Exchange and UC

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,"

Partner Communities - Sign up today

Are you a Partner - would you like to know what other Partners are doing or just have the opportunity to "chew the fat" over technology.

Partner Communities have been set up to allow Partners to do exactly that - this is a place were we can build relationships and ask questions. The success of the communities will be down to you joining and participating.

I know there is a wealth of knowledge out there from just meeting some of you - so lets share it on Partner Communities.

Please sign up whether you are new to UC or a die hard UC Partner.

There are two communities that you may want to join in the UC Arena

BPIO - Unified Communications and Mobility

Which is more technology focused

and

Unified Communications

Which is more focused around the business opportunity of UC

So sign up today and  lets get chatting

New Transporter Suite for Lotus Domino Servers, and generic IMAP/POP sources

A new version of the Transporter suite has been released that will aid you in moving from the systems above to Exchange 2007.

Download it from here

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=35fc4205-792b-4306-8e4b-0de9cce72172&displaylang=en

As an overview it does the following

Transporter Suite contains a set of tools for migrations from both Lotus Domino Servers, and generic IMAP/POP sources. For Lotus Domino the suite contains a set of tools for Directory and Free/Busy interoperability between Lotus Domino 6 or 7 and Exchange Server 2007 and Windows Server 2003 Active Directory. In addition for Lotus Domino the suite contains migration tools to migrate users, groups, personal address lists, mailboxes, personal mail archives, and applications from Lotus Domino 5, 6 or 7 to Active Directory, Exchange Server 2007, and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. For generic POP/IMAP servers the suite contains a set of tools to bulk migrate mailboxes from any generic email servers that support the POP3 or IMAP4 protocol to mailboxes in Exchange Server 2007

Unified Communications News

I have been a bit slow to get these announcements on my blog - but hopefully this post will cover most of the latest announcements

Hopefully you have already seen the Unified Communications Open Interoperability Program site. It outlines the vendors that have put forward gateways and solution for interoperability with OCS.

The main benefit of this site is that it defines vendors that have had their solutions vigorously tested and ratified by Microsoft to ensure the installation, setup and support is as seamless as possible.

Other interesting news includes a whole load if trials that will allow you to see the features and functionality first hand - they can all be found here.

New Year and loads happening

The New Year is with us and there is loads happening in the world of UC. I had a great break and only returned to work on the 7th ( hence the delay in getting to my blog). Some of the things that have come to my attention during my break

This blog entry by Erica Driver really explains where RoundTable is coming from and how it will hopefully change users perception of Video conferences. At the end of the day technology is only of any use if users use it - hopefully this type of blog by external companies will drive that adoption.

To complement this we now have certified OCS devices that are optimised for Office Communicator use. I have used most of these devices and will testify that they are brilliant - I would never go back to a conventional phone - my Jabra headset goes everywhere with me and gives me a voice quality second to none

There is moreso I will be blogging more shortly

My Demo Environment - Part 3 Integrating Exchange 2007 UM with OCS

So far I have tried to highlight how to get OCS and UM working separately. But obviously if we can integrate these two products together the user experience just gets better.

For instance you can:-

Call Voicemail from Communicator

See missed call notifications

No longer have to remember authentication details for OVA

The bottom line is Exchange 2007 now becomes the Voicemail system for OCS 2007. This means that essentially I can have a software based VOIP system integrated with a software based voicemail system. Obviously Exchange and OCS are much more than just that, hopefully you can start to see how Microsoft is unifying these communications so that they are totally integrated and beneficial to each other.

What do you need

1. Upgrade the Exchange server to sp1

2. Once done you will need to configure a new dialplan - using powershell

New-umdialplan - name OCSUMDailPlan -Uritype "Sipname" -Voipsecurity "SipSecured" - Numberofdigitsinextension 4

I then went into the properties of this dialplan and set the subscriber access number (this will be different for users just using ordinary Outlook Voice Access)

3. Apply this dialplan to the UM server

set-umserver -id Umdemo -dialplans OCSUMDialPlan

What I have done so far is create a new dialplan and assign it to the server.

The Dialplan will also automatically create a UM Mailbox policy so check what this has been called.

4. Then run ps1 script that is given in the Exchange 2007 sp1 binaries - it is called exchucutil.ps1. This is found in the scripts folder.

There is a great explanation of what it does here

I had a few issues running this originally - I got around the issue by changing the path to the scripts folder - no doubt this is something to do with my paths but I will figure that out later

This will create a umipgateway.

5. Next run OCSumutil - I did this on my OCS server - with the line ocsumutil /domain:ucdemo.com

What this does is create a RTC Special Accounts container in AD. In this container it will add a contact, I need to do a bit more investigation and work out the flows but I believe that when a call is diverted to voice mail it is this contact that is looked up and used to forward the call. The reason I say this is because the Line URI and telephone number are the subscriber access number that we gave in Step 2

6. Enable the users. This can be done via the GUI or Powershell, if done via the GUI pick the mailbox policy that was created for the dialplan - this will ensure that a SIPResourceidentifier is required, give this and the extension and enable the account. Alternatively the following powershell command will work

Enable-Ummailbox -id Julian -ummailboxpolicy "OCSUMDialplan Mailbox Policy" -extensions 2003 -sipresourceidentifier julian@ucdemo.com

This should then allow you to connect to your voice mail form communicator and also give you the options to redirect incoming calls to voice mail - see screen shots below

So this all worked for me but other things that may cause issues if it does not work first time is certificates. OCS needs to trust UM so you may need to get a certificate to allow this. To do this in powershell

New-ExchangeCertificate -DomainName ucdemo.com -Friendlyname UMOCSCert -Generaterequest:$True -Keysize 1024 -path c:\umocscert.req - privatekeyexportable:$true -subjectname "c=GB, o=Berkshire, cn=umdemo.ucdemo.com" -force:$true

So this will generate the cert request - take this and go to your certsrv https://server/certsrv and run through requesting a cert

Once you have it import it back to the exchange server

Import-ExchangeCertificate -Path c:\requestedcert.cer | Enable-ExchangeCertificate -ServicesUM