Unified Me : Unified Communications

The Web Scheduler is here!

Sean Olson — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 21:46:04 GMT

It’s here… for situations where Outlook is not your preferred way to schedule meetings, we now have an alternative available. The web scheduler is cross-platform and even works for you Lotus Notes fans ;-) Enjoy:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=6d6848ec-e7d6-41f4-82d9-5bed3526fcbd

Highly Available OCS 2007 R2 Deployment Guidance

Sean Olson — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 01:23:10 GMT

There is a new whitepaper out that you may want to take a look at that provides detailed guidance on how to achieve high availability and disaster recovery between regional datacenters. This is a non-trivial problem and requires a bit of know-how to get it established. Fortunately the whitepaper does a good job of walking you through this:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=c930febb-3a44-4bf3-969d-1c52675a7063

Technorati Tags: UC,OCS

Top 10 Things to Know About OCS 2007 R2

Sean Olson — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 08:59:32 GMT

Our virtual launch is coming very soon, but I thought I would share some tidbits of information that you should know about OCS 2007 R2. Just something to whet your appetite …

10. 64-bit

We’ve made the switch to 64-bit at last. Industry trends all point to this being the right time to make such a switch. The cost and availability of 64-bit hardware is unbelievable. In just the short time between the release of OCS 2007 and the release of R2, hardware has grown by leaps and bounds. We wanted to take advantage of that hardware and the only way to truly unlock it’s potential was to go native 64-bit. This is not just a recompile. There are significant changes involved. For this and many other reasons, we have decided to bid farewell to the 32-bit server.

9. Windows Server 2008

Customers demanded it and we have delivered – R2 has been re-designed to work effectively on Windows Server 2008. This is also not just a simple recompile. This means leveraging things like the improved (default) firewall in Windows Server 2008, IIS 7.0, EEC certificates, and much more.

8. Consolidation

In OCS 2007, we had two different options for deploying our Enterprise Edition: consolidated and expanded. Consolidated was simple to deploy because every server was running all the services (instant messaging, presence, conferencing, and voice). But it was limited in scale at the time (30,000 concurrent users per pool) and so our largest customers would deploy expanded instead. Expanded meant we took the resource intensive workloads (mainly web conferencing and audio/video) and offloaded them to dedicated servers.

Moving to 64-bit meant we could take advantage of the natural improvements in hardware and suddenly we could have the best of both worlds: easy to manage and scalable. We now recommend consolidated configuration for all deployments and we have the scale to match: 100,000 concurrent users per pool. (Or 200,000 if all you need is IM and presence)

But we didn’t stop at the core server roles. We also consolidated the Edge Server role so that there is now a single server role to deploy and you deploy multiple instances for scale.

7. No More DNAT

We use load-balancers to effectively scale out deployments and most load balancers support two different modes of operation. Load balancers inherently implement a network address translation (NAT) function as they attempt to make a single virtual IP address distribute across multiple physical servers. There are two obvious ways to do NAT: based on the destination address/port (DNAT) or based on the source address/port (SNAT). In OCS 2007, we supported either mode. In R2, we no longer support DNAT.

Why? Because DNAT has some peculiarities when one of those physical OCS servers behind the load balancer wants to communicate with different OCS server in the same pool and wants to load balance that communication as well. There’s no good way to make this work with DNAT. With SNAT, this works just fine. What’s the impact to you if you have already deployed? A simple re-configuration of your load balancer. No change in functionality or scale.

6. System vs. Config

We leverage Active Directory extensively. This comes directly from our vision statement where we believe a single identity is the core of any UC system. For Microsoft, that single identity comes from Active Directory. AD is effectively a smart, replicated, database. There is a lot of information stored in Active Directory in general and so this replication can be network intensive. For most deployments, this is a complete non-issue. However, for very broadly distributed global deployments, the network connectivity between all sites is not always reliable. The good news is that AD has a solution for this type of situation. It involves putting your application settings into a different container (config) than the normal default (system). The benefit of doing this is that you have a local copy of the config information that is available even when network connectivity between sites is down.

In previous releases, we gave you the option of using either (System or Config) but defaulted to System. That made sense for typically centralized IM and presence deployments. It makes less sense for global, typically de-centralized voice deployments. Our recommendation (and default) moving forward is the Config container. If you have already deployed using the System container, don’t worry. We have a tool to help you with the migration. What you should know is that you need to do this migration BEFORE you attempt to deploy R2.

5. Improved Updates

We’ve made some significant improvements in the way we handle updates to the clients and devices in R2. In OCS 2007, we introduced the Update Server role which allowed you to keep your desktop phone and RoundTable device software up-to-date. With R2, we now allow you to do the same with the Office Communicator desktop software as well. What’s more we’ve addressed most of the shortcomings of the previous implementation including:

No more Sharepoint dependency (this stuff works out of the box)
Fully authenticated downloads
Better support for remote phones outside the firewall
Support for cross-language updates (go from English to French, for example)

4. RDP-based Application Sharing

Ever use Remote Desktop or Terminal Server to access a remote machine? Works pretty well, right? Well now we use the same technology for application sharing in our product. It’s so good I forget I’m even using it. This is really fast, high fidelity, silky smooth application sharing – the way it’s meant to be. And it works in a web browser… on a Mac… from anywhere.

3. Dial-In Conferencing

You use them all the time. Audio Bridges are a natural way people work nowadays. Only now you no longer need to buy a separate bridge or pay per month or per minute. The nice thing is that this is fully integrated with the rest of the UC solution. You don’t have to worry about forgetting your PIN or remembering what your special meeting ID was meant to be. And you have complete control over who can join which calls – something that is hard to impossible to do in other systems. More on this to come …

2. Group Chat

We acquired a company called Parlano over a year ago. Since then, we have been busy integrating this world-class group chat product into our overall UC solution. With the release of R2, we are proud to announce the first Microsoft release of the new group chat functionality. Why is this important? Because IM has become mission critical at many companies but they aren’t tapping the full value of those IM conversations. With group chat, you get an indexed archive of these group collaboration sessions which you can search at any time. The institutional knowledge that was once lost can now be preserved and leveraged.

1. We’re Not Done Yet

We are still busy putting the finishing touches on things like SDKs, localizing into more languages, improving the planning tools, building the best documentation ever, and some pleasant surprises which I can’t discuss (yet). I will share more as these pieces fall into place over the next few months. There are some really exciting announcements coming at launch.

Snow Day

Sean Olson — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:55:04 GMT

Like most of the country, the Pacific Northwest is seeing a bit more snow than usual. In Redmond, we fear snow. For the greater part of the year we have very moderate weather and so most folks here don’t know how to drive on snow and ice. Today is particularly bad because the quantity of snow makes driving a Herculean task even for those accustomed to it.

I’d guess that at least 20,000 of the 30,000+ folks who work at Microsoft in Redmond are working from home today and that is an unexpected challenge for our VPN servers not to mention the local DSL/cable networks. Things are slower than usual but still working. If you can avoid doing a VPN connection, it’s a wise idea.

Here comes the obligatory plug for OCS ;-) I’m not using VPN for the most part. I don’t need it for Outlook and can do e-mail, share files, schedule meetings, etc. just fine. I don’t need it for OC and so I’ve been in meetings all day long using VoIP and application sharing in our soon-to-be-released R2 product. Alas there are some internal tools and web sites which I can’t completely avoid and so I dip my toes into the VPN waters occasionally. What I’m finding though is that set is shrinking over time.

Working remotely is becoming a more frequent occurrence for me (aside from the odd weather around here) and I’ve become addicted to this flexibility. I’ve done IM from Maui, international calls from San Francisco, working meetings in my PJs, and even full day workshops remotely. It’s not a perfect experience, but what I miss most are things we are actively working on. Next time I get snowed in, I will probably enjoy it ;-)

Technorati Tags: UC,VoIP,OCS

VoiceCon is almost here

Sean Olson — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 20:53:57 GMT

In two weeks, VoiceCon San Francisco will kick off. After our announcement of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 at the VoiceCon event in Amsterdam, I'm expecting quite a bit of excitement and questions about our upcoming release. Microsoft will have a strong presence at the event as always and I myself will have a chance to attend and be part of a panel discussion around "Leveraging VoIP Investments for Unified Communications". Unfortunately my schedule only allows me to be there for a day since my day job (shipping R2) keeps me busy. Please swing by the Microsoft booth if you have a chance and drop me an e-mail if you will be there on Wednesday.

The Future of the Voice Conference

Sean Olson — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:09:00 GMT

I've attended just about all of the major voice related conferences in our industry to date but of late it seems like the buzz that drew so many to VoIP and SIP in the "early" days is starting to wane as the industry matures and SIP is no longer a question but an assumption. So I'm quite intrigued to see what eComm can become. I've read some very favorable comments about the inaugural event in 2008. I'm now blocking off my calendar to attend next year's event. Like Microsoft's own Interact event, this sophomore effort is not one to miss. Ping me if you plan on attending as well. Would be great to meet as many folks as possible there.

Heading to VoiceCon

Sean Olson — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 07:54:45 GMT

It's that time of year already when thousands flock to sunny Orlando to experience VoiceCon. Last year, I got to see the world's largest phone:

Kinda silly when you think about it but you can't help but stop and stare. Stop by the Microsoft booth to see some really interesting phones (in a more convenient size). In addition to cruising the conference floor and hearing some great presentations and keynotes, I'll be sitting on a panel on Wednesday talking about SIP standards and interoperability:

To what extent is SIP viable -- or required -- when deploying a converged, multivendor IP communications network? To help you answer that question, Ed Mier, a leading independent expert on SIP will give you a detailed report on SIP interoperability, based on the latest annual survey of SIP-supporting vendors: How many and which features interoperate, where interoperability still falls short, and where we stand with SIP "extensions." He'll discuss his conclusions with a panel of vendor representatives and the audience.

KEY QUESTIONS

Which traditional voice features can be supported with approved SIP-standard specifications? What features can't?

To what extent do SIP elements from different vendors truly interoperate? Are the newer SIP-based systems backward-compatible with earlier products that were based on proprietary protocols?

In which areas of the network are SIP implementations most likely not to interoperate?

What sorts of features are being implemented as SIP extensions, and why?

Will SIP extensions always be with us, or will most if not all features become standardized over time?

Speaker - Ed Mier, CEO, MierConsulting, LLC
Panelist - Tony Rybczynski, Strategic Enterprise Tech, Nortel
Panelist - M Raza, Product Management, 3Com
Panelist - Sean Olson, Principal Group Program Manager, Microsoft
Panelist - Paul McMillan, Director UC Strategy, Siemens Communications

If you like what you hear and want to learn more, please stop by and see me. Or check out our new interoperability site.

Technorati tags: Unified Communications, VoiceCon, SIP

Making the Command Line Cool Again

Sean Olson — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 01:06:25 GMT

I worked on Unix systems for probably close to a decade before coming to work at Microsoft. The common denominator among them all was that the command line was way more interesting than whatever GUI they might provide (the two exceptions being the NeXT cube and SGI's IRIX which were years ahead of their time). My perspective was a bit biased being a programmer since scripting at the command line brought me an efficiency and range of functionality that could not be met with any point and click GUI. Simply put, it was way cooler to get things done with the command line than any pretty boy UI. For these reasons, I became acquainted with dozens of command line scripting options and expert in more than a few.

Bourne Shell and all its brethren are where it started for me: ksh, sh, Bash, zsh, etc. Writing scripts that could work on a variety of systems to automate a bunch of manual tasks. In that environment you don't learn one tool, you have to learn several to get anything useful done: grep, awk, sed, ps, kill, ls, sort, uniq, count, more, etc. You master the syntax of the input/output of each of these commands as well as the format of all the useful files. The mantra that everything is a file in Unix serves you well as long as you (a) know where that file is and (b) know the structure of the file.

This was tedious but it worked. The tedium came from learning a bunch of tools and how to string them together as well as how to work around the idiosyncrasies of these tools on all the different flavors of *nix. Then came the most wonderful invention: Perl. Hard to believe that it has been twenty years already! Perl was wonderful because it replaced all those tools and gave you a consistent regex notation for parsing all those text files. Perl 4 still sets the bar for maximum functionality in minimal lines of code. Perl 5 raised the bar by creating a vast library of re-usable modules to handle all those common administrative tasks and more. No more re-inventing the wheel over and over again.

Perl has an elegance to it once you grok the syntax. You can work some real magic with Perl hash tables and dynamic evaluation. Perl is never going to win any beauty prizes though. For some folks, it's just not their cup of tea. Python could be viewed as an alternative to Perl for those who prefer a more "pure" scripting language. I first came into contact with Python while working at NASA. There are some incredibly brilliant Python folks there. I love the way Python handles objects (though my favorite is the original prototype concept in JavaScript). Python too has a vast library of re-usable modules. Some would argue that the way Python handles libraries is cleaner than Perl but they both get the job done.

Fast forward to when I joined Microsoft six years ago. Love the interface of Windows compared to X Windows, but when it came to command line scripting, it was like going back to the dark ages. Not a big fan of cmd.exe or the WSH but it does get the job done. Partly because of past history I turned to ActivePerl to fill my scripting needs on the Windows platform. It's an awesome product but using Perl on Windows always leaves you feeling like something is missing. Part of the problem is that everything is not a file on Windows. Management in Windows means understanding other things like WMI, Active Directory, COM, etc. The other part of the problem is that Windows fundamentally handles file paths differently and it can be a hard transition from using Perl on Unix to using Perl on Windows. Using the command line in Windows was definitely not cool.

This all changes with PowerShell. I was skeptical at first. Could Microsoft really create something that could compete with Perl or Python and fill this aching gap in their command line story? I think the PowerShell folks have done just that. They've borrowed a lot of the great concepts from those languages while introducing some novel concepts of their own. First off, I can do things in PowerShell with about the same number of lines of code I would use in Perl. Secondly, I can leverage the entire functionality of the .NET framework. Re-read that again. I can't overstate the importance of this piece. No more re-inventing the wheel here. There is a ton of functionality in those libraries that you can use directly in PowerShell without having to learn any new syntax. For example, retrieving a file from a remote HTTP server is trivial and you don't have to know anything about HTTP. Third, PowerShell is built for Windows by folks who really understand Windows. All that WMI, AD, LDAP, and XML that is a routine part of managing a Windows system is easily accessible from within PowerShell. And I've never seen an easier way to access COM objects from a scripting language. Finally, you have to try the object-based pipeline in PowerShell to fully appreciate what this means in terms of power and efficiency. Simply put, you don't have to spend all your time parsing text anymore. You think in objects and not regular expressions. Beautiful.

This leads me to an obvious topic: when will Office Communications Server offer PowerShell as a command-line scripting interface? Like many Microsoft enterprise products, OCS 2007 today offers WMI as the primary scripting interface for the product. Combined with WSH, you can get most things done via a command line. But it's no PowerShell. The roadmap we have for offering PowerShell consists of two phases. In the first phase, you can use PowerShell's native ability to work with WMI to access all of that functionality. We have a good proof-of-concept for this in the CD that accompanies the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit. Longer term, we are going to offer a native PowerShell interface similar to what is available with Exchange 2007. To do this right takes time. We want to provide an object model and corresponding PowerShell cmdlets that maps well to the product and provides an interface that will be useful for years to come. This means rethinking our entire WMI interface as it stands today and coming up with something better. As we make progress on what that new interface will look like, I will post more information and solicit your feedback.

The command line is cool again, especially on Windows, and I can't wait to show you what comes next...

Technorati tags: Unified Communications, Office Communications Server, PowerShell

Planning Made Simple

Sean Olson — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 06:37:29 GMT

You want this tool. You need this tool. Get it now: http://download.microsoft.com/download/2/0/7/207bb9fb-bffe-478f-91b7-8339d25f7fdd/OCSPlanningTool.msi.

Answer some simple questions
Click Finish
See your OCS 2007 Topology

Nothing could be easier.

Technorati tags: Unified Communications, Office Communications Server

A late Christmas present

Sean Olson — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 02:14:33 GMT

The OCS 2007 Resource Kit book is finally here. Check it out on Amazon or your favorite bookstore.

Technorati tags: Office Communications Server

Ashlee Simpson does high tech?

Sean Olson — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 18:45:49 GMT

Great article over at FastCompany about high quality video conferencing. My favorite part is this quote:

The question is: how on earth are we still dealing with the awful sound quality of telephones, well into the age of ubiquitous internet, hybrid cars and Coke Zero?

Good question indeed. It used to be that the holy grail of VoIP was to meet landline telephone voice quality. Most were happy just to achieve cell phone voice quality. And now folks are demanding even more? Well, they should. Wideband audio codecs plus ubiquitous connectivity means you should get good quality audio just about everywhere. It's what we believe in.... and you should too :-) Have you heard the audio quality in Office Communicator or RoundTable? Let me know what you think about where we are at and where we could improve.

Technorati tags: Unified Communications

Is Office Communications Server a PBX?

Sean Olson — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 02:51:53 GMT

I hear this question all the time from customers. It's a fair question and a natural one since enterprise telephony has long been the province of the PBX manufacturers. In fact, this was such an entrenched mind set that most of the enterprise VoIP products out there today are just the same PBX architecture that's always been there with an extra interface to support VoIP. It's the same old dog with a shiny new collar. To answer this question, I usually pose a few of my own:

Why would you pay good money to replace something you already have? That is, replace one TDM PBX with a new "VoIP" PBX
Why would Microsoft bother releasing a product in 2007 that did nothing more than a product from the early '80s?
Have your communication needs changed at all since 1876?

Office Communications Server is not a PBX. It's a product to teach that old dog some new tricks and give you a genuine return on your investment at the same time. It's also part of a genuine Unified Communications strategy. By that I don't mean re-branding your existing PBX product line with a UC name. Times have changed and so have customer's needs including web and video conferencing. OCS is the product to deliver a new 21st century experience around telephony and other modes of communication as well. This doesn't mean you have to throw out that PBX. It works and provides a good basic service. Complement that PBX with OCS and now you have: people-centric communication, instant messaging, rich presence information, application sharing, video conferencing, and more. Add in Exchange Unified Messaging and you have a 21st century voicemail experience as well.

Will OCS ever be a PBX? Probably not. I think we are reaching the end of an era for the PBX architecture (whether TDM-based or IP-based). It's time to think about a new era of Unified Communications. Time to think about people as people rather than as phone numbers. Time to replace phone tag with something more productive. Time to introduce new ways of leveraging voice in your business applications and removing this island of telephony. Time to stop paying for a PC but only getting a phone ;-)

What do you think?

Happy Holidays!

Technorati tags: Unified communications

Joining the Blogosphere

Sean Olson — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 08:53:51 GMT

This is my inaugural post, at least on TechNet. While I've been blogging personally for some time and have even contributed to our team blog

Source: http://communicationsserverteam.com/

I thought it would be good to start posting a bit on my own as well. This gives me a little more flexibility in the timing and subject matter of my posts. I'll certainly be cross-posting a bit as well since we want the Communications Server blog to be an active one. So a little about myself ....

I'm the group program manager for the Office Communications Server product, recently considered by one publication to be the #1 VoIP product of the year (CRN 2007 Products of the Year) This is quite an honor given all the great VoIP products out there today. A lot of hard work by a team of very talented folks has finally paid off and I'm proud to be part of that team. We're not resting on our laurels though as we are busily planning the next two releases. Stay tuned for more info on that as I'm able to release it ;-)

I hope to keep up with this blog actively discussing not only my product and Microsoft's Unified Communications strategy but also the general UC marketplace and any tidbits of technology I find interesting along the way. Feel free to e-mail if there is something in particular you would like to see in this blog

Technorati tags: unified communications