Rob Costello : UC

INTERACT2008 Invitation

robcost — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 12:06:16 GMT

Corporate VP of Unified Communications Group Gurdeep Singh Pall has put out the invitation to attend Interact 2008 in San Diago, California, 8-10 of April.

This event will be both a great chance to rub sholders with the who's-who of the UC world, and a great chance to get some deep technical knowledge of the Microsoft UC product offerings. Content includes:

Forty technical presentations including:
- Planning Voice Architecture and Deployment in OCS 2007
- Sourcing, Deploying and Managing your UC Devices
- Microsoft Unified Communications for Developers: Building Communications into Your Applications
- Migration, Co-existence, and Deployment Strategies with Exchange Unified Messaging
- Automating Exchange Server 2007 Deployments using PowerShell
- Additions to Exchange Hosted Services Directory Synchronization and Reporting Tools
Hands-on labs to help you learn to deploy UC technologies end-to-end
Chat sessions with INTERACT2008 presenters
Birds of a feather sessions to connect on key unified communications topics
Partner Expo hall to interact with and learn about 3rd Party UC solutions

Check out the invite here...

http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2008/03/14/124.aspx

Technorati Tags: Unified Communications,Interact2008

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Public IP Requirements for A/V Edge

robcost — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 11:56:00 GMT

So a few people get nervous when you tell them your going to need a publicly routable IP when implementing the OCS A/V Edge role for external A/V Conferencing. Then you tell them they'll need to open up 10,000 high ports, and you can see the blood drain from their faces. :)

Well it's not all bad news. If you understand how the protocols work the risk really isn't that high.

Chad Lacy has a great post discussing the security that is wrapped around the A/V Edge role, check them out here...

http://blogs.technet.com/chlacy/archive/2007/12/21/a-v-edge-server-load-balancer-still-need-public-ip-address.aspx

http://blogs.technet.com/chlacy/archive/2008/03/12/a-v-edge-and-publicly-routable-ip-addresses-part-ii.aspx

Technorati Tags: OCS,A/V Edge Role,A/V Conferencing,Chad Lacy

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Upcoming UC Webcasts

robcost — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 11:35:59 GMT

Byron Spurlock, who had a hand in the writing of the Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit, has a pointer to some of the upcoming UC webcasts, check them out here...

http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/unifiedcommunications.aspx?tab=webcasts

Technorati Tags: Unified Communications,Byron Spurlock

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In KL for the UC Voice Ignite

robcost — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 11:51:52 GMT

Well, I'm here in Kuala Lumpur for the UC Voice Ignite that we're running here this week. I flew in overnight last night, and am now just getting myself ready for the event. The Grand ballroom is all set to go, with about 120 laptops setup for the attendees to work from.

So the flight over was an experience in itself. I came from Sydney, straight from the Voice Ignite sessions there, and had a 1hr stop in Brisbane. From Brisbane it was direct to KL, and I gotta say, it was the most turbulent flight I'd ever been on. The whole 7hrs was one bump after another, with quite a few REALLY big air pockets that dropped the plane, thrusting all the passengers, myself included, up from their seat, only to be stopped from hitting the roof by their seatbelts (which ended up being very tightly done up after the first 1/2 hour). The plane was great, it was Malaysia Airlines, which I'd never flown with before, and the staff were really good, but the weather really put a bad note on the trip. Hopefully it will be better on the way at the end of the week.

This is my first time in Kuala Lumpur, and it's very different to what I'd expected. Actually I didn't know what to expect. I deliberately didn't do too much research into Malaysia as I wanted to see it for myself, fresh, without someone else's views of the place in my head. The first thing of interest obviously was the airport. Everything was well signed and easy to get around, and getting through immigration and customs was very fast (take note USA). Then there was the taxi ride into KL to get to my hotel. It was 7am, so traffic was light, but it appears as though traffic lanes and speed limits are optional here, so that was also an unnerving trip.

So now I'm just going over the decks I'll be presenting, making sure I'm all set to go. Hopefully it all goes well.

Here is a bunch of photo's from my hotel room stitched together with Live Photo Gallery, in the middle are the Petronas Towers, pretty cool view yeah. The building down the bottom is a shopping mall, 8 stories high, it is huge inside!!!

Technorati Tags: Kuala Lumpur, UC, Voice Ignite, Travel

OCS Edge Deployments

robcost — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 08:11:10 GMT

Ok, so we know the OCS 2007 Edge Server Deployment Guide has heaps of great details on how to get your Edge deployment up and running, but it can be a little confusing, especially around some of the different firewall scenario's that people have. Some people have plenty of external IP address, some don't have many spare, some people have external and internal firewalls, some have a 3-leg firewall. It can get confusing, believe-you-me.

Jeff Schertz from PointBridge has a great post on some of these scenarios and good explanations of how you implement them. Check it out here...

https://blogs.pointbridge.com/Blogs/schertz_jeff/Pages/Post.aspx?_ID=19

Technorati Tags: OCS, Edge Deployment

Unified Communications Launch in Adelaide

robcost — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 04:34:52 GMT

We had the Unified Communications launch event here in Adelaide today, and it went pretty good. We had some of the evangelists and UC guru's in town for the day to talk about and demonstrate our new technologies to partners and customers.

Johann Kruse, Mario D'Silva, and Michael Kleef were all on deck to present to about 60-70 attendees. The guys did a great job and hopefully raised the awareness level a couple of notches about UC and how it can add value to our customers.

If you missed the event then you can get the decks from http://www.microsoft.com/australia/business/uc/events/default.aspx.

For more information on UC and what Microsoft has to offer, check out the UC center on MS.com at http://www.microsoft.com/uc.

Technorati Tags: Unified Communications

OCS QOE and QMS

robcost — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 05:53:19 GMT

Wow that's a confusing title for a blog isn't it?

So I've been talking to a lot of people lately about Office Communications Server and how they can take advantage of our Enterprise Voice features to provide Voice Over IP, either to coexist with their existing PBX infrastructure or to replace it altogether.

One of the first questions I get asked is always about bandwidth and quality, it goes something like this... "your a software company, how can you provide good quality voice services and not chew up all my bandwidth if you don't control the network layer".

So the discussion continues and we talk about the Quality of Experience (QOE) features we use in Office Communicator, and how we can natively support DiffServ with DSCP marking for QOS blah blah blah.

Well to top it all off now, we released the Office Communications Server 2007 Quality of Experience Monitoring Server (QMS), to enable IT departments to monitor voice quality based on information sent back by endpoints, such as loss/jitter/delay etc.

QMS is free, and you can get it here...

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

If you want more details on Quality of Experience and our support for QOS, check out the OCS QOE guide at...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=05625af1-3444-4e67-9557-3fd5af9ae8d1&DisplayLang=en

Technorati Tags: Office Communications Server, Voice Over IP, VOIP, QOE, UC

OCS Virtual Labs on Technet

robcost — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:17:52 GMT

We've got some Virtual Labs up on Technet for common things you'll want to do with Office Communications Server, check them out here....

Technorati Tags: Office Communications Server, OCS

Microsoft Unified Communications Launch

robcost — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 02:36:26 GMT

So we've had a couple of really exciting days with the launch of our Unified Communications range of products.

We've had the big launch events happening in the US, with followup events happening all over the world. Bill Gates headlined the launch in San Francisco, if you missed it you can check out the video at 100K | 300K | 750K. Bill also released an executive email to customers which you can read at: Bill Gates’ executive email .

Also some a little older news about Gartner's recent Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications (August 2007), which puts Microsoft in the Leaders quadrant, which is defined as “The Leaders quadrant contains vendors selling comprehensive and integrated UC solutions that directly, or with well-defined partnerships, address the full range of market needs.”

Locally we've also published several Case Studies of companies using the new capabilities in Office Communications Server 2007 and Exchange 2007. For more details on each of these Case Studies you can check out Oscar's post here... Australian case studies on Unified Communications.

Oscar and Mario have also been out there spreading the word, including a new article yesterday on iTWire here... Microsoft's unified communications blitz

With the launch event our partners have also started releasing hardware that is optimized for Office Communicator. For details of these partners check out the UC partner page on microsoft.com at http://www.microsoft.com/uc/partners_hardware.mspx. From here you'll get pointers to handsets and conferencing hardware like the kit provided by Polycom here... http://www.polycom.com/usa/en/products/voice/desktop/cx/cx.html

Technorati Tags: Unified Communications, UC Launch, Gartner Magic Quadrant, UC Case Studies

Unified Communications TechNet Update

robcost — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 06:53:28 GMT

To support the Unified Communications Launch events in Sydney and Melbourne (more details to follow about these events), TechNet will be running a series of Technical Readiness events across the country for IT Professionals wanting to learn more about the technology.
What will be covered?
Office Communications Server 2007 Deployment
This demonstration will walk through deployment of Office Communications Server 2007 starting with the planning & deployment guide, standard edition installation, user provisioning and entitlement, configuration, and finally validation. OCS 2007 will be the main emphasis of this demonstration. This session can be broken down into three parts. In the first part of the demonstration, we show the easy setup of Standard Edition 2007, this allows an organization to provide IM, peer to peer voice call capabilities immediately. The second part of the session will include an overview of complex installation topologies recommended for OCS 2007; this includes considerations for Enterprise Edition deployment, Edge server roles, various MCU roles, Mediation server and the Archiving server role. The third part of the session focuses on federation and public internet connectivity features of OCS 2007. This includes setup of Edge server roles for Public Internet Connectivity and Federation capabilities. It will also cover integration with Exchange 2007 SP1 Unified Messaging which enables an exciting set of features for end-users.
Mobility and Anywhere Access
This presentation will demonstrate the benefits of remote access and mobility features for Communicator and Exchange. The scenario will focus on how users stay connected and can work without interruption while travelling and on the go. Users continue to have access to presence and contact information and choice of communication options including mail, instant messaging, voice and multi-party conferencing. They can view documents and access SharePoint sites remotely. All these features increase productivity for the organization and are easy to set up by IT Pros. We will talk about implicit benefits of cost saving and lower help-desk calls.
VOIP Architecture
This presentation will describe to network managers and administrators the VoIP architecture of Office Communications Server 2007, demonstrate OCS’ superior quality of experience for voice and video, and describe the network requirements for implementing OCS in the data network. We will discuss Microsoft’s user-focused approach to quality with OCS, the core media stack and codecs used for VoIP in Office Communications Server 2007, and network provisioning for enterprise deployments of Office Communications Server 2007. The attendees will leave with knowledge of the advanced media technologies present in Office Communications Server 2007 and how those technologies relate to planning for a deployment in their environment.

Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Overview
This demonstration will walk through the feature enhancements introduced in Exchange Server 2007 SP1. The demo will cover a range of new technologies, from Windows Server 2008, Standby Continuous Replication and OWA 2007, to enhanced functionalities such as Mobility, end user experience and administrator management.

VOIP Topologies and Interoperability
This demonstration will expose administrators to the voice configuration and management experience in Office Communication Server 2007. We will walk through administrative tools, explore RouteHelper, and implement key deployment functionality such as dial plans, new site deployment, and least cost routing. The administrators will leave with knowledge of basic telephony deployment scenarios and options for more complex configurations.
Registration Details
Canberra Friday 16th November
Adelaide Thursday 22nd November
Brisbane Monday 26th November
Perth Wednesday 28th November

Office Communications Server Best Practice Analyzer Released

robcost — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 06:08:27 GMT

The Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Best Practices Analyzer Tool is a diagnostic tool that gathers configuration information from a Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 environment and determines whether the configuration is set according to Microsoft best practices. You can install the tool on a client computer that runs Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0, or on a server that runs Office Communications Server 2007.

The tool uses set of configuration files to gather information from the Office Communications Server 2007 environment. It compares this data against a set of pre-defined rules for Office Communications Server 2007, and reports potential issues. For every issue reported, the tool provides the current configuration in the Office Communications Server 2007 environment, and the recommended configuration.
With the proper network access, the tool can examine your Active Directory and Office Communications Server 2007 servers to do the following:

Proactively perform health checks, verifying that the configuration is set according to recommended best practices
Generate a list of issues, such as suboptimal configuration settings or unsupported or not recommended options
Judge the general health of a system
Help troubleshoot specific problems
Prompt you to download updates if they are available
Provide online and local documentation about reported issues, including troubleshooting tips
Generate configuration information that can be captured for later review

Check it out here...

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=1B90993C-072A-4C84-B385-B76D23B2F27C&displaylang=en

Technorati Tags: OCS, Unified Communications, BPA

New UC Videos on ITShowtime

robcost — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 04:41:00 GMT

Two new videos on ITShowtime for Unified Communications.

Unify your Communications - http://www.microsoft.com/emea/spotlight/unified_communications_demo_unify_your_communications_a_practical_demo.aspx

RoundTable 360 Panoramic View - http://www.microsoft.com/emea/spotlight/unified_communications_demo_microsoft_roundtable_360_paranomic_view_a_practical_demo.aspx

Technorati Tags: Office Communications Server, OCS, RoundTable, Unified Communications

New OCS and OC Blogs

robcost — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 03:57:19 GMT

There are two new blogs from our Office Communications Server and Office Communicator teams, check them out here...

Communications Server Team Blog - http://communicationsserverteam.com/default.aspx

Communicator Team Blog - http://communicatorteam.com/default.aspx

Technorati Tags: Office Communications Server, Unified Communications, Blogs

UC Documentation Links

robcost — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 06:00:32 GMT

Over at the UK UC & RTC blog, hot on the announcement of the RTM of Office Communications Server 2007, they have a great list of documentation for Office Communications Server, Office Communicator client and Office Live Meeting. For brevity I'm not going to repeat it all here, so check it all out here...

http://mucuguk.org/blogs/microsoft_unified_communications_user_group_ap/archive/2007/07/31/165.aspx