Here are six nice videos on TechNet Edge put on from the OCS product team:
TechNet Edge:
1. “Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and the new Attendant Console” | Presenter: Jamie Stark
2. “What’s New in Conferencing with Office Communications Server 2007 R2” | Presenter: Renee Lo
3. “What’s New in Office Communicator, Communicator Web Access, and Devices with Office Communications Server 2007 R2” | Presenters: Huat Chye Lim and Ashima Singhal
4. “Group Chat and Office Communications Server 2007 R2” | Presenters: Ashima Singhal and Bob Serr
5. “What’s New in Mobility and Anywhere Access with Office Communications Server 2007 R2” | Presenter : Avi Sagiv
6. “What’s New in Administration and Management with Office Communications Server 2007 R2” | Presenter: Anand Lakshminarayanan
Meeting Overview: Meet with Microsoft to discover how provide convergence with existing voice environment and reduce costs for improved ROI or “VoIP as you are”.
Date: Today
Time: 1-3PM EST
Location: Peabody Hotel, Room- Challenger Room on Mezzanine Level (3).
Orlando FL. during Educause 2008
Agenda:
· OCS R2 discussion/Q & A
· Federation discussion and benefits
· Peer best practices
· Partner engagement strategies
· Microsoft programs- Voice Pilots and Lighthouse
· Partner solutions:
· Feedback and Future Topics of discussion
For those who cannot attend in person:
· Toll-free: (866) 5006738 Participant Code: 222345
In my previous post around this, I mentioned there is an Exchange 2007 Rollup3 needed to resolve this problem but I need to be a bit more clear on that suggestion. The Rollup3 only resolves this behavior when the recipient of the voicemail is in one dial plan and the caller, who is also UM enabled, resides in a different dial plan.
So what about people who leave voicemails from the outside?
The most common voicemail scenario, where the Rollup3 fix does not apply, is when someone calls from a number outside of your school/campus. The voicemail will appear in your inbox, where you can see the Caller-Id digits in the voicemail, but when you listen to this message in OVA it says ‘A message from an unrecognized number’.
External voicemail
Why does it do that?
I pinged the Exchange UM product team about this scenario and here is what they said:
OVA doesn’t play the caller id in the voicemail header by design. Exchange OVA says “A message from…” and is followed by one of three options:
1. Caller name: if Exchange UM recognized the number as belonging to a particular person via GAL or local contacts lookup
2. “an unrecognized number”: if Exchange UM receives a number, but couldn’t match it to a person via GAL or local contacts
3. “an unknown number”: if Exchange UM didn’t receive a Caller-Id number whatsoever
Exchange UM does not read the digits out in case #2 by design because many people found it tedious to hear a 10 digit number spewed out at them in the header.
What are my workarounds?
You have two options here:
1) To hear the Caller-Id digits read out, you will need to say “envelope information” after listening to a voicemail within OVA.
Excerpt of OVA voice commands and DTMF.
Note: You can grab all the OVA commands here. Makes for a useful quick start leave behind at a person’s desk.
or
2) For frequent outside callers, add them as local contacts in your Outlook client which will change OVA to read the caller name vs. an unrecognized number. You could also add them as contacts in the global address book if they are globally used contacts.
When planning for larger mailboxes a couple of areas need to be addressed. First where is the hit? on the server or on the client. If the client is less than 2GB than the client (Outlook 2003/2007) should be in cached mode. The client requires the RAM and hard disk to perform with bigger mailboxes. For example a 1GB Mailbox a client should have at least 1GB RAM and a 5400 RPM disk. With a 2GB Mailbox a client should have 1-2GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM Disk. It is possible to have mobile users with over 2GB Mailbox size but it's important to note that the RAM/Disk performance is shifted to the client and experience will vary by the parameters of the client.
Moving beyond 2GB Mailbox(OST) can be addressed by looking at what you are syncing. Review this blog from the Exchange team: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/12/17/447750.aspx
As you can see the bottleneck is the client as you continue to synchronize with larger and larger mailboxes. So you have 3 choices:
Using the Storage Calc for 1000 Mailboxes on a single server with a 2048 mailbox quota size the IOPS/Mailbox changes considerable between Cached at .48 to online with 3.39. This change would need to be reflected in your design.
Another area that can affect poor performance is the number of items a container holds.
This issue occurs when an Outlook user works with items in a folder that contains many items. Outlook must perform several operations against the Exchange server to retrieve the contents of a folder. Therefore, when there are many items in a folder, additional processing is required to respond to the Outlook requests.
You can help avoid poor performance in Outlook by carefully managing the number of items in folders, especially the Outlook folders that are heavily used. These folders include the Inbox, Calendar, Tasks, and Sent Items folders and any other heavily used folders. The recommended number of items in a folder depends on several factors. These factors include the client's proximity to the server, the storage infrastructure, the load on the hard disks, the number of users, and the number of restricted views.
It's recommended that you maintain a range of 3500-5000 items in a folder. You can create more top level folders or create sub-folders underneath the inbox and sent items folders. When you do this the cost with the index creation is greatly reduced if the # of items in any one folder doesn't exceed 5K.
Solutions to help with mailbox management include:
We have been tight lipped about R2 for some time now and it has been hard as we have been wanting to share all the R2 goodness coming in a few months. Finally, at VoiceCon today, we let the cat out of the bag.
Here is a highlight of some of the features coming in OCS 2007 Release 2 (Note: the screen shots I added here are beta and are subject to change):
Next-Generation Collaboration
•Dial-in audioconferencing. Office Communications Server 2007 R2 enables businesses to eliminate costly audioconferencing services with an on-premise audioconferencing bridge that is managed by IT as part of the overall communications infrastructure.
Internally at MS, the plan is to switch to OCS for our primary audio conferencing bridge with an estimated savings of over $4 million dollars per year.
•Desktop sharing. This feature enables users to seamlessly share their desktop, initiate audio communications and collaborate with others outside the organization on PC, Macintosh or Linux platforms through a Web-based interface.
This is accessed via Communicator Web Access where you hit this with your IE, Safari,or Firefox browser across platforms.
•Persistent group chat. This enables geographically dispersed teams to collaborate with each other by participating in topic-based discussions that persist over time. This application provides users with a list of all available chat rooms and topics, periodically archives discussions in an XML file format that meets compliance regulations, provides tools to search the entire history of discussion on a given topic, and offers filters and alerts to notify someone of new posts or topics on a particular topic.
This comes from our Parlano acquisition and has already gained a lot of interest in the schools I have demoed this to. I setup various chat channels such as the Engineering Channel, the Economics Channel, IT support channel, the sky is the limit with what you could do with your school here.
Enhanced Voice and Mobility
•Attendant console and delegation. This allows receptionists, team secretaries and others to manage calls and conferences on behalf of other users, set up workflows to route calls, and manage higher volumes of incoming communications through a software-based interface.
This replaces the Communicator Client for a receptionist, administrative assistant they can perform blind transfers, consultative transfers, import their bosses contacts, pre-stage recurring audio meetings, etc.
•Session Initiation Protocol trunking. This feature enables businesses to reduce costs by setting up a direct VoIP connection between an Internet telephony service provider and Office Communicator 2007 without requiring on-premise gateways.
I can see a lot of interest here since you can save quite a bit by using Direct SIP vs. using on-premise hardware such as a Session Border Controller. We are working as part of the SIPConnect working group to ensure there is fully interoperability with OCS.
•Response group.A workflow design application manages incoming calls based on user-configured rules (e.g., round-robin, longest idle, simultaneous), providing a simple-to-use basic engine for call treatment, routing and queuing.
This can be used for simple call group queuing/routing such as a departmental IT group it also has hold music, autoattendant speech recognition such as “Say ‘Printers’ for Printer support” and the recipient will receive an inbound call with a contextual reference such as “Printer help”.
•Mobility and single-number reach. This extends Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile functionality to Nokia S40, Motorola RAZR, Blackberry and Windows Mobile platforms, allowing users to communicate using presence, IM and voice as an extension of their PBX from a unified client.
New Developer Tools for Business Applications
•APIs and Visual Studio integration. This improves the efficiency of everyday business processes by enabling businesses to build communications-enabled applications and embed communications into business applications.
You can setup UC call flows with Visual studio 2008 and leverage an SDK for Speech server.
The worldwide launch of OCS 2007 R2 is February 3rd and you can sign up for the launch here:
http://www.microsoft.com/communicationsserver
There will be plenty more R2 information coming from the product team as well as in our blog around things like moving to R2 from RTM OCS, the new 64-bit requirement, etc. Stay tuned!
Webinar: Streamlining your communication and Collaboration.
Agenda: Unified communications technologies, including unified messaging and web portals, help K12 administrators and educators streamline communications and collaboration across the district. But just what is a unified communications strategy, and what does it take to implement it?
Presentations by: Keith Price, Chief Technology Officer, Hoover City Schools in Jefferson County, Alabama; Debbie Karcher, Chief Information Officer, Miami-Dade County Public Schools; William E. Hagen, Unified Communication and Mobility Solutions Manager, Microsoft EducationOriginal webcast: 10/14/2008. Sponsored by Microsoft
Find it here: http://www.districtadministration.com/webseminars/webseminararchive.aspx#17
Title of Meeting: UC Roundtable Gathering group meeting
Date: October 29th 2008
· OCS Future releases under NDA
· Toll-free: (866) 5006738Participant Code: 222345
I had a Rocky Mountain university ask how they could route specific internally defined SMTP domains that are sending out of the Hub Transport to an Encryption server. To accomplish this, a custom Transport Agent is required. A transport agent is akin to the event sinks of Exchange 2003 where you have a custom .dll utilized. To read about what one is go here and how to write one go here.
I found a sample transport agent that provides similar functionality:
namespace FFRouting1 { public class SampleRoutingAgentFactory : RoutingAgentFactory { public override RoutingAgent CreateAgent(SmtpServer server) { RoutingAgent myAgent = new SRoutingAgent(); return myAgent; } } } public class SRoutingAgent : RoutingAgent { public SRoutingAgent() { //subscribe to different events base.OnResolvedMessage += new ResolvedMessageEventHandler(SRoutingAgent_OnResolvedMessage); } void SRoutingAgent_OnResolvedMessage(ResolvedMessageEventSource source, QueuedMessageEventArgs e) { try { RoutingDomain myRoutingOverride = new RoutingDomain("contoso.com"); foreach (EnvelopeRecipient recp in e.MailItem.Recipients) { recp.SetRoutingOverride(myRoutingOverride); } EventLog.WriteEntry("FFRouting1 Agent", "My Routing Agent fired successfully", EventLogEntryType.Information, 555); } catch (Exception except) { EventLog.WriteEntry("FFRouting1 Agent", except.Message, EventLogEntryType.Error); } } }
A question from a school in Utah:
The scenario was their Outlook Voice Access (OVA) was not correctly announcing the caller when the user was in a different dial plan defined in UM. This problem occurs if the voice mail message is from a user who is authenticated against a different dial plan. OVA announces "Unrecognized caller" even though the caller address is resolved correctly in Microsoft Office Outlook and in Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access.
I found the fix: download and install Update Rollup 3 for Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1. You can grab rollup3 here:
949870 Description of Update Rollup 3 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1