in OCS2007 appsharing was gone from Communicator. In its place we added the full featured web conferencing Live Meeting client with a very similar feature set to the Live Meeting service. Here you can do appsharing and much more - whiteboard, polls, markup, ppt, etc. You could escalate to a LM from Communicator and the LM client would launch inviting everyone into a meet now session. This scaled up nicely becuase we had a new OCS server side MCU handling it (DATAMCU). PSOM - Persistent Shared Object Model is the protocol behind LM originally developed by PlaceWare. PSOM is much more efficient on the network than T.120 with estimates of 10kbps for a typical participant. PSOM uses TCP port 8057 and is encrypted with TLS.

So now we're at OCS 2007 R2 and what do we do - add back in click-to-appshare right within the Communicator client via RDP. The first version of RDP was based on T.128 - same family of ITU standards that Netmeeting was based on! Little bit of dejavu here but RDP is much better than netmeeting - very efficient and very mature protocol that's been around and tweaked since NT4.0. The standard listening port for RDP is 3389 but OCS treats RDP as real-time media which means we wrap it up in RTP and the payload is RDP. We turn off RDP encryption since we encrypt the RTP payload for SRTP. We treat it like any other media type. By the way that's why we dont support you virtualizing CWA since it translates RTP to JPGs for app sharing to browser clients (we dont support virtualizing any roles that handle media).

I had a customer approach me about RDP capabilities for sharing 3d images and depending on the application it is much better suited for such things than PSOM but keep in mind it is still a protocol for remote viewing/control and wont work too well for video at 30fps. There is a new appsharing MCU to scale this up (RDPMCU) so multiparty works fine although only one person can be in control at a time. It also doesn't have the full capabilites of PSOM like annotations for example so the LiveMeeting client is better there. I gotta say though I just love having the capability back right in OC and I use it all the time for quick ad-hoc sharing/collab. So there's the formula - no more netmeeting and R2 adding RDP in addition to PSOM - RDP+PSOM-NetMeeting=R2!

Here are some links on how RDP works and optimizations we have made in the protocol:

MSDN Protocol Doc

Top 10 RDP Protocol Misconceptions - Part 1

Top 10 RDP Protocol Misconceptions - Part 2

RDP Performance Whitepaper

Lets talk about Video

Andrew Sniderman — Sat, 16 May 2009 01:55:00 GMT

I just finished deliverying the video session for Masters so my head's full up on video. Here are some tidbits on how to get the most out of video in R2:

R2 adds VGA (860x480) and HD 720p (1280x720) for P2P calls. We also upped the frame rate from 15fps for CIF to 25 for VGA/HD
In OCS 2007 we only supported CIF resolution video (352x240); now that clients can do CIF, VGA and HD we added a way to do capability negotiation between endpoints to figure out the best resolution for a video call - this is done in SDP
Bandwidth control - you can control at the pool and we send via in-band provisioning at registration. Clients also will optimize sending resolution depending on viewing size selected. So for example if you're viewing a small CIF size video window the sender wont send VGA or HD.
We did a bunch of work to optimize the bitstream in VGA to bring it down to ~600Kbps; HD is ~1.5Mbps. We use RTVideo (based on the VC1 standard for both); H.263 is also in the video stack for partner interop
Client capabilities play a factor - for example HD requires a quad core box to send
You'll also need an HD webcam - check out the TANDBERG one about to release - even if you're not doing HD the optics are amazing and make a huge quality difference
Dont let your users run free w/ random webcams and no guidance. Use webcams we've certified (TB one will be there soon) and give them some direction on camera placement (eye level atop a non-jiggly monitor is best), lighting (you need light on your face not behind you) and background (neutral is best not some fancy poster or somesuch with a lot of detail). Use the USB Video Class drivers - the certified webcams dont require any add'l software/driver install; have windows update pull the latest. Finally make sure you have decent network - even with all the optimizations we do for real time, video needs BW and quality is impacted by packet loss
Monitoring server (QoE) now surfaces video metrics and we also raise add'l user events in OC showing if network / bandwidth are impacting calls
Try integration with your existing video conferencing gear - if you've got recent Polycom or TANDBERG room or deskside systems chances are it speaks SIP and w/ a firmware upgrade you can get it to register w/ OCS and have Communicator Video Calls. These guys are working on making this integration even better including support for ICE for anywhere access.
Try RoundTable, er the Polycom CX5000 for an easy setup room system for the total room videoconference experience - 360 degree video, all the web conferencing trimmings you get with Live Meeting and individual video from folks in the room or joining remotely - adding video can be transformation for meetings w/ remote participants.

R2 CWA

Andrew Sniderman — Sat, 02 May 2009 03:12:00 GMT

Some good stuff in the new version of CWA. For a feature look, check

http://communicatorteam.com/archive/2009/04/27/694.aspx

For a tech look, check this post I wrote

http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2009/04/28/473.aspx

One thing to look out for here - CWA 2007 published an AJAX API that some folks wrote UC apps against notably Blackberry for their OCS IM capability. R2 CWA no longer supports this API so if you need this functionality - save your CWA2007 server or if you're starting with R2 run 2007 domainprep and forestprep so you can install a 2007 CWA server. Below KB has more details on this

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969336

Update on OCS Global Settings for R2

Andrew Sniderman — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 21:42:00 GMT

Haven't been completely slacking - here's a post from me that hit the Communications Server team blog last week

http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2009/04/13/409.aspx

If you've done a move from system container to config partition with R2 I'd love to hear how it went. Thx, Andrew

New Stuff

Andrew Sniderman — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 01:21:00 GMT

New bits have been trickling out since we shipped R2. Three notable ones:

SCOM Management Pack - this is a combo that includes what was the QoE monitoring MP which is a must for any serious deployment with Voice/Video so you can proactively monitor media quality. Get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=0FCA3752-76D4-42F3-9241-A663E40C1E2C&displaylang=en
BPA - RTCBPA itself doesn't change but the XML ruleset has been updated for R2. Get RTCBPA here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1b90993c-072a-4c84-b385-b76d23b2f27c and then have it check for updates.
Capacity Planning Tool - remember this from LCS 2005? It's back for R2! It does all the R2 workloads but not web conferencing or Group Chat. Get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=f8cbddd6-7608-4bbe-9246-16e96c62bef4

R2 Voice Applications

Andrew Sniderman — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 03:05:00 GMT

I mentioned I'd do some explaining how the new R2 features work in a prior post.

When you install an R2 SE server or EE pool FE you get the choice of installing a number of new capabilities, specifically:

Conferencing Attendant (RTCCAA)
Conferencing Announcement Service (RTCCAS)
Response Group Service (RTCACD)
Outside Voice Control (RTCCCS)

Each of these have a corresponding service and all run within a new Application Server we shipped with R2 to host Microsoft applications built on top of OCS. You might see this referred to as UCAS or Unified Communications Application Server. There's a service that corresponds to UCAS (RTCAPPSRV) and also ones that correspond to each of these applications - I've indicated the service names next to each one above.

The first two are the plumbing behind the R2 dial-in conferencing capability for audio conferencing. CAA is what answers/authenticates dial-in participants and transfers them into the appropriate meeting. CAS provides entry/exit and mute tones for dial-in participants. ACD or Response Group is used for routing calls to Agents for example in a service desk scenario and finally CCS or Outside Voice Control is used primarily to enable call back scenarios when using single number reach in Communicator Mobile (COMO).

For a good overview check out the R2 Planning Workbook we wrote for TAP customers and partners - the second section gives a comprehensive overview of all R2 roles, capabilities and topologies.

R2 and AD Dependencies

Andrew Sniderman — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 22:22:00 GMT

Few things I've seen come up here recently with R2, so heads up:

Forest and Domain functional level - must be at least Windows Server 2003. This differs from OCS which required Windows Server 2000.
32bit DCs - R2 binaries are x64 only so consider this as you run AD prep steps. While you don’t need to run directly on a DC, ideally you have an x64 member server in the Forest root domain to run Schema and Forestprep. This can be a box you build out for your first R2 server.
Global Settings default in Config Container - R2 wants to store its global settings in AD's config naming context rather than the domain naming context (which LCS did and OCS recommended). For Greenfield this isn't an issue but if you're moving from OCS or LCS you may want to review a script we've released to move global settings. Here's the script and doc on this - note this isn't required but if you want to do it has to be done *before* running R2 schema prep. I wrote a post on this awhile back for OCS; we're working on updating for R2.

Blogs I read

Andrew Sniderman — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 04:53:00 GMT

or at least subscribe to and browse when I can. These lists show in the margin on the LHS of my blog. Tried to be thoughtful about this and grouped them into official Microsoft blogs with product team behind them, Microsoft bloggers that could be folks from the product team or from the field like me and finally a few from partners and individuals.

If you have a favorite blog that consistently gives good stuff let me know and I'll add it. Thx, Andrew

of Federation and SANs

Andrew Sniderman — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 03:28:00 GMT

I was working with a customer to get them federated with Microsoft and the question came up - would they need Subject Alternate Name or SAN entries on their external cert?

You need to understand the three types of Federation you can setup with OCS to get the answer:

Direct Federation - only federate with designated partners - requires the sip domain and associated fqdn of each federated partners edge
Enhanced Federation - only federate with designated partners - requires sip domain only and OCS discovers the edge FQDN via SRV/A records
Open Federation - federate with anyone - requires domain specific SRV/A records

The key bit here is SRV records - anytime you discover the fqdn of a server via these records and that fqdn differs from the actual machine name (which should match on the cert's subject name) you're going to need a SAN entry that matches to establish a TLS session.

So … for my customer they were doing Enhanced Federation and they did support multiple internal SIP domains so the answer here is Yes. Note this same reasoning applies internally if you're relying on internal SRV records for client auto-configuration and you have multiple SIP domains - gonna need SAN entries on those certs.

Thanks to Thomas Binder for helping me with this - Thomas is a Microsoft Consultant in Austria and one of the first Microsoft Certified Masters in OCS!