There was a question today on the behavior with the update in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2415902 which adds further text to the presence states for IM Only and No Voice. The question is why are the text phrases different and the reason is we are using “positive/negative” phrasing of capabilities...

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...

While Microsoft maintains a list internally, we do not publish the company names that we federate with directly using OCS and Lync. Matt Landis has this blog post where he is gathering that data for those interested. Thanks Julian for the comment with other site - http://lyncdirectory.com TomL...

I was able to publish an article on the topic of support for Service Packs on the Next Hop blog. I have a few edits requested but do let me know if there is anything unclear or worse conflicting with existing documentation. http://blogs.technet.com/b/nexthop/archive/2011/02/24/support-for-service-pack...

As customers were beginning to upgrade OCS 2007 R2 deployments with Lync, the question of support for Group Chat showed that what was originally thought to be a simple answer required a more complex matrix to illustrate. After conferring with the appropriate teams, this is the verbiage and table we...

Posts like this always give me concern because in the effort to be helpful I am providing information that we don’t support doing – direct table modification in SQL. Just because you have a lab topology to play with is no excuse to not properly backup the database or the use of virtual machine options...

With the launch of Lync Server 2010 another blog was created for Lync PowerShell topics, however very few customers will have the product until 2011 due to general availability, holidays and business requirements. Customers want to know how to administer OCS 2007 R2 via script and/or PowerShell and so...

At this time we do not support OCS 2007 R2 or Lync Server 2010 with databases on SQL 2008 R2. I am sharing this because this is a fairly common question we receive and we point people back to the documentation on what we do support. The absence of something should always be presumed to be not supported...

I suspect this will be some welcome news for people working with OCS 2007 R2 and Lync Server 2010, we have begun to document the firewall ports needed with the deployments:  OCS 2007 R2 Firewall Port Settings As a Wiki this allows the community to contribute to the content which means it should...

Has the term SIOPs (Standard Input Output Panels) been mentioned in regards to Group Chat and you wondered what they were only to find that an Internet search turns up links saying it isn’t supported? They were not supported when Group Chat released but added later and when the documentation was published...

There was an internal question about the ability to use Windows Active Directory Groups for securing Group Chat channels. Not finding it in the Group Chat content* I switched to my lab and created a group including the user that I first confirmed had access. I then removed that user and noticed that...

A recent customer issue had the question asked of why a new certificate with Client Authentication in the Enhanced Key Usage (EKU) in addition to Server Authentication fixed an issue for the Group Chat Administration Console connecting successfully. I took a screen shot of my Group Chat Server Configuration...

We are working on an effort to provide some guidance on monitoring the health of a Group Chat deployment and included are these two counters: MGC:SERVER - 01 - MGC Server Networking.\MGCSERVER - 003 - Active Endpoints MGC:SERVER - 01 - MGC Server Networking.\MGCSERVER - 011 - Active Users When you are...

Premal Gandhi of our escalation team has started a blog which can be really valuable given he sees the issues that are most problematic which tend to give all of us our most valuable learnings. Due to the type of issues he receives you won't likely find daily/weekly posts but you will most certainly...

Today's post comes courtesy of Wes Glockzin , Support Escalation Engineer in Texas, wesglock at microsoft dot com. The following is a synopsis of an issue I had and things I learned with customer that is using three OCS 2007 R2 Edge servers load balanced and NAT/firewalled both internally and externally...

Update October 25, 2010 with SQL table information at the bottom of the post Did you deploy Group Chat CU5 and expect the User Colors functionality, I did and so did others, we appear to have an undocumented stored procedure change to communicate. We are investigating whether it truly is undocumented...

We had a question regarding the whereabouts of the OCS Deployment Validation Solution document. I found it with a helpful hint from Rui by downloading the 2007 version of the tool - DVT.MSIT - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=3596A10D-65CC-4CCA-8470-3F23D5EA55B2&displaylang...

I saw an email this morning sharing notice of this solution. I have not used it because I install an Enterprise pool given I install all roles which makes it easier in the long run. Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express (SSMSE) is a free, easy-to...

December 3, 2010 update: The content on Technet has not yet been updated but I raised an urgent request today. I recognize that the content is still confusing but allow me to say that Group Chat with CU5 is supported with OCS 2007 R2 in a Windows 2008 R2 raised functional level and with Windows 2008...

May 3 – The document has been pulled in order to address some last minute edits. I expect an update for ETA this week based on the schedules of those involved. For those of you that were looking for content around load balancing OCS 2007 R2, the doc you want has just been released. The effort is designed...

The cycle of product release has impacted my posting again as I am working with the next client/server for OCS which means I don’t get to post content about the release. I always point people to the public site on microsoft.com to avoid ever saying anything too soon. I also have been working with the...

A few weeks ago we released the Capacity Planning for Group Chat document and very quickly our MVP community began to question the validity of such a doc with no ability to actually gauge the requirements for the size of the database. Today we have released the spreadsheet to help with this effort. http...

A customer question was raised about wanting to delete the Recent Contacts entry list for users due to some alias changes and migrations. Nobody knew the answer right away and I was pretty sure it would be in the backend database somewhere. Turns out it is kept client side. If you want to know WHERE...

This is quite easily the most active topic of discussion we have going right now, internally, customers, MVP’s, Master’s, Moms and Dads, it seems everyone wants to know. The problem is that the answer is simple despite each group trying to tweak the discussion to the nuance of their deployment need or...

The Microsoft Unified Communications Virtual User Group (UCVUG) will be hosting it's quarterly meeting on December 8th, 2009 at 2:00 PM Eastern Time (-5 GMT). This event will be broadcast online via Microsoft Live Meeting. Please register if  you plan to attend so that we can get a count of how...