Bill & Greg's Most Excellent Adventure

Last Post here

GregK — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:53:00 GMT

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

VoIP as you are

GregK — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:19:30 GMT

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

Unified Communications is not coming, it is here!

GregK — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:28:45 GMT

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 digital, nationwide PCS wireless network in the US.

The presentation was focused on Sprints challenges including maintenance of PBXs across the US, introduction to VoIP without breaking the bank (how to introduce VoIP handsets and replace TDM handsets – where’s the ROI?), and existing VoIP solutions were not viable due to limitations around SIP trunking.

As you can see Sprints network includes a number switches scattered throughout the US. The new plan is to consolidate and provide services in a main facility using the CS2100s, Microsoft’s OCS 2007, and Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging to provide a centralized, manageable VoIP infrastructure for years to come.

The part of the presentation I found valuable was the lessons learned.

1. UC is a cultural shift to all levels of the organization. Challenge your teams to look at the bigger picture.
2. Gain Stakeholder support at officer level in org

Bring silo’d teams together at the beginning

Exchange/Mail
Voice
Desktop
Networking

Don’t underestimate the importance of end-user adoption
Don’t forget about Support – convert teams to support mixed infrastructure
Seek out experts – I believe in this one as well. Alot of my customers have fantastic resources but it’s always good to have a second set of eyes on the project for confirmation.

Bottomline – Sprint was challenged with business and technical hurdles to move to Unified Communications. Nortel and Microsoft helped the Sprint team and now Sprint has a plan for the consolidation efforts.

It was exciting and I found the presentation excellent and an example for my customers in education. My hat goes off to the Sprint, Nortel, and MS teams on this project!!

OCS – SIP over UDP?

GregK — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:21:15 GMT

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/2008/05/23/196.aspx

Blackberry and OCS

GregK — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:59:56 GMT

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 and symbols.

It also includes presence info so you can see who is available as well as supporting enhanced presence features like access level permission based on personal, team, company, public, or blocked.

Directory lookup and adding info is very important and the client supports this as well. There are other features as well but I like the click to…email, MMS, SMS, and call feature when finding a contact.

To use the Blackberry Client for OCS it needs to be downloaded from blackberry.com. It can be installed by user over-the-air (OTA).

The server side requires the addition of a BES server which may already be in use with Exchange today. BES v4.1 (SP6) and later is required.

Calling all Users!!

GregK — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:28:00 GMT

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 DL. From within OVA you can do a directory search to find a DL and then send a voicemail to the DL.

You can also use galgrammargenerator.exe to create the grammar needed for the new DL. More info here:http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125014(EXCHG.80).aspx

OCS Reference Tools you can use!!

bill hagen — Sat, 31 May 2008 03:00:00 GMT

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

Office Communicator Overview

Top 10 Benefits of Microsoft Office Communicator

Also, some on Exchange/Outlook:

Better together: do more with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and Exchange Server 2007

Up to Speed with Outlook 2007

Outlook Calendar Basics

Introduction to Unified Messaging

Work with Microsoft Exchange content when offline

Exchange How To Videos

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/demos/default.mspx

Case Studies References for UC and UM

bill hagen — Sat, 31 May 2008 02:55:00 GMT

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 Case studies for UC and UM

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/

University of Kentucky- OCS and Roundtable:

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000835

Tracy USD- Exchange UM

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000805

Scotch College- OCS and Exchange UM

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000783

University of Sydney- OCS and Exch UM

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000858

Colorado State- OCS

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000736

Barry University- OCS

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000738

University of Sharjah

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000702

Georgia Tech- Exchange UM

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000468

Northtec- OCS

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000407

Sullivan University- Exch UM

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000385

Marquette University- Exch UM

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000014

MWI

GregK — Fri, 30 May 2008 18:25:00 GMT

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 space that provide MWI for Exchange UM. Geomant, Interactive Intelligence, and Enabling Technologies. At a glance here are feature sets. These features and functionality may be dated and new features may be available so I suggest due diligence with our partners. Take care.

Planning for OCS 2007 Part II

GregK — Fri, 30 May 2008 18:04:00 GMT

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 in OCS will help you.

The above is a picture of standard deployment. This is for customers that are looking for a small deployment of OCS. I don’t believe this meets the demands of most customers as you are looking for a scalable, highly available service for campus. This is great for pilots or Proof of Concepts. It’s very small and can scale to approx 5K users. This design requires 2 OCS Servers. One is for remote users (users outside the firewall – students/faculty/staff), public IM users or federated users, and the other server is your home server with SQL Express for the databases.

To sum up the functionality is limited to:

IM presence and conferencing
External user access including federation, public IM connectivity, anonymous user participation in Web conferencing external user access to audio and video sessions

I usually look at deployment of a pool (even if relatively low user base at first) only because it provides me with a scalable architecture as I look at full deployment.

Here we have an enterprise pool but no external access. So this would provide internal only communications. No edge servers are deployed. I would look at a consolidated edge topology with HTTP Reverse proxy and 1 server for internal pool for Pilot or testing. This allows me to grow my configuration to support multiple servers without a full redesign of OCS. You can have a single Front-End server in a pool without the hardware load balancer requirement. Once you have two Front-End’s then you need the load balancers.

We also have consolidated and expanded pools based on load in the environment. I’ll explain them on the next blog.