Marcus Hass' [MS] Blog : IM/LCS

Microsoft Online and SBS 2003

mhass — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:16:00 GMT

I have been working with the Microsoft BPOS aka Microsoft Online guys in Enterprise accounts for a while to help big companies migrate to BPOS dedicated. Don’t know what that is? Check out www.microsoftonline.com. To sum it up, it is hosted Exchange, SharePoint, OCS, LiveMeeting, and a few other offerings. For bigger businesses, Microsoft sets up dedicated hosting servers, for small it is multitenant.

I help out a small company from time to time because they have 15 employees and a Small Business Server 2003 environment. They are constantly running out of space on their 5 year old server because mail boxes keep growing because of attachment sizes. These guys are the perfect scenario to migrate to Microsoft Online!

So, I setup a free trial and started loading some of the coexistence tools like email sync and dirsync onto the Small Business server. Well, that was the plan. Turns out, dirsync can’t be run on a domain controller and will only run on Windows Server 2003. I think the BPOS guys missed the Small Businesses aren’t going to have an extra server lying around. How can you miss this scenario when building your tools, especially a segment of the market so perfect for BPOS?

So, they will have to forgo the coexistence and migrate mailboxes in one fell swoop over a weekend, which won’t be pretty over the small network connection they have.

I am sure there are technical reasons, and that's what will be used as an excuse. It just disappoints me when we have really smart guys that miss such a big opportunity to help small businesses.

Automated install of Outlook Conferencing Addins

mhass — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 23:59:00 GMT

My customer (Mike Vrabel) and I got completely frustrated today in trying to find a way to deploy the Outlook Conferencing Addin for Live Meeting 2007 via SMS. The Office web site gives you a ConfAddins_Setup.exe which is neither an MSI or provides you switches for automated install or answer file.

Some digging turned up a solution:

1. Copy confAddins_Setup.exe to a local directory on your test PC
2. Open a command prompt (if Vista make sure the command prompt is administrator elevated)
3. Using the command prompt navigate to the directory where confAddins_Setup.exe resides
4. Type the following command line - "confAddins_Setup.exe -out <drive>:\<folder path>"
5. Step 4 should have extracted the LMAddinPack.msi file
6. From the directory that contains LMAddinPack.msi install the Addin from the command line using the following command line "msiexec /i <filename.msi> /qn"

You can then use the normal MSI command line switches to deploy silently, just make sure to kill Outlook on the target machine first:

msiexec /I LMAddinPack.msi APPCONFLICT=IGNORE /qn

Gripes and praise about Communicator Web Access

mhass — Thu, 26 Jan 2006 00:56:00 GMT

I am working on an LCS design for a customer and saw that LCS’ Communicator Web Access shipped in December. I read the docs and discovered that it works a lot like Outlook Web Access (OWA) because it uses forms based authentication. I was surprised at this because I assumed that we would have created a web client as an ActiveX control that behaved like Office Communicator.

Office Communicator accesses the corporate LCS environment through an Access Proxy server in the DMZ, which in turn connects to a Director in your Corporate network. I believe the Office Communicator uses SIP for signaling and talks to the Access Proxy using this protocol.

So, why wouldn’t Communicator Web Access use the same type of protocols to connect to LCS? I hate it when we make products that have 6 different ways to connect to it, it makes us infrastructure guy’s life hell. After all, we had to implement this weird, Access Proxy to Director to LCS Pool to LCS Backed infrastructure.

I can think of three main reasons:

1) There are much better packet filters for HTTP/HTTPS than there are for SIP

2) Most people that have LCS have OWA, so this fits that model

3) Allow people with other platforms to use LCS

I have also posted an example below of our High Availability Infrastructure, right click and save to your PC for a better picture. Since we haven’t implemented it yet, I can’t vouch for its entire accuracy, but you can get the idea.

Hosted Messaging and Collaboration 3.5 released today

mhass — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 18:56:00 GMT

This morning, Microsoft announced version 3.5 of the Solution for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (the product formerly known as HVMC). The latest version of the solution incorporates new mobile synchronization capabilities, a variety of security enhancements, and new tools that lessen management time and extend customer acquisition opportunities for hosting partners. As always, the solution includes engineered tools and guidance on hosting Windows, Exchange, SharePoint, and LCS.

The official press release is here.

New Stuff:

§ Windows Server 2003 SP1 support

§ Automated password synchronization between hoster directories and end-customer accounts

§ New customer migration tools and updates to key technology components

§ Exchange SP2 support

§ Direct push technology (similar to Blackberry devices)

§ New mobile security features include the ability to wipe data from devices that have been lost or stolen and set up automated rules to help prevent access by unauthorized users

LCS and UPN's

mhass — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 17:03:00 GMT

I was messing around with LCS last night here in my lab. I had installed LCS a couple times and helped customers get up and running, but I am not an LCS expert. I was trying to duplicate a customer issue where I wanted to limit how certain users could talk to and add to their various chat client. Instead, I ran into an issue where I couldn't get any clients to sign in.

After messing around with SRV records, "LCS enabling" users in AD, and making sure the service was starting, I still couldn't log in with ANY users. I then started looking at what the SIP URI was defaulting to. I discovered that it was defaulting to one of the valid UPN names that I have in my domain. But, this wasn't the UPN for the domain the users were in.

Example:

Domain name extended for LCS: contoso.com

SIP URI: myuser@vanitydomain.com

Since the SIP URI doesn't match the domain extended for LCS, the user can't login. After adjusting the LCS user properties for my users to reflect the the "real" domain name (myuser@contoso.com) everything worked fine.

I am not sure why any valid UPN wouldn't work since the users are still part of the domain, but I assume it is just how LCS validates users to allow them to use the server.

Microsoft Instant Messenger, which client to use?

mhass — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 05:48:00 GMT

I have been playing with Office Communicator, which is really cool with the integration to other office products. I especially like the way it shows Out of Office messages, and the integrated phone stuff. Here are a couple deal breaker complaints that make me not use it as my primary IM:

Won't log my conversations so that I can refer to them later. Sure you can have the LCS (Live Communication Server) server email them to you, but you have to remember to do that and Desktop Search will put them in the email section rather than the IM section
Can't order users by offline/online, it always does groups
Federated users (AOL, MSN IM) can't add me to their IM. I can add them, but because it is not a true passport or AIM name, I never get the popup to join their IM
Doesn't have the cool avatars and spaces integration like MSN IM

I wish Microsoft's IM client teams could all meet and decide on key features that should go across all IM clients.