Exchange and UC

OCS R2 Response Group

I have been meaning to do this for a little while. I have finally managed to get some time to do it. Basically I have recorded two videos. The first is how to go about setting up a response group,  using rgscot to create the contact object and then creating a workflow.

The second instalment is what a user will get when they call a response group. Apologies for the quality of the second video as I needed to cut it all together as I need to assume two personas, that of the user calling in and that of the agent answering.

All these videos and more are on www.ucsimplified.com

Using 3g for Communicator Video Calls

This is not the first time it has happened and I bit not the last. One part of my role is going to events to demonstrate the technology. As part of the preparation I was always ask the event organisers to ensure we have at least have a wireless internet connection. To be fair they always do have an internet connection. The problem being that it is not always as good as you would have hoped for.

I was at an event last friday where said internet access was not particularly reliable and so I had to resort to my mobile to do the demo over 3g. As I said this has happened before as highlighted out in Mark's blog.

If you don't believe it is do able check out this video,  which had Brett, I and Junners on a three way video call while Brett speed through the countryside on a train (Brett recorded this on a his mobile so apologies for the quality and Brett's dusty screen).

So I hear you ask what is the point of this rambling - well it is certainly not encouraging you to do this - the cost (depending on your data plan) could be career threatening in the current financial situation. It is more about demonstrating the ingenuity that Communicator /OCS uses to ensure calls can be completed over poor links. Ideally we would love to have great big fat pipes but in real life this is not always the case and when push comes to shove and you need to do that vital call and share info some technologies will not even try, whereas we can.

To read more on how we do this check this doc (it is from OCS 2007 and more has been done to make this even better in R2)

The Time is Now - IT Strategies for Uncertain Economic times

I don't need to go into how tough things are out there. I talk to Microsoft Partners day in day out about what they are seeing. Some of it is good and some of it is bad but on the whole most are seeing that this is a time where change can be implemented.

At heart I am a techie and if given the option I will talk about the technology far over and above trying to sell the cost benefits to Partners and customers. But while I truly believe that the technology will sell itself, there needs to be a cost justification to move.

Microsoft UK has published this document, which I had chance to read yesterday and I think any IT Pro or IT manager should read it and then make sure the people who make the IT spending decisions also read it. The following are my thoughts on the documents.

Being Strategic

Lots of IT employees will be taking the attitude of keeping there head down and weathering the storm. After all IT is still seen by a lot of companies as a necessary evil that is a drain on the bottom line.

A report was produced by Gartner that sees IT (as viewed by CEO's) as evolving to become one of the top three success factors by 2012. If you are in IT at your company today you will become a strategic asset (if you get it right) and a key differentiator for improving business agility and reducing cost.

Hence the reason I say the time is now. Any company is looking to reduce cost today, but at the same time they do not want to hindered employees from doing their jobs.

Microsoft is exactly the same - travel used to be a big part of my role and while it hasn't totally gone I am acutely aware of the cost involved. For this reason I will try to conduct any of my meetings via livemeeting. Try it free here. Once you get used to it, it really becomes the norm and not only will you not want to travel but you will no longer have to spend the dead time sitting in the car or train.

The cost savings are there to see - MSIT have written a case study outlining the savings.

As you can see $212m a year saved - $17m savings alone attributed to travel (45600 journeys)

Forrester has written an article on the Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Unified Communications. I would suggest that this is the starting point to prepare your business plan and cost justification.

Do it Now

There is a lot of reading above let alone the the question of implementation - but I am very confident that if you do this now your company will be in a lot better shape both in the near term and when the financial crisis turns the corner.

React now, be proactive there has never been a better time to implement change in behaviour of the employees as well as moving your company forward. When the CEO looks back in 12/18 months time it could be you that he remembers.

The time is now...

What's New in R2

Everyone knows that R2 is just around the corner, but frustratingly unless you are a Microsoft employee or on one of the partner programmes you cannot get hold of the bits to play with it yourself.

Hopefully these videos on edge.technet.com will provide insight into what is coming.

OCS 2007 is a great product and really does encapsulate unified communications. Even Steve is on the road to streamlining his communications.

So have a look to see what the guys in the coomunications team have achieved in just over 12 months, this next release will really take communicating with colleagues both in and outside of your company to a new level.

What’s New in Office Communicator, Communicator Web Access, and Devices with Office Communications Server 2007 R2

· Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and the new Attendant Console

· What’s New in Conferencing with Office Communications Server 2007 R2

· Group Chat and Office Communications Server 2007 R2

· What’s New in Mobility and Anywhere Access with Office Communications Server 2007 R2

· What’s New in Administration and Management with Office Communications Server 2007 R2

If you want to sign up for the FREE virtual launch and register for the evaluation software when available go here

What a difference a year makes!!!

There has been a bit of a lull in my blogging, for a number of reasons,

1. I have been very busy seeing Partners and Customers (that is for the benefit of my manager:-))
2. I have been beaten by other bloggers about topics I wanted to blog about and I don't want to increase the volume of information circulating around if it has been said before.
3. Not really a lot has changed in the last few months.

However October and November have had some rather large announcements in the UC space. Namely the announcement of R2 last month and the "Online" yesterday.

Rather than regurgitate what has been announced I thought  I would give you a quick update of what I have seen in the past year since the initial launch of Office communication server 2007 in October 2007 and how the ecosystem has changed.

The launch was great and I think you could say that we had a fair share of techies that loved it and a fair share of who said it couldn't cut it in the voice world. Shortly after the launch some members of the UC team went to a Voice reseller event. It was a real eye opener for me, while understanding they way Partners do business and how Microsoft support the partners, it was quite interesting to go to a event whereby the whole model was different, and that a world of margins and shifting tin was the nature of the game. Trying to convince telephony resellers that we work to a different model was challenging to say the least and I must admit that it really hit me that these guys where not going to adopt our technology simply because of the technology and the benefits it could offer. Also while these resellers and the telephony vendors were aware of what Microsoft could do, it was early days and I think the common consensus was while a threat, Microsoft were an unknown quantity.

What a difference a year makes........

We returned this year, almost exactly twelve months later, and the whole dynamic had changed. Interestingly three of the big telephony vendors presented real life case studies of Unified Communications. Each case study included OCS. Not surprising from my point of view as I am aware of it capabilities. However the resellers sitting in the audience couldn't believe it. One reseller asked the question:-

Why are you including OCS in your solutions?.  Microsoft have plans to replace the PBX and surely this will lead to the death of your business and mine?.

The answers from the panel ranged from "There is a saying keep your friends close and your enemies closer" to "I would use the term alternative to a pbx rather than replaced"

So what am I actually trying to convey - well it boiled down to one thing in order to survive in the telephony market you have to diversify, the margin and shifting tin model is on its last legs.

This brings me nicely to the initial announcements. There are lots of telephony resellers that need to diversify and how can they do it. Well if you are not able to employ Microsoft engineers then the Microsoft Online Services will enable you to sell Exchange and Sharepoint.  Likewise there are plenty of Microsoft Partners who have these wealth of skills and probably lack some skills in the telephony arena. Share the love and cross pollenate your skills between the data and voice channels. Because if you don't with the imminent release of R2 I think it will become easier for Microsoft Partners to do the Telephony implementation on there own.

Find out more about the Microsoft Online offerings here and what is planned for R2  here

Microsoft Online Services

Office Communication Server R2

And if you would like to sign up for the Virtual launch of R2 go here

Performance Impact of High Item Counts and Restricted Views

This is a great article - during my days as a CPR engineer I spent many an hour understanding the impact of this and how it effected Performance on an Exchange server.

It is very useful and will give you a better understanding of what an Exchange server has to do when creating a view in a folder. It also highlights what restricted views are and how they are generated and used.

So if you are having perf issues on an Exchange server take a look at this doc and check item counts. Even if the this is not the cause it is a great read to understand some of the complexities of ESE B+ trees

Upcoming OCS Webcasts

There is a durge of upcoming webcasts for OCS on the horizon

Here are the links

Live Webcasts

TechNet Webcast: Disaster Recovery in Communications Server 2007 (Level 200)

Monday, June 2, 2008

9:30 A.M.–10:30 A.M. Pacific Time

TechNet Webcast: All About Communications Server 2007 Security (Level 300)

Thursday, June 5, 2008

9:30 A.M.–10:30 A.M. Pacific Time

TechNet Webcast: Configuring DNS, Certificates, Ports, and Load Balancers for Communications Server 2007 (Level 300)

Monday, June 9, 2008

8:00 A.M.–9:00 A.M. Pacific Time

TechNet Webcast: Deploying and Managing Your Unified Communications Devices (Level 300)

Tuesday, June 10, 2008

1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time

Momentum Webcast: Bringing Everyday Applications Together with the Power of Presence (Level 100)

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

11:00 A.M.–12:00 P.M. Pacific Time

TechNet Webcast: How to Do a Proof of Concept for Communications Server 2007 Interoperability with PBX Systems (Level 300)

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

9:30 A.M.–10:30 A.M. Pacific Time

TechNet Webcast: A Technical Introduction to Forefront Security for Communications Server (Level 300)

Thursday, June 19, 2008

11:30 A.M.–1:00 P.M. Pacific Time

TechNet Webcast: Communications Server 2007 Quality of Experience: Defending, Deploying, and Succeeding (Level 300)

Thursday, June 19, 2008

11:30 A.M.–12:30 P.M. Pacific Time

TechNet Webcast: Video Conferencing and Interoperability with Existing Systems (Level 300)

Monday, June 23, 2008

1:00 P.M.–2:00 P.M. Pacific Time

TechNet Webcast: Planning and Deploying Voice Routes in Communications Server 2007 Using Route Helper (Level 300)

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

9:30 A.M.–10:30 A.M. Pacific Time

Shell Case Study

One of the re-occuring questions I get whenever I am meeting partners and customers is "So who is using Office Communication Server?" I can reel off a whole load of Organisations. Plus I use it day in day out - I no longer have a phone line on a PBX

This case study has now been released and outlines Royal Dutch Shell's implememtation of Office Communication Server 2007

The full cases study is here

https://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000001527

Some of the highlights include the following quotes

"By using Office Communicator 2007, an employee in Nigeria will know instantly if a coworker in Siberia or the Netherlands is available and the best way to contact him or her. It is a single, transparent environment for the user."

"Employees appreciate being able to use Office Communications Server 2007 to place phone calls whether they are at home or traveling—and at no cost."

They are realising the potential that OCS can bring to their business, are you download the evaluation version from here

Email is ruining my life......

This article has been around for quite sometime - I was due to attend a meeting with Loughborough University's Dr Tom Jackson(one of the interviewees in the article) yesterday that was organised by Brett. Unfortunately it got cancelled. I was waiting for that before I blogged about this, as it is has not been rescheduled yet I will get my initial thoughts down

Some of the salient points from the article

"One FTSE firm estimated that dealing with pointless e-mails cost it £39m a year. "

"On average, we spend 52 hours a year just dealing with our junk mail."

"Britons take 14 million sick days due to stress every year. He (Professor Gary Cooper) believes e-mail is a major source of employee anxiety.

E-mail inboxes are causing employees concern, because of the number of e-mails and the poorly written e-mails. They really want to find some sort of solutions for these problems," he says."

The article also states that email is now 24/7 - Blackberry and Windows Mobile is exacerbating the issue. I have been having face to face conversations with colleagues in Microsoft who will constantly check their Windows Mobile for mail. I am probably guilty of this also. Likewise I have heard horror stories of colleagues checking their devices during the evening when watching Corrie. Much to the annoyance of their partners.

I personally still rely on email - it is a great way to disseminate information and to ask questions to many people when the answer is not needed immediately.

I think most of the stress related to email is because of the volume, not the content. How do you prioritise which email in your inbox needs to be addressed first.

Most of my day to day communication is now done over IM. Because most of my co-workers do the same I know that what is in my inbox is normally not high priority. If someone needs to get hold of me in Microsoft they will normally do it over IM. Using IM in OCS then makes the escalation to voice calls much easier.

Has the volume of mail I get decreased because of this - probably not,  but overall I would like to think I am much more in control of my communications.

The world is moving to an IM culture, and no doubt in the years to come the BBC will be running an article "IM is ruining my life" but for the meantime it works for me.

Long Time no Blog....

It has been a busy time over the last couple months. Microsoft are in the last quarter of their financial year so I have been rushing around doing my normal day job. I have finally had chance to sit down and start to get some of the posts I have been meaning to write actually on my blog.

It seems that I am not the only one - looking at the blogs I usually read, many have been pretty quiet -( Mark, Ewan, Brett)  probably suffering from the same overload as I am :-)

Some great posts I have come across recently are

Matt's explanation of Hyper-V

The Office Communication Team Blog - has some great information for example why we do not do SIP over UDP

Seniors blog always has great info

Steves blog is the must go place to find out all the latest technology - I am amazed how he finds the time read and collate all this info 

So hopefully the next few posts of mine will have been worth the wait :-)

OCS Planning tool

The OCS Planning tool is available

It is a great start to plan your OCS topology producing diagrams as below

Download it now 

The Elastic Fanatastic - RTAudio the adaptive codec

Yesterday the UC team were in Manchester running the Public Sector Unplugged event. (Last one in London next week) It turned out to be a great event - well attended with an interactive audience who were keen to learn more about UC.

The last session was all about OCS and what it can do for organisations around the country. Unfortunately when we came to do this last session we lost all Internet connectivity. Mark and I were going to do the session - and although pretty stressful we decided the show must go on. Now there were two options

1. Finish on a low by giving the audience 45 minutes of slideware explaining what it could do and some architecture

or

2. Just do the demo with whatever means we had.

Obviously we chose option 2.

But what means did we have, well I had my trusty blackjack 3g windows mobile device - but no cable to attach it to my laptop and Mark had a 3g device with a cable.

Firstly I configured the laptop and phone to use Bluetooth pan and then a connected to the internet. Alas I was on the Internet so step one was achieved

The demo involves IMing someone escalating to a voice call and then video.

So off I went - Stephen and Alasdair from Tayside Fire and Rescue were  willing volunteers and we started off with IM and went to voice and then video, all was working brilliantly. They were using Roundtable so we could show the active switching and I was really pleased. Then all of a sudden up popped a toast from Neil at POSTCTi responding to an earlier IM , so taking the bull by the horns  I responded and asked if he wouldn't mind joining the demo. He willing obliged and so I dragged and dropped him in.

All worked without a hitch - I was basically conducting a three way conference between three different federated organisations over 3g using OCS.We had a few minutes of conversation and then ended the call. I was ecstatic, over the moon.

The purpose of this post - to show what this software is capable of, The codecs just adapt to what bandwidth is given to them and will allow you to have video conferences when most systems wouldn't even try.

Don't get me wrong we love good networks with low latency and no packet loss - but life isn't always that simple and you are not going to get great internet connections wherever you go. But knowing that all is not lost and you can still do this over poor links is great to have as a reserve. QoS is great but QoE in my mind is better.

More on RTAudio can be found here.

Lastly thanks again to Steven, Alasdair, Neil and Mark, without them no matter what network the demo wouldn't have happened.

OCS Speech Server 2007 - I am blown away

I was tasked with doing a UC demo by our illustrious leader at a recent group meeting. The brief was simple you have 5-10 minutes to blow them away. Not an easy task to achieve to an audience of about 250 who have mostly seen and are using Microsoft UC on a day to day basis. Escalating to a video call was not going to cut it.

After a brief chat we decided upon an OCS Speech Server Demo. This is something I always planned on doing but never really got around to it - probably because I am NOT a developer and so put it to the back of my to-do list.

But this gave me the push I needed so with a bit of trepidation I embarked on the challenge. The remit was simple install OCS Speech server, attach a softphone to it and get it to answer and then get it to ask questions to which it understands your answers.

Using the Wibbly Wobbly web I set about looking for some samples to butcher for my demo.

Surprisingly this was quite simple there is a great site called www.gotspeech.net that allows you to download a whole load of training material and samples.  What it also has is a Sliverlight presentation showing you exactly what to do to create and run simple apps.

The demo was going to answer the call - get the user to supply a DTMF code  which it would recognise and work out who you were and then ask some question and finally ask you to record a message.

Easy eh,,, well to my surprise it was - it was very easy and I think this is one of the major benefits of the whole solution is that you can use Windows Workflow Foundation.

After installing Visual Studio 2005, OCS Speech Server 2007 I started to play around with it. It is very gratifying to just be able to drag and drop a speech component onto a workflow add some text and have a server talking to me and understanding my responses.

I appreciate that my demo is very simple and I also appreciate that there are a very talented and knowledgeable speech application developers who really make this fly. My intention is not to devalue any of the brilliant work they do

The point of my post is that to try and make sure you do not dismiss this area of Unified Communications because it is something you have not done before. But get  it up and running and play with it because it will really make you think and realise the possibilities that this OCS component offers.

Other good sources of info - the forum and Michael Dunns' book, Microsoft Pro Speech Server 2007

Unified Communication Specialisation

A lot of  Partners ask me who do I achieve the UC Specialisation - well if you need to find out what is involved then there is a page on the Partner Portal that outlines what is required

Live Meeting licenses now available for partners

I realise that this has been a bug bear for a lot of partners, the fact that LM licenses were not available to you - and dare I say it you had to use other Technologies.

Well we have listened to the feedback and now you can get the following

"On March 1, 2008 we will be offering Gold and Certified partners Office Live Meeting licenses for evaluation. Certified MSPP partners are granted 15 Live Meeting Professional named user licenses for use within our Certified Partner Conference Center. Gold MSPP partners will receive 30 Live Meeting Professional named user licenses for use within our Gold Partner Conference Center. Additional program information will be available on our Live Meeting Partner Page at http://partner.microsoft.com/officelivemeeting,"