April, 2009

From its humble beginnings as purely an IM and Presence Web client, CWA catapults itself into relevancy with its 2007 R2 release with the addition of two major OCS modalities – Audio and Desktop sharing! And as if that wasn’t enough, CWA has also gone and enabled these features for external users as well (also known as anonymous users). Other features squeezed into this release also include: customization, extensible tabs and distribution group support. This blog post...

With Microsoft® Office Communicator 2007 R2, you can start an instant messaging session with a single contact, with multiple contacts, or with a group. Send an Instant Message You typically start an instant messaging session by double-clicking a contact name in the Contact List. Send an instant message In the Contact List, double-click a contact, type a message, and then press ENTER. Add an emoticon Place the text cursor where you...

With Microsoft® Office Communicator 2007 R2, you use Access Levels to control the presence information that others see. For example, you probably have a short list of co-workers who you want to have access to your mobile phone number. To make your mobile number available to a contact, assign the contact to a Team or Personal Access Level. Switch to Access Levels view Click the Change view button and then click Access Levels . Change a person’s Access...

Each contact in your Contact List has a Presence button and a status text string that reflects his or her availability and willingness to be contacted. You can use the status indicated by the Presence button to determine which mode of communication is best suited for connecting with the contact. Microsoft® Office Communicator 2007 R2 provides a variety of communication options. For example, you can double-click the contact to start an IM session, click the Call...

Each Microsoft® Office Communicator 2007 R2 contact, including you, has a full set of presence attributes that describe availability, activity, and willingness to be contacted. Presence attributes also include contact information such as phone numbers, personal notes, and location. The amount and type of presence information that you make available to others is controlled by Access Levels. For example, when you assign a contact to the Team Access Level, that...

Microsoft® Office Communicator 2007 R2 provides a full set of personal presence attributes that you can customize and make available to other contacts to help them communicate with you. As shown in this illustration, presence attributes include your presence status, your location, and a personal note. Add and publish phone numbers In the Office Communicator Title bar, click the Menu button, click Tools , click Options , and then click the Phones tab...

This is the fourth article in the series that explains how Conferencing works in Office Communications Server 2007 R2. It builds upon the concepts in the previous articles on Voice, Presence and RCC. The article explains the conference types in OCS, and how a simple conference can be created. I further explain how an existing voice call is escalated to a multiparty conference. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2009.04.ocs.aspx Enjoy Reading! ...

Office Communicator (OC) 2007 R2 is finally here, and I hope you’ve had a chance to explore some of the cool new features Rajesh mentions in his blog post . Although the release was mostly focused on enhancing the voice experience, we also made some updates to the contact list to improve the contacts experience. Sort by display name In OC 2007, contacts within groups are sorted by status (availability/busy contacts appear first followed by away...

Voicemail has been an important feature of PBXes for years. In Microsoft Office Communicator R2, we have continued to invest in the integration with Exchange Unified Messaging (EUM) to make it easy for you to access your Voicemails and manage your Voicemail answering options. In this blog post I will be discussing three new Voicemail features in R2: Voicemail Change Greetings Support: You can now change your Exchange personal greeting or access your voicemails...

Your Contact List is a list of co-workers, family, and friends with whom you communicate most often. When you first install Microsoft® Office Communicator 2007 R2, you must build your Contact List. Search for someone Type a person’s name or e-mail address in the Search box. Add a person or distribution group to your Contact List Type the person or distribution group’s name in the Search box, and then drag the name from the Search Results...