Bill & Greg's Most Excellent Adventure

Last Post here

2008-07-15T19:53:00Z

All,

Our team has changed this fiscal year and I wanted to have a new site to reflect those changes with all of our team: Bill Hagen, Mark Garcia, and I.

The new site is http://blogs.technet.com/ucedsg/default.aspx

CYA there.

Greg Katz

VoIP as you are

2008-07-11T16:19:30Z

Here’s a funny video on Unified Communications. The PBX stays!!! PBX Sitter: The Legend of Dan Wilson

Unified Communications is not coming, it is here!

2008-06-16T15:28:45Z

Last week I was at Teched where one of my colleagues introduced Sprint in a presentation on Nortel and Microsoft’s continuing efforts around UC. Sprint a long time customer of Nortel and Microsoft and with 64,600 employees operates the largest 100-percent digital, nationwide PCS wireless network in the US.

The presentation was focused on Sprints challenges including maintenance of PBXs across the US, introduction to VoIP without breaking the bank (how to introduce VoIP handsets and replace TDM handsets – where’s the ROI?), and existing VoIP solutions were not viable due to limitations around SIP trunking.

As you can see Sprints network includes a number switches scattered throughout the US. The new plan is to consolidate and provide services in a main facility using the CS2100s, Microsoft’s OCS 2007, and Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging to provide a centralized, manageable VoIP infrastructure for years to come.

The part of the presentation I found valuable was the lessons learned.

1. UC is a cultural shift to all levels of the organization. Challenge your teams to look at the bigger picture.
2. Gain Stakeholder support at officer level in org

Bring silo’d teams together at the beginning

Exchange/Mail
Voice
Desktop
Networking

Don’t underestimate the importance of end-user adoption
Don’t forget about Support – convert teams to support mixed infrastructure
Seek out experts – I believe in this one as well. Alot of my customers have fantastic resources but it’s always good to have a second set of eyes on the project for confirmation.

Bottomline – Sprint was challenged with business and technical hurdles to move to Unified Communications. Nortel and Microsoft helped the Sprint team and now Sprint has a plan for the consolidation efforts.

It was exciting and I found the presentation excellent and an example for my customers in education. My hat goes off to the Sprint, Nortel, and MS teams on this project!!

OCS – SIP over UDP?

2008-06-05T17:21:15Z

What’s the overhead? What’s the argument. This is a very interesting blog that shows how the least common denominator in SIP communications is TCP but how the argument for UDP has continued over 20 years. http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2008/05/23/196.aspx

Blackberry and OCS

2008-06-05T14:59:56Z

I have OCS but some of my execs use Blackberry devices. How can they participate in IM conversations, etc. with OCS?

RIM is updating BES to take advantage of OCS. The BES solution will allow for IM one-to-one and multi-party IM. It includes emoticons and symbols.

It also includes presence info so you can see who is available as well as supporting enhanced presence features like access level permission based on personal, team, company, public, or blocked.

Directory lookup and adding info is very important and the client supports this as well. There are other features as well but I like the click to…email, MMS, SMS, and call feature when finding a contact.

To use the Blackberry Client for OCS it needs to be downloaded from blackberry.com. It can be installed by user over-the-air (OTA).

The server side requires the addition of a BES server which may already be in use with Exchange today. BES v4.1 (SP6) and later is required.

Calling all Users!!

2008-06-04T21:28:00Z

The question I received the other day was on sending voicemail to multiple users using Exchange UM. How can we achieve this?

This can be done by creating a Universal Distribution List (DL) and adding all intended Unified Messaging recipients to the DL. From within OVA you can do a directory search to find a DL and then send a voicemail to the DL.

You can also use galgrammargenerator.exe to create the grammar needed for the new DL. More info here:http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb125014(EXCHG.80).aspx

OCS Reference Tools you can use!!

2008-05-31T03:00:00Z

All Unified Communication End User Reference Guides

Favorite OCS Deployment guide

End User Content for UC

Microsoft Office Communicator Quick Reference

Using Communicator with Office Applications

Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 Demo

Office Communicator Overview

Top 10 Benefits of Microsoft Office Communicator

Also, some on Exchange/Outlook:

Better together: do more with Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 and Exchange Server 2007

Up to Speed with Outlook 2007

Outlook Calendar Basics

Introduction to Unified Messaging

Work with Microsoft Exchange content when offline

Exchange How To Videos

http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/evaluation/demos/default.mspx

Case Studies References for UC and UM

2008-05-31T02:55:00Z

Several ask me if they can learn from other Education institutions references so below are a few we have as of May 2008. Many more will be published this summer around OCS adoption and telephony integration. Stay tuned for more!

Education Case studies for UC and UM

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/

University of Kentucky- OCS and Roundtable:

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000835

Tracy USD- Exchange UM

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000805

Scotch College- OCS and Exchange UM

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000783

University of Sydney- OCS and Exch UM

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000858

Colorado State- OCS

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000736

Barry University- OCS

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000738

University of Sharjah

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000702

Georgia Tech- Exchange UM

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000468

Northtec- OCS

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000407

Sullivan University- Exch UM

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000385

Marquette University- Exch UM

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000000014

MWI

2008-05-30T18:25:00Z

Turn the light on. We have IP phones on campus that we’ve purchased. If we go with Exchange UM how can we light the phone. Exchange 2007 UM doesn’t provide MWI out-of-box. This requires a 3rd party server application. We have three great partners in this space that provide MWI for Exchange UM. Geomant, Interactive Intelligence, and Enabling Technologies. At a glance here are feature sets. These features and functionality may be dated and new features may be available so I suggest due diligence with our partners. Take care.

Planning for OCS 2007 Part II

2008-05-30T18:04:00Z

Topology!!!

Most of the time I get questions that start out with, “How many servers Greg?” “I have this many users….”, etc. It’s important to understand how functionality plays a big part in designing and OCS deployment and how the topologies are defined in OCS will help you.

The above is a picture of standard deployment. This is for customers that are looking for a small deployment of OCS. I don’t believe this meets the demands of most customers as you are looking for a scalable, highly available service for campus. This is great for pilots or Proof of Concepts. It’s very small and can scale to approx 5K users. This design requires 2 OCS Servers. One is for remote users (users outside the firewall – students/faculty/staff), public IM users or federated users, and the other server is your home server with SQL Express for the databases.

To sum up the functionality is limited to:

IM presence and conferencing
External user access including federation, public IM connectivity, anonymous user participation in Web conferencing external user access to audio and video sessions

I usually look at deployment of a pool (even if relatively low user base at first) only because it provides me with a scalable architecture as I look at full deployment.

Here we have an enterprise pool but no external access. So this would provide internal only communications. No edge servers are deployed. I would look at a consolidated edge topology with HTTP Reverse proxy and 1 server for internal pool for Pilot or testing. This allows me to grow my configuration to support multiple servers without a full redesign of OCS. You can have a single Front-End server in a pool without the hardware load balancer requirement. Once you have two Front-End’s then you need the load balancers.

We also have consolidated and expanded pools based on load in the environment. I’ll explain them on the next blog.

Planning for OCS 2007 Part I

2008-05-14T22:26:00Z

Alot of people ask me "How many servers do I need for OCS? How should they be deployed?" etc. The first thing to understand in deploying OCS is to understand the scenarios you want to accomplish with OCS. OCS is a very powerful software collaboration tool. Understanding the scenarios helps you understand the server roles that are required to support your configuration. So if we focus on scenarios we have the following:

Instant Messaging (IM) and Presence - IM for Internal users only (Staff/Faculty)
Conferencing with Audio/Video - Conferencing for Internal users only (Staff/Faculty)
Remote Access Scenario for IM and Presence - IM collaboration without Barriers (Students/Staff/Faculty can collaborate) Note - all users using Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC)
Remote Access Scenario for A/V and Conferencing - full collaboration without Barriers (Students/Staff/Faculty can colloborate on and off campus)
Federation Scenario - setup relationships with other schools or organizations and securely collaborate with them.
Public IM Connectivity (PIC) scenario - AOL/MSN/Yahoo integration with your instituation. This allows scenarios such as perspective students to talk to faculty and staff that are using MOC.
Phone Control Scenario (RCC) - Remote call control - work with phone system. phone system anchors call.
Enterprise Voice Scenario - OCS intiates and anchors call for users.

Sounds like alot. It is. So we need to understand how our school intends to use OCS.

So if we use the above scenarios we can start to see what servers are required to meet the scenarios needs:

OCS Standard or Enterprise Edition
A/V and Web Conferencing server
Access Edge Server
Access Edge Server, Web Conferencing Server Edge Server, and A/V Conferencing Edge Server
Access Edge Server, Web Conferencing Server Edge Server, and A/V Conferencing Edge Server
Access Edge Server, Web Conferencing Server Edge Server, and A/V Conferencing Edge Server
3rd party PBX
Mediation Server

At this point we have started to identify servers needed for deployment. What we need next to understand what topology we need for deployment. I'll talk about that in my next post.

Adding favorites programmatically to OWA

2008-05-14T20:24:00Z

In OWA you can provide access to documents and control those permissions for private and public access. What my customers are asking is how can I prepopulate these favorites. There isn't a really easy way or supported way to do this today but it can be done programmatically. One of my collegues has outlined the procedures to do this here: http://gsexdev.blogspot.com/2007/10/adding-document-favorite-links-for.html

This is unsupported but is really cool.

Office 2008 for Mac SP1 is here

2008-05-13T19:41:00Z

Office 2008 for the Mac Service Pack 1 is available. http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx?pid=Mactopia_Office2008&fid=395D1487-A3A6-4106-A0F8-4D6E1D6D89D2#viewer

This update contains several improvements to enhance security, stability, and performance, including fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your computer's memory with malicious code. For detailed information about this update, please visit the Microsoft Web site.

Cached Mode

2008-05-12T16:49:00Z

Cached Exchange Mode was introduced with Outlook 2003. When an Outlook account is configured to use Cached Exchange Mode, Outlook works from a local copy of a user's Exchange mailbox stored in an Offline Folder file (OST file) on the user's computer, along with the Offline Address Book (OAB). The cached mailbox and OAB are updated periodically from the Exchange server. At the same time, Outlook 2003 maintains an online connection to a remote copy of your mailbox in Exchange Server.

The time that is required to complete the initial synchronisation between Outlook 2003 and Exchange Server 2003 depends primarily on the size of the mailbox and on the speed of the connection to the Exchange Server 2003 computer.

Access to all data is not available until the initial synchronization is complete. Therefore, it is recommended that a fast connection is used when Cached Exchange Mode is started for the first time for each user.

After the initial synchronisation is complete, Outlook 2003 would keep the local copy up to date automatically. If a change was made to the data on the server, Outlook 2003 would be notified to synchronise the changes. Changes on the server may occur if a new message was received, or if another client made a change to existing data. If changes are made to the local data, Outlook 2003 synchronises those changes with the server automatically. This process occurs in real time and does not require user intervention.

Outlook 2003 Cached Exchange Mode offers the following benefits:

· After messages have been cached locally, typical user operations do not cause interactions that block the server. Marking a message as read, replying, and editing require a small amount of data to be pushed up to the server to keep the mailboxes synchronised. However, the pushing of data occurs in the background. This behaviour causes much faster access to messages and to attachments, because work is done from the local copy instead of the server copy.

· Cached Exchange Mode causes no loss of conventional functionality. New e-mail notifications, full Global Address List details, free/busy lookup, public folder access, and delegate support function as expected. However, this is true only when a network connection to an Exchange Server computer is present.

· Cached Exchange Mode provides intelligent use of bandwidth. This functionality is enabled by synchronising only headers on slow connections (connections that are slower than 128 kilobits per second [Kbps]). This functionality works only when a network connection is present.

Additionally, Cached Exchange Mode offers administrators the following benefits:

· Reduced server load. After messages are cached locally, re-opening the same message does not require server transactions.

· Reduced network load. After messages have been pulled over the network one time, subsequent access to those messages does not cause additional network traffic. Because messages are also compressed, there is an additional reduction on network load.

When and who should run cache mode? It all depends on the cache size and performance of the local pc.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738147.aspx

Effect of Online Mode Clients

Unlike Cached Exchange Mode clients, all Online Mode client operations occur against the database. As a result, read I/O operations will increase against the database. Therefore, the following guidelines have been established if the majority of clients will operate in Online Mode:

250 MB Online Mode clients will increase database read operations by a factor of 1.5 when compared with Cached Exchange Mode clients. Below 250 MB, the impact is negligible.
As mailbox size doubles, the database read IOPS will also double (assuming equal item distribution between key folders remains the same).

The following graph illustrates IOPS based on mailbox size.

Database read IOPS increases as mailbox size increases

Testing has also shown that increasing the database cache beyond 5 MB per mailbox will not significantly reduce the database read I/O requirements. The following graph depicts 2-GB mailboxes using Online Mode clients and the effect increasing the cache beyond 5 MB has on reducing the database read I/O requirements.

Database read IOPS decreases cache size per mailbox increases

As a result of this data, two recommendations can be made:

Deploy cached mode clients where appropriate. See the "Item Count per Folder" section below for more information.
Ensure that the I/O requirements are taken into consideration when designing the database storage.

For additional IOPS factors, such as third-party clients, see Optimizing Storage for Exchange Server 2003.

PST/OST Encryption

2008-05-12T16:41:00Z

The best way to secure a PC is physical access. If someone can gain access to your PC then the job of hacking has been made easier. If a user gains access to a PC that is part of a network and logged in then what access do they have? Everything. This includes mail. Outlook is logged in with pass-through authentication and users can gain access to mail. If this computer is not joined then user credentials are provided to login to Outlook. One of my customers just asked if they had access to PST/OST files can they open? Yes they can be opened. PST/OST provide compression (which can obscure data) but they do not provide encryption. Encryption should be accomplished on the drive with EFS, Bit Locker or some 3rd party hard drive encryption tool.