All, Our team has changed this fiscal year and I wanted to have a new site to reflect those changes with all of our team: Bill Hagen, Mark Garcia, and I. The new site is http://blogs.technet.com/ucedsg/default.aspx CYA there. Greg Katz

Here’s a funny video on Unified Communications. The PBX stays!!! PBX Sitter: The Legend of Dan Wilson

Last week I was at Teched where one of my colleagues introduced Sprint in a presentation on Nortel and Microsoft’s continuing efforts around UC. Sprint a long time customer of Nortel and Microsoft and with 64,600 employees operates the largest 100-percent...

What’s the overhead? What’s the argument. This is a very interesting blog that shows how the least common denominator in SIP communications is TCP but how the argument for UDP has continued over 20 years. http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2008...

I have OCS but some of my execs use Blackberry devices. How can they participate in IM conversations, etc. with OCS? RIM is updating BES to take advantage of OCS. The BES solution will allow for IM one-to-one and multi-party IM. It includes emoticons...

The question I received the other day was on sending voicemail to multiple users using Exchange UM. How can we achieve this? This can be done by creating a Universal Distribution List (DL) and adding all intended Unified Messaging recipients to the...

All Unified Communication End User Reference Guides Favorite OCS Deployment guide End User Content for UC Microsoft Office Communicator Quick Reference Using Communicator with Office Applications Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 Demo ...

Several ask me if they can learn from other Education institutions references so below are a few we have as of May 2008. Many more will be published this summer around OCS adoption and telephony integration. Stay tuned for more! Education...

Turn the light on. We have IP phones on campus that we’ve purchased. If we go with Exchange UM how can we light the phone. Exchange 2007 UM doesn’t provide MWI out-of-box. This requires a 3rd party server application. We have three great partners in this...

Topology!!! Most of the time I get questions that start out with, “How many servers Greg?” “I have this many users….”, etc. It’s important to understand how functionality plays a big part in designing and OCS deployment and how the topologies are defined...

Alot of people ask me "How many servers do I need for OCS? How should they be deployed?" etc. The first thing to understand in deploying OCS is to understand the scenarios you want to accomplish with OCS. OCS is a very powerful software collaboration...

In OWA you can provide access to documents and control those permissions for private and public access. What my customers are asking is how can I prepopulate these favorites. There isn't a really easy way or supported way to do this today but it can be...

Office 2008 for the Mac Service Pack 1 is available. http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx?pid=Mactopia_Office2008&fid=395D1487-A3A6-4106-A0F8-4D6E1D6D89D2#viewer This update contains several improvements to enhance security, stability, and...

Cached Exchange Mode was introduced with Outlook 2003. When an Outlook account is configured to use Cached Exchange Mode, Outlook works from a local copy of a user's Exchange mailbox stored in an Offline Folder file (OST file) on the user's computer,...

The best way to secure a PC is physical access. If someone can gain access to your PC then the job of hacking has been made easier. If a user gains access to a PC that is part of a network and logged in then what access do they have? Everything. This...

As a valued member of the Microsoft community, we would like to extend to you an official invitation to an Office Communications Server 2007 Ignite event! This 2-day hands-on technical workshop is intended to provide you with key information regarding...

This question always comes up during the ADS. The problem is there isn't a magic bullet. Each customer will have a different user model that will dictate scale for their environment. The product team on development of OCS looked at core customer data...

I figured I'd talk a little about the OCS conferencing architecture in this blog. The OCS Conf architecture consist of 3 main components: The focus, focus factory, and the MCUs. The Focus is the traffic cop. It is a conference state server that coordinates...

The Beta period is over. Mac client has released. It can be downloaded here; http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx?pid=Mactopia_Messenger The key features for both Corporate and Personal are: Corporate Features: • For corporate Mac users, increased...

Exchange 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007 have strict requirements for x.509 certificates..Wild card Certificates can't be used as these will break TLS for the edge servers. The edge servers need FQDN for proper operation. This can be accomplished...

You can connect iPhone for IMAP today but what alot of my customers are waiting for is Exchange Active Sync support. Apple is rolling out their iPhone Enterprise Beta right now. For more info check here: http://www.apple.com/iphone/enterprise/

The Quality of Experience (QoE) Monitoring Server enables you to perform near real-time monitoring and service assessment of unified communications media. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=09115944-625f-460b-b09c-51e3c96e9f7e&displaylang...

Entourage 2008 has shipped and my customers are asking questions. What's new? How can deploying Entourage 2008 for my Mac community help me? I would first direct you to Amir's Blog. Amir did an excellent writeup on Entourage 2008. http://blogs.technet...

In Outlook 2003/Exchange 2003 we had a great whitepaper on bandwidth and network requirements. It's here: Exchange 2003 Whitepaper . We've updated our guidance for Outlook/Exchange 2007 - it is available at http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/04...

In Jan of this year we came out with tools to help migration IMAP mail to Exchange 2007. The tool can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=35FC4205-792B-4306-8E4B-0DE9CCE72172&displaylang=en Some tips for the...