December, 2008

This was a question from a Northeastern school district:

Mac Messenger 7.0

Mac Messenger 7.0 is available for a Mac user to login into either Windows Live (MSN) or OCS 2007:

                   Login to either Windows Live or OCS 2007

Messenger 7.0 client is similar to OC client on PC with presence, groups, etc.

You can grab Mac Messenger 7.0.1 here.

Features of the Mac Messenger 7.0 client:

• Presence
• 1-1 & Multi-party IM
• 1-1 & Multi-party Voice and video support with other OCS users
• Exchange Global Address List Search
• Enhanced Presence
• Bonjour support
• Office for Mac Integration
• Support for OCS Public IM Connectivity (connect to OCS off campus)
• NTLM & Kerberos Authentication
• Emoticons
• Secure IM - - encrypted. Same protocol as OC
• Spell check – This is a nice Mac only feature
• Multiple Points of Presence – MPOP implantation similar to OC – the ability to sign in with the same account on multiple devices
• Integration with Office for the Mac – display presence information for people that are in your Messenger contact list, start IM, add user as Messenger contacts, Integration in Entourage, Word, and Project Center…
• Conversation History Archive – saving Instant Messages and reviewing them in the Conversation History view.
• Selectable sign-in status – the ability to sign in with a specific status set (Busy, Away, Available…)
• File Transfer

  

Mac Messenger 7.0 OS requirements:

Mac OS X version 10.4.9 (Tiger) or a later version of Mac OS

Communicator Web Access (CWA) with Macs:

We support Firefox and Safari browsers on the Mac connecting to OCS 2007. With the upcoming OCS 2007 R2 CWA, you can take it a step further on the Mac or Linux browsers where you can join a PC desktop sharing session and view and collaborate with their desktops. There may be plans to allow for Mac to host at some point in the future (always subject to change of course).

What about On-Prem OCS Live Meeting support?

Currently, there is no Mac support at this point but the alternative solution to this is to use the Communicator Web Access coming in R2 to join a shared desktop session.  The other alternative option would be to leverage the Live Meeting Web Access, via a Mac browser, for the LM service in the cloud vs. with OCS. See my other blog here about the Live Meeting differences.

What are some of the differences with from the PC Office Communicator client, Communicator Web Access and the Mac Messenger 7.0 client? Here is a useful matrix:

Here is one solution I came up for a customer:

1) Add another web site to the Exchange CAS (OWA) server such as owamoss.colotech.edu

2) Added in a second /owa vdir to the new website you just created (e.g. owamoss.colotech.edu) via Exchange command shell:

New-OwaVirtualDirectory -WebSiteName "owa.moss.colotech.edu" -Name myowa2

3) Change the new /owa vdir in the new website to Windows Integrated

4) In SharePoint, point the SharePoint OWA webpart to the new website name (e.g. owamoss.colotech.edu).

Only use this new URL for MOSS webpart rendering and other users will continue to use the current URL for OWA such as mail.colotech.edu

So I've had PIC working for a long time and now AOL doesn't work. Nothing is wrong with MSN or Yahoo.....

If your school is using Public IM Connectivity with OCS Servers, you may not be able to communicate or see presence of AOL users.

AOL changed their root certificate. You can obtain the new Root CA 1 cert here: https://pki-info.aol.com/AOL/.

This cert needs to be in the trust list for the OCS server for the servers that connect to sip.oscar.aol.com.

More Information:

Microsoft Customer Support Services has created a Windows Media Video to walk our customers through the process of adding this certificate.

Yes, however you have to change the default Exchange voicemail storage compression codec from WMA format to WAV for now. I have heard Blackberry is working on changing this at some point.

What storage codec options do I have for UM voicemails?

In general, UM supports three different storage compression codecs, including G.711 PCM (*.wav), GSM 6.1 (*.wav) and wma (*.wma). In terms of file size, G.711 PCM gives you best quality but largest size, GSM 6.1 is almost the same as WMA but lower audio quality.  You can find out more here (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa998670.aspx). Keep in mind sizes of voicemails will increase with moving away from WMA (11k for 10 sec for WMA, 160k for 10 sec with G.711 and 16k for 10 sec with GSM)

Can I mix and match storage codecs in the same dialplan?

Yes, can either set GSM to apply to all the users in the dialplan or if you have a small subset of Blackberry users, you change just those users to WAV (GSM) and leave the rest as WMA. Using the Exchange shell you can change it like this for example:

Set-UMMailbox mailboxalias –CallAnsweringAudioCodec GSM 

More on the command options here.

Just a side note from a TCO perspective, a research company released a study where there is a 20-28% reduction in the TCO when moving to native Exchange ActiveSync (Windows Mobile/iPhone support) from Blackberry Enterprise Server.

Yesterday I was with a customer and we were talking about using Rights Management Protection with RMS and Windows 2008. As part of the eCAL Suite licensing package our customers have the client rights to deploy an RMS Server and provide protection for Outlook messages so with a campus agreement (with eCAL Suite)  and a Windows 2008 Server license you can protect email with RMS.

For information on how to deploy RMS with Windows 2008 please view this video: http://www.microsoft.com/winme/0706/29882/ADD-401_demo1/f.htm