The Electric Wand : 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.

Microsoft Roundtable transitions to Polycom

Ewan — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:44:47 GMT

Microsoft & Polycom announced yesterday that the Microsoft Roundtable conferencing device (used with Live Meeting or OCS 2007 to present a 360° view of the room to participants joining from elsewhere), will be replaced.

Polycom are taking over the manufacturing and distribution of Roundtable and renaming it to the somewhat-less-natty “CX5000 Unified Conference Station”.

In many ways, this is good news since it fits within Polycom’s core strength rather than being something of an adjunct product (which is there to support something else, which is pretty much how the Roundtable fitted into the Microsoft world), and it should be available from a lot more places than before.

If you haven’t seen the Roundtable/CX5000 before, check out Forrester Research’s Erica Driver, on her own blog, comparing the experience of using Roundtable to An IMAX Movie after listening to FM radio.

Business continuity – it’s a people thing, not just a premises one

Ewan — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 11:44:00 GMT

I had a really interesting discussion with a customer last week, when we were musing over the effects that the snow had on UK businesses. It was another example – like the floods which have hit parts of the country over the last few years – of a threat to business continuity which it’s easy to overlook.

Most businesses have prepared some contingency for what IT should do when it all goes wrong – starting with individual equipment failure (using RAID disks, redundant power supplies & the like), to clustering of services and replication of data to be able to survive bigger losses, either temporarily (like a power cut) or for longer-term outages (like loss of connectivity to a datacentre, maybe even loss of the datacentre itself).

What the weather conditions taught us the other day was that the people are even more important than the premises – the customer said it was ironic, that all their systems were up and running well, it was just that nobody was there to consume them.

Warwick Ashford from Computer Weekly writes about how their publisher, Reed Business Information, has built remote access into their business continuity plans. Interestingly, most of the discussion focussed on how to use VPN technology to connect to the office.

Funny, really. With Outlook & Office Communicator not needing to use a VPN to securely connect back to my office, I spent most of the WFH-time connected, productive, but not using a VPN at all.

Custom presence states in OCS – revisited again

Ewan — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 12:15:00 GMT

I posted a while back about custom presence states (here and here). Well it turns out that a change made to an updated version of Communicator, requires (by default) that the custom state XML file is downloaded from a “secure” URL (so ruling out the file:// URL type).

I’ve posted my XML file to SkyDrive (since it’s available with an SSL connection and tends to be available from everywhere).

If you want to use the same URL, just open the following registry file and it will point your Communicator client at my XML file…

Otherwise, add your own URL to the registry at

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE
\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator
in a string value called CustomStateURL.

Registry file

(tip – if you don’t trust me, download the REG file and drag/drop it into Notepad to verify that it’s not going to do bad things to your machine).

When the weather outside is frightful…

Ewan — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 12:21:07 GMT

… the UC technology is soooo delightful.

OK, it’s cheesy as you can get, but very true. The weather forecast on Sunday night was for heavy snow, and sure enough we awoke on Monday to about 4-6 inches of fresh snow – something that many countries would take in their stride, but in southern England, we just don’t have the infrastructure to cope. [since it’s such a rare event].

I had decided on Sunday night that I was probably going to stay at home, so changed all the face/face meetings I had scheduled for Monday, to phone/video calls.

One director at Microsoft sent an e-mail round to his team on Monday morning:

SNOW CHANGE: Team meeting to be changed LIVE MEETING ONLY! DO NOT DRIVE!

I have been clearly informed that South England does not own snowploughs. And as I look out the window at the 5 inches of snow with no snow tires on my car, as a Canadian who has driven in very big snow storms, I know when not to drive – and this is one of those times. It will be too risky. So, we will probably trim the meeting to the MYR presentation and maybe 2 other topic. More to come – but don’t drive! Looking forward to our meeting – ‘see’ you all there :-).

Thanks;

Michael

I also had a half-day partner meeting which had been scheduled for weeks; that was converted to a Live Meeting so everyone could join remotely. In this instance, the actual partners were stuck on motorways, or holed up at the airport, so in the end it was rearranged for another day.

It was amazing to see how, if the infrastructure is in place to allow it, some companies just flick to having (nearly) everyone work remotely and it not drastically affect productivity. OCS Product Manager Sean Olson wrote about the “Snow Day” phenomenon that happens to Redmond every so often.

In fact, in the mid-December incident hit the news over here, with a bus skidding through a barrier and hanging over the I-5 freeway. Here’s an article with a great VR picture of the scene.

As it happens, we released OCS 2007 R2 yesterday. Also, there’s a report which should be published soon, looking into the business impact of deploying UC at Microsoft, using Forrester Research’s methodology for measuring business value.

The outcome? The RoI for Unified Comms is so clear that it paid for its procurement & deployment in 2 months.

Updated LifeCam software

Ewan — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 11:22:00 GMT

It's not exactly "news", since the Microsoft LifeCam web-camera driver & software package was updated a few months ago, but I only picked up the latest version the other day and it brought a few smiles when playing with it today, during a call with James Akrigg.

The LifeCam software does real-time manipulation of the video coming from the camera, and should be visible in any application that uses the webcam (eg IM, Live Meeting etc). A few of the effects are potentially useful - like the one which blurs the background but keeps the face in focus, but most are just silly: some hilariously so.

What's kind-of amazing about the software is the facial tracking it can do; either to zoom in and out as you move around (and follow your head movements), or to attach effects to your face or the background, all in real time.

My favourite funny effect is the "big mouth" one :)

I can't for the life of me think of a business reason for using this, but it certainly raised a laugh ...

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.

Gibson Guitars "Riffs on OCS" (boom, boom)

Ewan — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 09:25:10 GMT

Information Week reported that Gibson, makers of the iconic Les Paul guitar (as used by just about everyone, maybe most famously Jimmy Page of Led Zep or Slash from Guns N Roses), are doing great stuff with Office Communication Server, and singing its praises. They found the level of integration with OCS with the other applications that the users had, was the most obvious benefit to using it - echoing what David Berlind from ZDNet said after seeing a pre-release version in action...

So deeply and contextually can Office Communicator's DNA be integrated into the rest of Microsoft's solutions that there is probably no other glue in all of Microsoft's portfolio that so elegantly demonstrates the company's strategic vision for making knowledge workers more productive at what they do.

Well good luck to Gibson.

I've always been a Fender man, myself - but then since they migrated from Linux to Windows Server, they could always follow suit and adopt the same technology.

As an aside, the last time I bought a guitar, I was humming and hawing between a new US Fender Stratocaster or a straight-up Les Paul standard - then I came across the Indie Guitar company. In the end, I got an instrument which I think is as good if not better than both, and it worked out cheaper too...

Custom presence states in Communicator, reprise

Ewan — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 13:37:00 GMT

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 from a couple of people who've had trouble getting it working.

There may be some gotchas with the XML file you create, too (especially if you accidentally end up with an invalid XML file as I did at first attempt). A tip would be to check that your XML will render in Internet Explorer OK (by double-clicking) - if it doesn't, then Office Communicator isn't going to like it. Also, you'll need to make sure you use the correct language codes - English being 1033, something that's not all that obvious in the documentation

Here's my XML - if you want to, just copy this to Notepad, save it as OCSSTATUS.XML and make sure the URL in your registry points to the location where you put that XML file (see below...)

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<customStates xmlns=
"http://schemas.microsoft.com/09/2005/communicator/customStates"
xmlns:xsi=
"http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation=
"http://schemas.microsoft.com/09/2005/communicator/customStates ">
       <customState ID="1" availability="online">
              <activity LCID="1033">Working from Home</activity>
       </customState>
       <customState ID="2" availability="online">
              <activity LCID="1033">Fine and Dandy</activity>
       </customState>
       <customState ID="3" availability="busy">
              <activity LCID="1033">Meeting with Customer</activity>
       </customState>
       <customState ID="4" availability="do-not-disturb">
              <activity LCID="1033">Presenting and Projecting</activity>
       </customState>
</customStates>

To add the value to the registry, either do it manually or else copy the following block of text to Notepad and save it as OCSSTATUS.REG file, then double-click on that to import to the registry.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator]
"CustomStateURL"=file:///d:/software/applications/ocsstatus.xml

Note the format of the URL - unless you're picking up the XML file from a network resource, it will be a file: type, but the correct formatting of that URL is to use three forward slashes before the drive letter.

Hope this helps!

Custom presence states in Office Communicator

Ewan — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 13:22:38 GMT

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 presence states, or if a user is savvy enough to do it themselves, they could have some fun...

The custom states appear like shown in this screenshot (the one in the deployment guide seems to be in error - it doesn't actually show any custom states), and you can have up to 4 of them and set which of the coloured statuses you want to apply to each of your defined presence states.

I'd originally noticed this was possible when I glanced down at the beautiful screen on my newly-acquired "Tanjay" phone (as shown on Gurdeep's desk here, along with a bunch of other UC devices, and akin to the LG-Nortel 8540), and I saw Adrian's status was "Delivering ..."

... which set me off to find out how he'd done it. Note my own status is also displayed on the Tanjay, and updates in real time...

Identity & presence: the key to anyone's Unified Communications strategy

Ewan — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 12:55:33 GMT

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 "get" the point of UC technology, whereas others are either blind to its potential, or even doing the fingers-in-ears, shut-eyes, repeating "no, no, no" denial that a lot of this stuff is coming whether they like it or not.

I don't mean that software companies are somehow going to compel everyone to adopt it, more that end-users themselves will be expecting to use technology at work which they have grown used to at home. For several years now, it's been typical that people have better IT at home than they'd have in the office - from faster PCs, bigger flat screens, to the software they use - it's exactly this kind of user who has driven the growth of services like Skype, and possibly helped shape the way enterprises will look at telecoms & communications in the future.

Various pieces of research, such as Forrester Groups' 2006 paper on "Generation Y" types (as reported at TMC.Net), predict that people who were born in the 1980s and beyond, are adopting technologies into their lives faster than previously... and as those same "Millenials" are making their way into the workforce, they're bringing their expectations with them, and possibly facing the "Computer says no" attitude that some, er, older, IT staff might still be harbouring.

Instant Messaging concerns

It's already been reported that teens use IM more than email so it seems inevitable that IM will come to the enterprise one way or another. Some enterprises have turned something of a blind eye to "in the cloud" IM services such as Windows Live/MSN Messenger, AOL, Yahoo, Google Talk etc. Others have actively shut down access to these services by blocking firewall ports. Both of these approaches will need, at some point, to be re-evaluated or formalised through acceptable use policies etc - just as businesses in the past didn't give users internet access or even email, due to concerns that they'd just waste all their time chatting, or the threat to security of opening up to the world.

In reality, users will waste time on IM initially, just like they'll possibly spend worktime surfing the web or playing Solitaire on their PC, but sooner or later they'll get over the novelty and start using the technology to be productive, and even if they still "play" during working hours, the net effect will be positive.

IM as email reduction strategy

Many people agree that they get too much email, and that culturally, email is used when it would be better to pick up the phone or talk to someone face-face. IM can reduce the volume of email sent, not just for the disposable communication (the "have you got a minute?" type) but for the fact that people who are not online at the time, don't tend to get IM. It's all too easy to blast an email out to a group, asking for help - now, when the people in that group who've been out of the office next log in, they'll get your request ... even though your problem may well have been solved by now. That just doesn't happen with IM, and some customers I've talked with estimate that adoption of enterprise IM sees a >50% drop in internal email volumes.

Presence is the magic ingredient

What makes IM useful is the "presence": the knowledge of who, in the company (even, possibly, people you haven't ever added to a contact list like you'd need to do in the public services), is available and in a position to respond to you. Cliff Saran of Computer Weekly wrote a blog post recently which was scathing of presence, but illustrates a fundamental lack of understanding of what it "is":

Yes it's fine to be able to know that someone is free, but it relies on the user having to update their Presence each time they walk over to the coffee machine, have a chat and a laugh with a colleague, go to the toilet, leave for the train, get home, go to the pub, have dinner, watch TV and go to bed.

-- "Microsoft's unified productivity killer", Cliff Saran, 28th August 2007

Sorry Cliff, but you're about as far wrong as it's possible to get without changing the subject entirely. The whole point of presence is that it's something the user shouldn't have to worry about. And if they want to, they can. Culturally, some people won't want to use the technology at all, which is fine... though sooner or later they may realise they're losing out, and come back to the party.

I start my PC up, and if it finds a network, Office Communicator logs in and sets me to be online. When my Outlook calendar says I'm busy, my presence changes to "In a meeting". When I pick up the phone, it's "In a call", all done automatically.

When I lock my screen (as I'd do - WindowsKey+L - any time I'm away from my desk for more than a few seconds), my status goes to "Away", and restores when I log back in. If I just walked away without locking, after 5 minutes, I'd be "Inactive" then 10 minutes later, it would be "Away" (at least that's the default timeouts and behaviour... they can be tweaked). And all the while, by clicking that big coloured button in the top left, I can over-ride the automatically set presence and do it myself. Or even sign out.

As well as controlling what my own status is (and by extension, how phone calls will be routed to me and when), I can also set what level of information I'm prepared to share with others - from allowing select people to interrupt me even when I've set "Do not Disturb", to blocking people from even seeing that you're online altogether.

Presence and UC telephony

Look at the strategies of any IT or telecoms company who's involved in this space: finding a user (based on some identity, probably not just their phone number) and seeing their presence is a key part of the value of UC. Making it integrated into other applications and devices the user is working with, and giving the user the choice to use it or not use it as they see fit, is vital to the success of presence being adopted and embraced (rather than rejected by users as big brother-ism or invasion of privacy).

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:

Playing with Roundtable prototype

Ewan — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 17:48:44 GMT

I've been looking forward to Roundtable coming out... it's a very interesting type of hybrid between a standard conference speakerphone and a series of web-cams, all tied together by plugging it into a PC and running the new LiveMeeting 2007 client software.

The concept of Roundtable is quite simple really - put it in a room with a round table in the middle, and people who join the meeting online will see a panoramic view of what's going on in the room, with the "active speaker" being identified in software based on where the sound is originating from. Other participants not in the room can be the active speaker too, if they have a webcam attached.

I got my hands on a prototype device the other day to have a play with (so I could figure out how to talk to my customers about it), and gathered a bunch of others in the same room...

We messed about for half an hour or so, and recorded the whole meeting - resulting in a series of files about 2Mb per minute, including the surprisingly high quality video. The first picture above shows me just stretching my arm around the device, and caused great hilarity like some kind of freaky Mr Tickle was sitting in the room.

Mark Deakin (UC product manager in Microsoft UK, and also featured as the active speaker in the picture above (on the left), was trying to emulate "Brother Lee Love" from the Kenny Everett TV show from the 80s...

The quality was very good, and once we start using these things in anger, the novelty of the camera will soon wear off and it'll be useful for real business purposes... :)

I have to say, I was very prepared to be underwhelmed (ie the risk of over-promising and under-delivering seemed on the high side), but instead I was blown away by the Roundtable (even though the device itself could probably benefit from a number of physical improvements...)

I can't wait for them to be deployed around our campus now!

The Roundtable user guide & quick reference card have already been published, and the device should be available through your local Microsoft subsidiary, in the next few months.

OCS2007 trial edition now available

Ewan — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 11:37:27 GMT

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

Bear in mind that these trials are for tyre-kicking and lab testing only - don't put them into full blown production. They will also expire in 180 days, though can be upgraded to the released and fully supported code.