PIC, the ability to IM between OCS/Lync with AOL, MSN/Hotmail/Live and Yahoo! is a great feature but during December each year any problem customers face hit one additional hurdle – Datacenter Lockdowns. The purpose of a lockdown is to bring stability for business or holiday reasons, which means folks...

From my bio and posts you may have caught on to the fact I have supported this product since LCS 2003 and switched to Program Management (not for a feature or component but more of running projects and working with customers and partners in managed programs) around 2007. In the support role and continued...

Today’s post comes courtesy of Nate Smyre from Willis Information Services The steps I went through to get it to work, I think, were a little more than I probably needed to go through. The first thing I installed were the remote server admin tools for x64 vista. I then extracted the lcsadmin.msi package...

I knew this one going in and I am always dismayed when I encounter it but I wanted to call it out for you while planning. When you choose the option to enable Archiving, CDR and QOE you have to have those roles running before you can complete the adding of a server to the pool. I will publish this post...

April 22 Update: New blog post about the decision tree on server team site - http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2009/04/13/409.aspx Very important: (from the R2 help file) If you decide to migrate your global settings to the Configuration container and you plan to migrate from a prior...

I am going to work through the deployment as we suggest our partners to do. We provide them a planning workbook (currently discussing to be released as part of document set) and the planning tool. The planning workbook is designed to provide an overview of the product at a very high level and then a...

OCS 2007 R2 will be reaching RTM, so I should document the deployment for you. Let me give some brief personal background and then deployment background. My current title: Senior Program Manager, Early Deployment and Readiness, Microsoft Unified Communications Group. I have supported the product starting...

Walter sent me an email today via the blog contact form and it was about Archiving levels. One of his colleagues had mentioned the idea that there were values of 0, 1, 2 and 3 controlling the amount of archiving. Admittedly I was not aware of the levels however it seemed reasonable because you would...

So MSN/Live/Hotmail offers alternate domain names for corporate use (sometimes referred to as vanity names) and you can IM between OCS and MSN/Live/Hotmail with the following syntax username(contoso.com)@msn.com  ( original post ). AOL offers this service (unsure of Yahoo!) but that same syntax...

I never claim to know everything about certificates but I do feel I know a fair amount. In working with a customer issue we had some questions on whether the certificate would be trusted by the PIC partners given the intermediate authorities. When asking one of the partners to look I simply provided...

  I think given all that will come from our presentation on the topic that a series will likely result. The right place to start on this subject is the Migrating to Office Communications Server 2007 document.  I would like to call out that the supported manner of administrating your clients...

I was contacted by Ian Fischer with an interesting question regarding LCS 2003 and Vista. I now need to support Vista clients and I have found out  that Messenger 5.1 doesn't work on it.  It crashes constantly.  I run LCS 2003 and need a client to work on Vista.  I heard OC 2007 works...

The team I am on has been handling 3 distinct projects this year - handling critical LCS customers, driving the OCS 2007 TAP (technology adoption program) (my role) and the Best Practice analyzer. This Friday we reached the RTM milestone and you may now use the tool, please note the system requirements...

Here is a question I received today and I thought I would attempt to address it here - Hi Tom, Do you have any knowledge, or reference to anyone deploying LCS 2005 components on virtual servers? E.g. when deploying an Enterprise pool, is it possible to use a single (or series of) virtual server as the...

Forgive the multiple postings, Dennis kindly alerted me that the images were not displaying. As I was doing this with a VPN to our corporate network the images displayed as I could connect to the source location. Jason Epperly has given permission to repost his internal blog on the subject. So, I get...

Andrew from Entrust alerted us to a problem with our documentation around the Entrust Certificates that customers use with Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 and mostly with PIC. I asked Andrew to provide me with information I can share here for your consumption and he has provided this: The majority...

Here is a recent email exchange regarding the use of the director, I hope that you are able to see the need and value for the Director given Dave's particular customer deployment. From: dave Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 To: Thomas Laciano Subject: Federation / PIC Hi Tom, I am putting a...

One nice thing about the blog and the IM technology is that I am able to establish contacts with many folks I would not normally have an opportunity to meet otherwise. / Edit December 12, 2007 Bobby Pena sent me the following email comment regarding the query on an LCS 2005 SP1 system, published with...

Microsoft Messenger for Mac 6.0.2, released Jan 30, 2007 http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.aspx?pid=download&location=/mac/download/misc/messenger60_download.xml I would like to let you know that the logging paragraph, included below, implies unfortunately that the logging is logging everything...

The information below comes from one of our support staff, handling certificate service issues. Live Communication Server requires a certificate to enable TLS. To generate this certificate, find the scenario that best fits your situation. Run the following commands to allow the Certificate Authority...

We have posted a FAQ for the Address Book Service to the UC Blog . If you have further questions and clarifications on the topic feel free to comment my blog or the UC blog. This post was created based on internal discussions from the field and support which means it was driven by all the customer...

Tuesday January 9th, 3 of us (Tom, Matt and Chad) will be presenting to the local Carolina IT Professionals Group for Live Communications Server. On the chance you are in the Charlotte, NC area please feel free to come by.

Determining my posts - The complexity of an issue and how much information can be shared to shed light on a subject. For example I have a customer issue with phone normalization. What looks like an easy post starts to be come complex with ABS and Communicator both being factors. With that customer...

The above error was reported by a customer from his Access Proxy. The first thought was locked down permissions on the server to the certificate store but that was not the case. For this customer issue they were using a domain service account instead of the local service account. Specifically - the...

Edit - adding the actual url :) http://blogs.technet.com/uc Sometimes a delay is a good thing and with the RTC blog never really getting off the ground there was room for improvement. Having such a big delay means we now get to focus a bit more on the new technology coming with Office Communications...