The Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging ‘Play on Phone’ feature provides access to voice mail messages for UM-enabled users. However, instead of playing the media attachment from a voice mail message over their computer speakers, users can listen to...

I recently stumbled on a free offering for a DID SIP Trunk (inbound calls only) from a company called IP Communications.  Having already added a magicJack device to my Unified Communications lab for routing both inbound and outbound calls, an additional...

Introduction This guide describes how to configure interoperability between Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Unified Messaging and pbxnsip IP PBX version 3.0 .   pbxnsip is an IP PBX solution for Windows that supports SIP communication over either...

One day while at work, my buddy Geoff Clark and I were discussing how expensive it can be to deploy a lab environment at home, especially one that supports VoIP telephony. When you combine the initial cost of purchasing new server hardware and telephony...

During the development of Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging, several changes were made to the URI parsing logic for calls that are handled by Unified Messaging servers.  When a call is routed to Unified Messaging server, each of the URI values contained...

While using Microsoft Outlook 2010, you may encounter the following error when accessing the Voice Mail options menu to modify your personal settings in the Exchange Control Panel (ECP): Additionally, the following two errors may appear in the Application...

Recently, one of my customers asked me how PIN expiration is determined in Unified Messaging.  He claimed that after adding his CEO to a non-expiring UM Mailbox Policy, the CEO was prompted to change his PIN after 45 days.  Having never experienced...

  Configuring OCS 2007 R2 Communicator Web Access Now we will install the OCS 2007 R2 CWA role.  Although the Communicator Web Access setup program only allows you to create a single virtual server instance (internal or external), a CWA server...

As a Senior Support Escalation Engineer with the Unified Communications team at Microsoft, I help a lot of customers install Microsoft Unified Communications products in either their production or lab environment.  I often find that for many smaller...

  Configuring OCS 2007 R2 Edge Next we will install the OCS 2007 R2 Edge role, which provides connectivity to the internal OCS environment for remote clients.  For the purposes of this lab, we will deploy a single Edge server supporting all...

I had an opportunity recently to dig into the file transfer mechanism in Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2 (MOC).  As you may already know, although a server from the OCS Pool is used to route setup information for the file transfer session between...

Contrary to statements published in various third party integration documents, it is possible to include mail-enabled contacts in the Directory Search functionality of a Dial Plan or an Auto Attendant in Unified Messaging.  Although the following...

In Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging, there are no options exposed within the Exchange Management Console that would allow an administrator to configure broadcast or announcement capabilities for voice mail messages.  For example, let’s say that you...

After successfully integrating Office Communications Server 2007 with Exchange Unified Messaging, you may find that you are unable to call voice mail to check for new messages from your Office Communicator client.  Upon placing the call, you may...

You may find that all users within an OCS Pool are unable to join a three-way IM conference or join a Live Meeting conference in Office Communications Server 2007.  In examining the logs of the OCS 2007 Front End server, you may see the following...

After integrating Office Communications Server 2007 R2 with Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging, you will likely begin seeing the following warning events in the application log of your Exchange UM server:   Log Name:     ...

After installing the Group Chat component from Office Communications Server 2007 R2, you may encounter the following error while attempting to upload or download files while joined to a chat room (see screenshot): A file transfer error occurred. ...

Recently I worked with a customer who was trying to install OCS 2007 R2 Group Chat on a member server running Windows Server 2008.  Each time the customer launched ServerSetup.EXE to install Group Chat, he encountered error 0x80070005 (Access is...

  As one of the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) for the Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging product within Microsoft CSS, I am often asked how to provide PSTN connectivity to both Office Communications Server 2007 and to Exchange UM.  Microsoft...

  This week I accepted a case escalation out of Microsoft EMEA which involved the Quality of Experience monitoring and reporting component of Office Communications Server 2007. Knowing absolutely nothing about QoE, I downloaded the OCS 2007 Quality...

Over the past few months, I have encountered at least four instances of customers who are having problems integrating Avaya SES (SIP Enablement Services) with Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging. All calls routed to Unified Messaging from Avaya SES 4...

New blog... first post. Unfortunately I don't have anything ground breaking or earth shattering to share. Oh wait, there's this, at least... This morning when I arrived at work, I found that my main Hyper-V server had been restarted due to the installation...