QoE Monitoring Server reaches RTM

jkruse — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 07:50:00 GMT

Those who were at TechEd Australia or NZ would have heard me talk about the QoE Monitoring Server (aka QMS (a TLA within a TLA)) - well the good news as posted by Warren Barkley at the OCS Team Blog is that QMS has reached RTM!!!

Office Communications Server 2007, Quality of Experience (QoE) Monitoring Server enables you to perform near real-time monitoring and service assessment of unified communications media.

The QoE Monitoring Server (QMS) is a new server role for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition. It provides the information that you need in order to better understand the media quality that your users are experiencing in your Office Communications Server 2007 deployment. With QMS, you can do the following:

Gather statistics on media quality of locations or based on a grouping of subnets
Proactively monitor and troubleshoot media quality of experience issues
Perform diagnostics to diagnose VoIP user complaints
View trends which can help you with post-deployment growth and measure results against the service level agreement

The QMS collects quality metrics at the end of each VoIP call from the participant endpoints, including IP phones, Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, the Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007 client, and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 A/V Conferencing Server and Mediation Server. These quality metrics are aggregated and stored in a SQL database. The data can then be used to alert you to abnormal media quality conditions and also to generate routine media quality reports.

So what does this mean? You can now monitor your voice network along with the rest of your computing infrastructure!

Download it now from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=09115944-625f-460b-b09c-51e3c96e9f7e&displaylang=en

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Speech codec in OCS 2007

jkruse — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 22:54:00 GMT

One of the huge improvements we're making in Office Communications Server 2007 is in the area of speech quality and Quality of Experience in VoIP phonecalls.

We have a document available for download with an overview of our RTAudio advanced VoIP codec, which has the ability to dynamically adjust to network conditions such as latency, packet loss, jitter, etc; and because it is a variable-bitrate codec, calls will not drop out if the network is not "perfect". This is a huge change from traditional Enterprise VoIP technologies, which require end-to-end management of the network. Rather than adjusting the network to fit the call, we can adjust the call to fit the network.

So what does this mean? Think better voice quality with less bandwidth, and the ability for remote/mobile users to connect to OCS and make voice/video calls across the Internet and from mobile networks, wireless hotspots, etc.

Download the document from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5d79b584-79c9-42a8-90c4-4ab3f03d19c4&displaylang=en

Johann's Unified Communications : qoe

QoE Monitoring Server reaches RTM

Speech codec in OCS 2007