Recruiter Nick Papé recommended this week’s topic. Escalation Engineer with spare time on his hands Ben Phillips wrote a cracking Windows 8 app to inspire Nick , and UC overlord Steve Tassell had this to say about it: “The app is another step in the consortium providing practical advice and guidance...

What’s that you say? A Breaker on the Side ? Well, Back in the late 1970s and early 80s, no self-respecting furry-dice-toter would be without their Chicken Box in their Roller Skate . The radio was channel-based, and though the users could agree to move a conversation onto a specific channel, there...

This week, we have a semi-rehash of earlier tips ( #51 and #67 ), based on some investigation work that’s been done inside Microsoft’s own IT group. If you’re going to join a Lync call (especially if you’re using video or app sharing, using a Roundtable/Polycom CX5000 device etc), then best practice...

One of the biggest cultural impacts of using Instant Messaging and UC technology in a business context is the way that people tend to check the status of someone before contacting them. It’s a relatively rare occurrence to get an internal phone call out of the blue if both parties are online: usually...

If you're regularly part of a Lync call which involves presenting slides, here's some best practice that everyone should know about. In a nutshell - don't share your whole desktop to show the PowerPoint slides; don't even share PowerPoint as a single program (something that Lync would allow you to do...

There is an all-too common refrain which echoes around the open-plan offices of many a Microsoft location, following the receipt of an incoming call… “Hello? Hello..?” The joy of Unified Communications with Lync sometimes means that receiving a phone call isn’t always as straightforward as it could be...

We’ve all had that feeling when you just know you aren’t going to make it in time for your next meeting… You know, you’re in Building 1 and the meeting’s at the top of Building 5, or you’re stuck in traffic, or in another meeting that’s already running over and isn’t going to end any time soon..? Obviously...

A tip this week concerning best practices for using Enterprise Voice in OCS or Lync for making and receiving voice calls… Participating in OCS/Lync Calls: Use a wired* connection when you are on OCS/Lync calls. (Performance over WIFI will not be as good) Ensure you use an approved...

Many Microsoft folks have experienced the joys of scheduling Live Meetings with customers and partners, where they get an email or meeting request with lots of links, asking them to install software on their PC before they try to join the meeting. How often do the attendees not manage to click the right...

Some time ago, I wrote on OCS custom status fields and how to implement them… Custom presence states in Office Communicator Custom presence states in Communicator, reprise Custom presence states in OCS – revisited again Well, security changes in the way Office Communicator...

Well hello again; it’s been a while. Normal service should now infrequently resume. I thought I’d update the instructions of a previous post, after I was showing someone how to use my old “ Contacts updater ” application to make all their Outlook contact phone numbers be E.164 compliant. (see blogs passim...

Today, the Exchange team released details of Exchange 14, now to be known as Exchange Server 2010. [ download here ]. There’s plenty of new stuff in the box, but I’m just going to look at one: high availability & data replication. [My previous missives on Exchange 2007 HA are here , here and here...

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about Thread Compressor on here – it’s an add-in to Outlook which removes unnecessary emails, on the assumption that most people reply to mail and leave the original intact, so you could keep the last mail in each branch of a thread, and remove all the others. Way back...

Microsoft & Polycom announced yesterday that the Microsoft Roundtable conferencing device (used with Live Meeting or OCS 2007 to present a 360° view of the room to participants joining from elsewhere), will be replaced. Polycom are taking over the manufacturing and distribution of Roundtable and...

I had a really interesting discussion with a customer last week, when we were musing over the effects that the snow had on UK businesses. It was another example – like the floods which have hit parts of the country over the last few years – of a threat to business continuity which it’s easy to overlook...

I posted a while back about custom presence states ( here and here ). Well it turns out that a change made to an updated version of Communicator, requires (by default) that the custom state XML file is downloaded from a “secure” URL (so ruling out the file:// URL type). I’ve posted my XML file to...

… the UC technology is soooo delightful. OK, it’s cheesy as you can get, but very true. The weather forecast on Sunday night was for heavy snow, and sure enough we awoke on Monday to about 4-6 inches of fresh snow – something that many countries would take in their stride, but in southern England, we...

Well, hopefully. I get asked a lot about what licenses customer need when they want to deploy Exchange & Office Communications Server, in order to keep themselves legal & compliant. It's sometimes a bit confusing that there are several versions of the core products, and often add-on licenses...

Here's a quick & dirty tool I put together for Outlook to be able to update all the phone numbers of contacts to make them E.164 compliant. It relates back to a post a while back around the challenges of formatting numbers 'correctly', particularly important once you get into using click-to-dial...

This is a follow up to Friday's post about what happens if you have Exchange Unified Messaging set up to send you notifications on missed call alerts (and on voicemail), using caller-ID to reverse lookup against the personal contacts folder. Stephen Spence commented: Fingers crossed nobody is using silly...

I've seen this behaviour in practice before, but I don't think it really clicked with me until Neil May from PostCTI (who was hosting our penultimate Exchange Unplugged event today) told me how pleased he was with it. This functionality concerns the "missed call notification" feature of Exchange Unified...

A question we get asked a lot is regarding the sizing of voice mail messages in Exchange 2007. If you're not familiar with the built-in voicemail capabilities, Exchange can function as a voice mail system (or Unified Messaging system, really - it's a way of unifying voice and inbound fax messages with...

A quick follow on to my post the other day about having custom presence states in Office Communicator 2007 - the Communicator Deployment Guide has a couple of minor errors which could frustrate you, as one commenter pointed out, and I've had comments from a couple of people who've had trouble getting...

I just discovered how to modify presence states in Office Communicator 2007: it's documented in the Office Communicator Deployment Guide (page 21, if you're interested), and allows for either the managed deployment of Communicator with additional corporate-set presence states, or if a user is savvy enough...

I spend a lot of time talking with customers about what Microsoft is doing with various new technologies, mostly involving or revolving around the Unified Communications stuff with OCS and Exchange. It's really interesting to see how many people just "get" the point of UC technology, whereas others are...