The Electric Wand : Exchange, OCS

Outlook 2010 beta and E.164 number format updater

Ewan — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:26:14 GMT

Well hello again; it’s been a while.
Normal service should now infrequently resume.

I thought I’d update the instructions of a previous post, after I was showing someone how to use my old “Contacts updater” application to make all their Outlook contact phone numbers be E.164 compliant.

(see blogs passim. eg here, here, or here.)

Now the little app I reference is an Outlook custom form, meaning it gets installed into the Exchange mailbox folder, rather than some client-side Add-in to Outlook. Custom Forms have been available since the days of the Exchange 4.0 client and later Outlook, as the installed forms show up an item on the “Action” menu within the view of the folder.

Now that Outlook 2010 has adopted the Fluent UI (aka the “Ribbon”), things have moved somewhat…

Just like the early days of Office 2007, the initial response from some users might be to get annoyed that things are in a different place, but in most cases, it’s a great improvement.

Since custom forms in Outlook have largely faded into the sunset, this particular one gets a bit more obscure… it’s a question of going to “New Items” within the folder, then selecting the “Custom Forms” pop-out (only available when you actually have some custom forms installed in that folder), and any forms installed will be presented there.

Bulk update Outlook Contacts' phone numbers to be E.164 compliant

Ewan — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:10:29 GMT

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 important once you get into using click-to-dial technologies such as Office Communication Server.

The tool itself is basic since it's only really expected that people will run it once, to sort out the numbers of old contacts you might have. It will check all the contacts in a given folder and automatically fix the numbers up, but there are a few caveats...

It's hard coded for UK numbers beginning +44 ... though the code is pretty easy to get to if you know anything about Outlook forms, and you can modify it at will.
It doesn't back up the contacts before modifying, so you might just want to copy your Contacts folder somewhere else before running, if you're of a nervous disposition. I can verify that it hasn't mangled any of my contacts and nobody in Microsoft who's tried it has reported a problem.
It's not exactly straightforward to install - but if you follow the instructions carefully, you'll be OK.
The document in the ZIP file explaining how to install & run it, is in Word 2007 format (docx). If you still haven't either upgraded or installed the compatibility pack to add OpenXML support to your older version of Office, there's a link in the ZIP file to go straight to the download page.

A final word: this is completely unsupported, supplied "as is" etc. If it does mangle all your contacts up, just revert to your backup copy - and if you didn't take a backup then you've only got yourself to blame.

Harsh but fair I think :)

Enjoy.

The logic converts "from" the format on the left to the format on the right... (_ denotes a space)

Old format number begins	New format number begins
0	+44
(0	+44 (
+44_0	+44_
+44(0	+44(
+44 (0)	+44
+440	+44
(0)	+44_

Examples

old number	New number
0118 909 1234	+44118 909 1234
(0118) 909 1234	+44 (118) 909 1234
+44 0118 909 1234	+44 118 909 1234
+44(0118) 909 1234	+44(118) 909 1234
+44 (0)118 909 1234	+44 118 909 1234
+440118 909 1234	+44118 909 1234
(0)118 909 1234	+44 118 909 1234

Microsoft launches "Online" hosted services

Ewan — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 16:16:00 GMT

In an attempt to clarify the whole online software branding, with "Live" being consumer oriented and "Online" being aimed at businesses, Microsoft launched a new service recently, but that may have gone unnoticed (what with other launch events such as PerformancePoint Server for business intelligence, or the Unified Communications launch of OCS and Exchange SP1 etc).

The new "Online" service ("Business Productivity Infrastructure") is offering Exchange mailboxes, Sharepoint sites and Office Communication Server hosted presence & IM. Currently the service is aimed at larger enterprise customers, though it will be extended to smaller organisations in due course. The Exchange, Sharepoint and OCS parts are all available separately, under the titles Exchange Online, Sharepoint Online and Office Communications Online.

The whole online services offering can be a bit confusing - at one level, Microsoft sells "Exchange Hosted Services" (EHS), which is a hosted filtering, archiving and encryption service that routes inbound & outbound SMTP mail to/from an organisation, weeds out the spam and infected messages then delivers what's left, optionally keeping a copy "in the cloud" for later access (eg for compliance purposes).

In this EHS model, you can still run Exchange "on premise", it's just that the hosted filtering etc helps reduce the volume of inbound junk.

This kind of service differs from the hosted Exchange offerings from various partners, who will host Exchange mailboxes for you in their data centres. Hosted Exchange has been around in one form or another for years, and it makes a lot of sense for start up companies or smaller orgs who don't want the overhead and up-front expense of buying & managing their own server in-house.

Rather than buying Exchange servers & licenses, with Hosted Exchange, the customers have a monthly subscription to the hosted provider, who provide all the service via a URL which can be used by Outlook or Outlook Web Access to connect. Hosted Exchange typically has a separate login for the end users, though in more advanced cases, the hosting provided may have a private network link back into the corporate network, allowing access to the corporate Active Directory.

There are hosting providers who will basically manage the server and the delivery of the service to your end users, but the licenses are owned by the customer directly - so in effect, you'd buy Exchange but instead of running it yourself, on your own premises, you outsource that operation to someone else, for a negotiated price.

The new Microsoft Exchange Online service effectively delivers hosted Exchange, but allows for customers who've already bought Exchange etc directly. In other words, you'd be able to go to a partner who re-sells the Exchange Online service, and buy the hosted service from them at a lower cost because you've already bought the rights to use the software (so the cost would be the operational part, not the software subscription).

This new service adds an extra choice, but it's not going to replace Hosted Exchange - it's quite likely that you'll be able to get a more customised service directly from a hosting partner, and it might be less expensive than the Microsoft Online service too, depending on who's offering it and where.

The Return of Exchange Unplugged

Ewan — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 12:09:44 GMT

In late 2005, to prepare for Exchange 5.5 going out of support (and to help customers understand what was involved in moving up to Exchange 2003), we did a really well received tour of the country arranged around the theme of "Exchange Unplugged".

We all wore "tour T-shirts" (in fact, every attendee got one), and keeping with the theme, I even carried my acoustic guitar and provided musical accompaniment at the start of each session. The nearest I'll ever get to being paid to play music, I don't doubt.

Anyway: we're doing it all again! With 8 "gigs", session topics titled:

Warm up act & welcome
Architecture Acapella
Migration Medley
Email & Voicemail Duet
Mobility Manoeuvres in the Dark
Y.O.C.S. (that's about Office Communication Server).

... it's clearly no ordinary event. Come along and see Jason try to squeeze into the tour shirt without looking like Right Said Fred, or find out if the YOCS session is presented wearing a stick-on handlebar moustache and leather hat.

Dates:

Living the dream with Office Communicator 2007

Ewan — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:06:03 GMT

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 with Office Communications Server (the soon-to-be-released successor to Live Communications Server).

Around 6 weeks ago, I joined an internal MS deployment of full-voice OCS, meaning that my phone number was moved onto the OCS platform so now I'm not using the PBX at all. It's been a remarkably cool experience in a whole lot of ways, but it really hits home just how different the true UC world might be, when you start to use it in anger.

I've been working from home today, and the fact that my laptop is on the internet (regardless of whether I'm VPNed into the company network), the OCS server will route calls to my PC and simultaneously to the mobile, so I can pick them up wherever. As more and more people are using OCS internally, it's increasingly the norm to just hit the "Call" button from within Office Communicator (the OCS client) or from Outlook, and not really care which number is going to be called.

Here, I was having a chat with Brett and since we both have video cameras, I just made a video call - I was at home so just talked to the laptop in a speakerphone type mode, Brett was in the office so used his wired phone, which was plugged into the PC:

(this device is known internally as a "Catalina" and functions mainly as a USB speaker/microphone, but also has some additional capabilities like a message waiting light, a few hard-buttons, and a status light that shows the presence as currently set on OCS).

It's a bit weird when you start using the phone and realise that you're not actually going near a traditional PBX environment for a lot of the interaction. Calling up voice mail, as delivered by Exchange Unified Messaging, is as easy as pressing the "call voice mail" button in Communicator - no need to provide a PIN or an extension number, since the system already knows who I am and I've already authenticated by logging in to the PC.

When I use this, the "call" goes from my PC to OCS, then from the OCS server directly to the Exchange server, all as an IP data stream and without touching the traditional TDM PBX that we still have here. A third party voice gateway allows for me to use OCS to call other internal people who are still homed on the PBX system, and to make outbound calls.

Microsoft's voice strategy of "VoIP As You Are" starts to make a lot of sense in this environment - I could deploy technology like OCS and Exchange UM and start getting immediate benefit, without needing to rip & replace the traditional phone system, at least not until it's ready for obsolescence.

Here's an idea of what kind of system is in place - for more information, check out Paul Duffy's interview with ZDNet's David Berlind.