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Unified Communications licensing made easy
14 December 07 08:35 AM | Ewan | 1 Comments   

Well, hopefully. I get asked a lot about what licenses customer need when they want to deploy Exchange & Office Communications Server, in order to keep themselves legal & compliant. It's sometimes a bit confusing that there are several versions Read More...

Filed under: Business, Unified Comms

Bulk update Outlook Contacts' phone numbers to be E.164 compliant
30 November 07 09:10 AM | Ewan | 1 Comments   

Here's a quick & dirty tool I put together for Outlook to be able to update all the phone numbers of contacts to make them E.164 compliant. It relates back to a post a while back around the challenges of formatting numbers 'correctly', particularly Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, OCS, Office, Outlook, Unified Comms

Careful what names you give to Outlook Contacts when using UM!
05 November 07 09:45 AM | Ewan | 0 Comments   

This is a follow up to Friday's post about what happens if you have Exchange Unified Messaging set up to send you notifications on missed call alerts (and on voicemail), using caller-ID to reverse lookup against the personal contacts folder. Stephen Spence Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, Humour, Outlook, Unified Comms

I learned a cool thing about Exchange UM today
02 November 07 03:22 PM | Ewan | 2 Comments   

I've seen this behaviour in practice before, but I don't think it really clicked with me until Neil May from PostCTI (who was hosting our penultimate Exchange Unplugged event today) told me how pleased he was with it. This functionality concerns the "missed Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, Outlook, Unified Comms

Voicemail sizes on Exchange 2007
01 November 07 06:45 PM | Ewan | 1 Comments   

A question we get asked a lot is regarding the sizing of voice mail messages in Exchange 2007. If you're not familiar with the built-in voicemail capabilities, Exchange can function as a voice mail system (or Unified Messaging system, really - it's a Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, Unified Comms

Custom presence states in Communicator, reprise
03 October 07 11:37 AM | Ewan | 3 Comments   

A quick follow on to my post the other day about having custom presence states in Office Communicator 2007 - the Communicator Deployment Guide has a couple of minor errors which could frustrate you, as one commenter pointed out, and I've had comments Read More...

Filed under: IM, OCS, Unified Comms

Custom presence states in Office Communicator
27 September 07 11:22 AM | Ewan | 6 Comments   

I just discovered how to modify presence states in Office Communicator 2007: it's documented in the Office Communicator Deployment Guide (page 21, if you're interested), and allows for either the managed deployment of Communicator with additional corporate-set Read More...

Filed under: IM, OCS, Unified Comms

Identity & presence: the key to anyone's Unified Communications strategy
07 September 07 10:55 AM | Ewan | 1 Comments   

I spend a lot of time talking with customers about what Microsoft is doing with various new technologies, mostly involving or revolving around the Unified Communications stuff with OCS and Exchange. It's really interesting to see how many people just Read More...

Filed under: IM, OCS, Unified Comms

OCS2007 trial edition now available
06 August 07 09:37 AM | Ewan | 1 Comments   

If you want to get your hands on trial software for the recently-released Office Communications Server 2007 and its client, Office Communicator 2007 , then you're in luck... OCS trial download (both Standard & Enterprise editions) Communicator trial Read More...

Filed under: IM, OCS, Unified Comms

OCS 2007 RTMs
30 July 07 10:02 AM | Ewan | 0 Comments   

The title says it all really - Office Communications Server 2007 released to manufacturing on Friday. Mark posted about it then, so I guess it's official (though there's not much hoo-haa yet on Microsoft.com). It's getting pretty exciting with the use Read More...

Filed under: OCS, Unified Comms

Living the dream with Office Communicator 2007
25 July 07 03:06 PM | Ewan | 3 Comments   

I've been a long-time fan of instant messaging and pervasive "presence", especially the cultural changes it allows organisations to make in order to communicate and collaborate better. As a result, I've been really interested to see what's been happening Read More...

Filed under: Exchange, IM, OCS, Unified Comms

Communicator phones sneaking out
27 April 07 01:20 PM | Ewan | 0 Comments   

When Microsoft first announced the Unified Communications strategy & partnerships last year, one of the pictures that was shown off was of a prototype "Communicator phone" - a networked device which could be used to make phone calls through the Office Read More...

Filed under: OCS, Unified Comms