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...

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...

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...

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...

Rick Varvel, Microsoft Consulting Services comes through with another great paper. I mentioned his papers for the Edge Server in the past and he has now dedicated time to the OC Phone Edition (OCPE, Tanjay) upgrade process. Due to some of our programs purchasing devices in advance of program needs...

This is a guest post from John Lamb of Modality Systems . John is an MVP and in a recent dialog about architecting a solution that addressed the lack of support for Archive Server clustering John mentioned having completed one. In John’s words: “We designed a very large EE Pool with 3-tier OCS Archiving...

We had an internal question about a deployment where an upgrade from OCS 2007 to OCS 2007 R2 was resulting in the error: Could not create the query dialog in the MMC.  Here is how the consultant described the customer problem: I just completed a migration from OCS R1 to R2 and almost everything...

The Office Communications Server 2007 R2 documentation has been online for a while although really only the client content. The server content has been loaded this week. I will share that due to logistics around the site the R2 content exists in the Server Products and Technologies hierarchy for the...

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...

Chris was kind of to share his blog post on IP-IP Gateway configuration: http://voipnorm.blogspot.com/2008/12/ip-ip-gw-configuration-notes-for-ocs-to.html

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...

You will notice that in the 2007 documentation we moved to the phrase of reverse proxy when discussing the publishing of content, but obviously if we document any product it will be ISA. We never state you can't use another product, it is just that we don't test or document any of the competing products...

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...

The long awaited release of the OCS 2007 Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) 2007 has been completed: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=A1832431-54B7-4070-9B10-14EFB231FF0C&displaylang=en&displaylang=en TomL LCSKid

<Sept 8 2009 rewording as Elan shared that some thought I meant director role as a job instead of about OCS. Now if I hear he got a raise or options, I expect to see a nice thank you gift. (grin)> Elan contacted me via my blog regarding how one would use the OCS Director server role and in conversing...

One of my main responsibilities is managing Microsoft Consultants to work with our customers and partners in our beta/TAP programs. With both consulting and support involved each group gains product familiarity early and helps prepare their organization for when the product releases. One of the consultants...

In my role I am on a distribution group with our Most Valuable Professional's ( MVP ), which allows us to gain valuable insight into trends with deployment problems, questions or documentation items as well they share input on future product plans to help us avoid problems based on their experience....

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...

This question came from our MVP's regarding the ability to prevent attendees from marking up the presentation. The presenter can do this in the following dialog. In the Attendees panel, select Permissions -

I found this posting from Dmitry with an OCS 2007 PowerShell solution and thought I would pass it on - if you have other solutions please comment with links. Since Dmitry's post does a really good job of showing the UI, I won't repeat it here. PowerGUI OCS PowerPack for PowerGUI TomL LCSKid

Check out the latest marketing video for VoIP as you are video. It is 15 minutes long and includes the Sklar brothers of Cheap Seats fame (or at least where I first learned of them)' http://preview.microsoft.com/video/videoDetails.aspx?video=17648162-1372-4eef-af74-a7362978bc09 If you listen close the...