Great news from the Unified Communications Group and the Exchange Product Team. Exchange 2007 SP1 Beta 2 has been released as a commuity technology preview for subscribers of MSDN and TechNet Plus.

 To learn more about it, please check out the Exchange Team Blog http://www.microsoft.com/technet/abouttn/subscriptions/default.mspx

- Kevin Engman

 UC Community

We have created two new Blogs for Office Communications Server and Office Communicator. These Blogs are by the respective teams within the Unified Communications Group. Please add them to your RSS or favorites. The URL's are http://www.communicationsserverteam.com and http://www.communicatorteam.com

On these two blogs you will be able to learn about the product teams, their features, tips n tricks, product announcements, usability enhancements and more.

 You can also learn about Exchange via the Exchange Team Blog http://www.msexchangeteam.com

We will not be posting to this Blog URL in the future. We want to thank you for your participation in the blog and look forward to continuing our community interaction on the new team blogs.

 Regards,

- Kevin Engman

 UC Community

Today, Jeff Raikes announced some great news at the Financial Analyst Meeting that Communications Server 2007 and Communicator 2007 is code complete and will be released to manufacturing tomorrow, July 27^th.

RTM is a significant milestone in our unified communications and VoIP strategy, and we’re looking forward to general availability this fall.

To learn more, please check out some Q&A with Gurdeep Singh Pall on the PressPass site.

More technical information will be coming in the next few days, weeks and months to help you with your deployments.

- Kevin Engman

  UCG Community

If you like FREE and want to experiment with unified communications products in a virtual online environment, then you've come to the right place.

Check out the newest Unfied Communications TechNet Virtual labs covering the following topics: deploying and configuring, enabling users and installing, configuring and using conferencing, using management and troubleshooting tools, compliance and archiving, and unified messaging at http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/unifiedcommunications.aspx?tab=virtuallabs

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Virtual labs:

Deploying and Configuring Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 ,    ,Configuring and Using Conferencing in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007  ,  Using the Management and Troubleshooting Tools in Office Communications Server 2007 , and Compliance and Archiving in Office Communications Server 2007 .

Microsoft Offic Communicator 2007 Virtual labs:

Enabling Users and Installing Office Communicator 2007

Microsoft Exchange 2007 Virtual labs:

Exchange Server 2007: Configuring the Unified Messaging Server  

So don't delay and visit our newest Virtual Labs today! 

- Kevin Engman, UCG Community

We previewed our next major release of Microsoft Office Live Meeting today at TechEd. This proved to be an important milestone for us since we haven’t had a major update to the service in awhile. Customers told us they wanted to see new features in three major areas 1) tighter media integration 2) better e-learning features and 3) a more intuitive interface for meeting attendees.  The 2007 release delivers on all these areas, which we’re no doubt excited about.

The other really compelling thing about this new version of Office Live Meeting is that this technology forms the backbone for the server-based conferencing experience we’re delivering with Office Communications Server 2007, which is set to release to manufacturing this summer.  With either version of Microsoft’s conferencing solution – a server or a service – end-users have the same client, and customers can integrate 360 degree video using Microsoft RoundTable as well as use other off-the-shelf Web cameras.

Check out the Office Live Meeting screenshots here - image gallery and check back to the Blog for more information about this new release.

- Serhii Sokolenko

   Technical Product Manager

At Interop Las Vegas 2007, Microsoft Corp and 9 leading IP-PBX vendors announced plans to provide interoperability between their respective communications solutions; this represents more than 80% of the global PBX installed base. These industry leaders are integrating their IP telephony offerings with the Microsoft’s Office Communications Server 2007 unified communications solution.   This has been enabled via the release of an interoperability specification for Microsoft^® Office Communications Server 2007 which was announced in March at Spring VoiceCon.  The broad interoperability offered by this approach will enable customers to rapidly integrate their existing telephony investments with Microsoft’s software-based unified communications solution.

The benefits of such a deployment are the ability to seamlessly enjoy the existing telephony user experience in a way that is tightly integrated with the unified communications user experience, e.g.:

• Intuitive user experience
• Multi-modality (e.g. voice, video, text messaging, web collaboration)
• Ad-hoc multi-party, multi-modal conferencing
• Integration with business applications (e.g. Outlook)
• Rich Presence
• Mobility
• Enhanced security

For customers who are unable to integrate their existing PBX infrastructure with Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft also announced a partnership with 3 market leading IP-PSTN Media Gateway vendors who can enable interoperability between almost any PBX and the Microsoft unified communications solution.

To read our full press release: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/may07/05-22InteropRoadmapPR.mspx.

More information on the integration of traditional telephony and Microsoft unified communications solutions can be found in an upcoming White Paper.

- Russell Bennett

  Senior Program Manager

The Office Communications Server Public Beta has now been enhanced by product offerings from Unified Communications Group’s strategic gateway partners. After IT Pros download the Public Beta, they will be directed to the Strategic Hardware Partners Resource Page  (http://www.microsoft.com/uc/pdgtrials/default.mspx).

Gateways are a key component of Office Communications Server 2007 delivering software-powered VoIP that works with existing messaging and telephony infrastructures. By supporting the wide variety of legacy protocols and country approvals, gateways enable Office Communications Server 2007 to adapt to a global enterprise customer’s footprint and changing business needs. UCG has initially engaged with 3 strategic gateway partners – Dialogic, AudioCodes, and Quintum – as part of the Unified Communications Basic Media Gateway Program.  The program is designed to ensure that gateways conform to technical specifications and deliver ubiquitous connectivity, superior audio quality, great manageability and easy configuration with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.

Learn more about Gateway Partners and OCS Public Beta
Each gateway partner has developed complete websites to support the Office Communications Server 2007 Public Beta – including marketing collateral, technical support information, and ordering information.

Audiocodes: http://www.audiocodes.com/Content.aspx?voip=2823     

Dialogic: http://www.dialogic.com/microsoftuc/

Quintum: http://www.quintum.com/microsoft/index.html       

- Kevin Engman

  UCG Community Lead

Are you excited about devices?

If so, please check out the next generation of phones and devices we announced today with our partners optimized for Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communicator 2007. We’re encouraging customers to test drive some of these products through our beta program starting tomorrow.

Also, if you get a chance, take a look at the partner demos at the Channel 10 home page.

- Meera Mehta

   Senior Product Manager, Unified Communications Group

Some great news today as Tellme Networks has officially joined the Microsoft family. On May 3^rd, Microsoft announced that it has completed its acquisition of Tellme, the Mountain View, Calif.-based provider of voice services for everyday life, including nationwide directory assistance, enterprise customer service and voice-enabled mobile search.

Tellme will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft from its Mountain View, Calif., offices. Tellme CEO, Mike McCue, is remaining Tellme’s senior leader.  He and the amazing group of talented and creative employees will be joining the Microsoft Business Division.

As we announced in March, Tellme and Microsoft share a common vision around the limitless potential of voice as a way to find information, connect with people and enhance business processes, any time and from any device.  We are already working closely with our customers and partners to make this vision a reality across many complementary areas including natural interfaces, unified communications and mobile search. 

Stay tuned for more information in the coming months.

- Kevin Engman

  UC Community Lead

In LCS2005 SP1, two new federation models were introduced; the ability to federate with the three big public IM providers AOL, MSN & Yahoo! and Enhanced federation by which peer enterprises are discovered via DNS SRV. Further, enhanced federation could be enabled in two different modes. Restricted Enhanced Federation in which only domains configured in the allow list domain were used to locate the federated peer via DNS SRV. This was the default federation model in LCS 2005 SP1. The other model was Un-restricted Enhanced Federation which allowed domains with valid certificates to connect to your Access Edge Server.

With the release of OCS 2007, two new security and protection mechanisms for the federation model “Allow discovery of federation partners” (called Un-restricted Enhanced Federation in LCS 2005 SP1) have been introduced.

One of the reasons a list of allowed domains was added in LCS2005 SP1 was to prevent an attacker from using a “directory harvesting attack” to discover usernames within an enterprise. The idea behind a directory attack is that you try two values (in this case usernames) from a to z, aa to zz, etc. and by looking at the results, discovering if a valid username matches the values you tried. In OCS 2007, in order to prevent this attack a federated peer is allowed to communicate with a fixed number of usernames in a certain time period. Once this is exceeded, attempts to try new usernames will be rejected. This method works by using the fact that an enterprise will have a fixed number of valid usernames but an attacker has to try far more names that will be invalid. There are more sophisticated attacks than one described, but all basically will usually try more invalid names than valid ones.

The second mechanism is message rate limitation where the Access Edge Server restricts the rate at which it accepts messages from the federated peer. The precise rate is based on traffic analysis. A federated peer discovered through DNS SRV starts out at a highly restricted rate. Once the Access Edge Server sees an acceptable ratio of successful responses to failure responses sent to the federated peer it then allows a higher rate of messages. Periodically the server checks the ratio and readjusts the rate if appropriate. This allows limiting the resources the Access Edge Server uses on behalf of a federated peer.

Because both of these mechanisms have the potential to impact legitimate communications, either when a large amount of traffic is sent across the federated link, or when a large number of parties are communicating on both ends, adding a federated peer to Allow list removes these restrictions. In order to be able to easily identify both legitimate peers and potential attackers a list of “Notable Peers” is maintained in the administration UI. The mechanisms are designed and calibrated to allow quite heavy legitimate traffic whilst protecting the system automatically from the attacks described, and allow administrators to easily find the domains that their users communicate with and take appropriate action if required.

There are two actions an administrator can take; firstly they can add the domains to the deny list, secondly they can block the peer certificate via the Operating System certificate store. Blocking the certificate at the OS level is most efficient but can be circumvented by the attacker getting a new certificate. Adding the domain to the deny list makes it harder for the attacker as they will require a new domain too. Both actions can be taken for maximum protection and efficiency.

As these additional features offers a good level of security and make federation configuration much easier, "“Allow discovery of federation partners" is the default federation model in OCS 2007. If your enterprise’s needs require a different federation model, this default can be changed easily on the Access Edge Server.

Links:                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Live Communications Server 2005 Document: Deploying Access Proxy and Director

- James Undery

   SDE II, Unified Communications Group

Some great news from the Unified Communications Group. Exchange is now offering a FREE trial of Exchange 2007.

This free trial service enables enterprise customers to experience Microsoft^® Exchange Server 2007, the industry’s leading platform for e-mail, calendaring and unified messaging. The trial service will be implemented and managed by Unisys Corp., a worldwide technology services and solutions company. As a result, enterprise customers will have the opportunity to evaluate the many new features of Exchange Server 2007, including anywhere access using a PC, the Web or a mobile phone. Customers can also experience the new unified messaging capabilities, built-in protection technologies and operational efficiencies of Exchange Server 2007, aimed at helping employees make faster and more accurate decisions, gain immediate access to information, and stay connected across many locations.

Related Links:

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Trial Web Site

Press Pass:  Unisys Manages Microsoft Exchange Server trial experience

Unisys Web site

With the recent Response Point announcement, we’ve received some questions about the relationship between this offering, the upcoming Office Communications 2007 release, and Microsoft’s overall unified communications strategy.

Both Office Communications Server 2007 and Response Point provide voice capabilities over IP and either enhance or replace traditional phone systems.  The products share a common foundation of using a software based foundation to bring innovative capabilities and value to voice and telephony applications.  The two products, however, address very different customer segments and usage scenarios and therefore are quite different in their implementation and scope.

The different target audiences and usage scenarios and the resulting differences in implementation are as follows:

Microsoft Response Point is a phone system designed specifically for the small business environment. The Response Point software was designed to support a direct replacement for existing small business phone systems with the objective of radically simplifing the phone experience.  Its breakthrough voice-enabled user interface makes it easy for users to control all the features of the phone using just their voice, including making a call, transfer, park, access to voicemail and more.

In addition, often small businesses do not have dedicated IT staff on-site, so Microsoft has designed Response Point to allow the average small business PC user to easily manage phone moves, additions or changes with a few quick and easy mouse clicks to save time and money.

Microsoft has partnered with three OEM manufacturers– D-Link, Quanta Computer and Uniden – to design unique hardware base units and desktop phones for the Response Point phone system software. 

By contrast, Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 delivers streamlined communications across voice, instant messaging, and web conferencing integrated into the applications used most by businesses (such as Microsoft Office applications).  It was designed to enhance the communications capabilities for larger organizations by working with the telephony and networking infrastructure they have, while using the power of software to provide next-generation communications capabilities to users.

What you get with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 + Office Communicator 2007:

o    Enterprise grade server and client that offers instant messaging and presence features; Conferencing capabilities, including multiparty audio conferencing using voice over IP; User instigated click-to-call capabilities from within the Communicator 2007 client interface, as well as integrated desktop applications such as Microsoft Office system, allowing users to make and receive phone calls on a preferred device using a personal computer.

o    An open platform based on industry standards that integrates with existing IP and PBX systems, whether direct or via gateway to enable  PC based calling.

o    Integration with a broad eco-system of partners, especially those who share our commitment to standards and interoperability in order to fulfill the promise of integrating all business communications into a seamless and unified experience for customers.

For some time, we have stated that gaining the benefits of unified communications does not require a rip-and-replace of the desktop phone and PBX.

Microsoft’s objective is broader. And our approach to delivering voice plays to our unique strengths in software innovation. We believe simply that people require the right tools to easily communicate, to collaborate, to access the information that empowers informed and timely decisions, and the ability to work efficiently and effectively no matter where they are located.

We feel strongly that the upward trend in companies migrating to PC- and server-based telephony systems points to significant opportunity for our partners as well. By publishing the OCS 2007 interoperability specification last month at VoiceCon (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/mar07/03-06VoiceCon07PR.mspx), we hope to spur third party innovation in software application integration and end user devices that will further enhance and exploit the productivity benefits of our unified communications solution.

For small businesses looking to implement their first phone system (or replacing the one they have), we hope they will consider the offerings built on the Response Point software.  For larger organizations that look to gain the benefits of unified communications while leveraging their existing telephony and network investments, we believe Office Communications Server is a compelling solution.  Both use the power of software to bring exiting new capabilities to the voice market, but do so in different ways.  

What about the roadmap for the two products?  Will they come together?  The next steps will be based on the evolution of this dynamic market and the feedback we get from customers.  The teams are working closely together so that both the small and large business customers gain the benefits of software-powered VoIP regardless of the offering built for them.

- Eric Swift

   Sr. Director, Unified Communications Group

You know without getting all technical about this blog, I thought I’d just talk a little bit about “supported” load balancers for Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005. Often the question from customers becomes, “Is my particular load balancer supported for your product?” Well… the product group didn't specifically test the Barracuda 240 or the Netscaler hardware load balancer or any Cisco devices but that doesn’t mean they aren’t supported. Foundry Networks, F5 Big-IP and Webmux load balancers were tested because those were available to us at the time… But if a hardware load balancer is capable of being configured for SNAT (Source Network Address Translation) or DNAT (Destination Network Address translation), it can be configured for IP (Layer 2) forwarding and it is placed in a supported topology, then it should work just fine and would be supported. Whoa, that’s a bit of techy stuff to chew on… I’ll explain.

Load balancing is based on various forms of network address translation (NAT) at layers 2 and 3 of the networking stack. You may also know that network topologies can be built using different NAT modes. You with me so far? OK then… load balancers can be connected in two LCS topologies, as an independent node on the network or as an intermediary device between the Front End servers and the rest of the network. The first type of connection I mentioned is referred to as a one-arm topology while the latter is referred to as a two-arm topology. The product group supports only Front End servers with a single network interface card with a single IP address. After you tell them this, here’s where customers go off and ask about configs that aren’t supported. Configurations involving two or more IP addresses and/or two or more network cards per Front End server could potentially work but they are not tested and not supported by Microsoft. No support cases, no code changes if issues are discovered.

The three possible forms of NAT used for load balancing are below. But only two NAT modes are supported for LCS, DNAT (Destination NAT) and SNAT (Source NAT) and there’s two topologies that work with those NAT configs. For Destination NAT (or half-NAT), two-arms and one or two IP subnets behind the load balancer is supported or one arm and two IP subnets is supported. For Source NAT (or full-NAT), two-arms and one or two IP subnets is supported or one arm and one or two IP subnets is supported. Mouthful? Confusing? Not really if you whiteboard the two supported NAT modes and write the supported topologies underneath. The NAT mode that does not work for the LCS 2005 architecture is Direct Server Return, or commonly referred to as “out-of-path mode”. This configuration will not work for the server management traffic using DCOM over TCP port 135 and that’s why it’s not supported. Otherwise you couldn’t open the admin tool and administrate the Enterprise Edition pool through the load balancer.

      Below is a concise list of load balancer connectivity requirements for setting up a LCS 2005 pool:

1. The load balancer MUST expose an ARP-able Virtual IP Address (VIP)
2. The load balancer MUST provide TCP-level affinity. This means that the load balancer must ensure that TCP connections established with one Front End server will guarantee that all subsequent traffic on that connection will go to the same Front End.
3. TCP idle timeout should be set to 20 minutes
4. Front Ends within a pool MUST be capable of routing to each other. There can be no NAT device in this path of communication. Any such device will prevent successful intra-pool communication over RPC.
5. Front Ends MUST have access to the Active Directory environment.
6. Front Ends MUST have static IP addresses that can be used to configure them in the load balancer. In addition, these IP addresses must have DNS registrations (referred to as Front End FQDNs).
7. Administration machines MUST be able to route to both the Pool FQDN as well as the Front End FQDN of every Front End in the pool(s) to be managed. In addition, there can be no NAT device in the path of communication to the Front Ends. Again, this is a restriction enforced by the usage of the RPC protocol by DCOM.

So that covers the load balancer requirements, the supported network requirements and topologies and the NAT modes that are supported. But you should also review our public documentation here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/FX011526591033.aspx and read the whitepapers available for the three hardware load balancers that were tested. From those docs you should get a good overview and feel for how to configure your hardware load balancer.

http://www.cainetworks.com/papers/webmux/lcs2005.htm

http://www.f5.com/solutions/deployment/index_lcs.html

http://www.foundrynet.com/pdf/wp-msft-live-com-server-load-bal.pdf

- Stu Osborn

Program Manager

Today is a really exciting day for the Office Communicator team because it marks the first time we have been able to share with you the full extent of our vision of what type of user experiences we believe must comprise Unified Communications. Delivering on this vision is a path we have been on for a while and there have been some major milestones on this path - we shipped Communicator 2005, which was a great enterprise grade instant messaging and presence client and gave a glimpse what was possible – but this beta really marks the first opportunity for us to share working bits with you that demonstrate our complete vision.

When we started the Communicator team, we were driven by a very fundamental belief - communications systems of today do not meet the needs of users in the workplace that they find themselves in. This new world of work – an always connected, fast moving, globally distributed world of work – where time to decision is a business imperative requires users to have a new communications experience in order to be successful. This was clear from the frustration users had with their current tools which was centered around four pain points

1.       Interaction Impedance Mismatch: Users were frustrated because the experiences offered to them by the current communications systems didn’t match their mental model. A prime example of this is the initiation of communications. Users wished to communicate with other users. However, they found themselves communicating with other users’ devices.  Because the systems didn’t offer the right abstractions so that users could have interactions that matched their mental model, there were instead exposed to the details having to make a choice whether to call a person’s office phone number, or their mobile phone number, or disturb them and call them at home

2.       Unproductive Communications: The new workplace that users found themselves in demanded increased and quicker communications but instead they discovered that most of their attempts at communicating were not successful. In fact a Gartner study indicated that over 70% of all phone calls end up in voicemail. And given the multitude of devices people had – that pain got compounded with people having to leave a voicemail on multiple systems

3.       Splintered Communications:  Technological advances were giving users multiple means of communications.  This should have made the users more productive and efficient, but what they found was that the availability of a communications medium was predicated on the application they happened to be in. If a user was currently using an email client – she could only have an asynchronous text based communication. If she was using chat software her only choice was a real-time text communications. With a phone it was voice and with conferencing software it had to be data. What users wanted was access to the all modalities and not to have to switch applications just so they could use the most productive medium.

4.       Siloed Communications: Even the few systems that offered some level of integration by providing multiple communication modalities were not integrated with applications. Much as our team loves building communication applications, it was clear to us from the beginning that communications is not the primary goal of most users. It is an absolutely crucial task they engage in – but they engage in their communications in context of workflows, business processes and projects that actually are the primary part of their job.

So we found that users were not able to realize their potential and be as productive as they could be and despite all this deep need all that was being offered to them by other vendors was more of the same.

We decided we would redefine the communications experience around the following tenets:

1.       People Centric Communications: Our system would let users communicate with users and take care of all the details under the covers.

2.       Presence Mediated Communications: Presence would be the dial tone of this communications system allowing users to determine the willingness, availability and capability of other users before they even initiated communications.

3.       Integrated Communications: We would break the silos between different media and different types of conversations giving a single experience that encompassed text and voice, real time and asynchronous and two part and multi-party conversations

4.       Contextual Conversations: We would allow users to communicate right from within the applications they used in their roles and also allow the context of the communications to flow between users

So here is the unveiling of the product that is built on the above principles.  Over the next few weeks we hope to engage with many of you as you give us your feedback and impressions on the product and we talk about the capabilities, design decisions and technology but today let me point out just a few of the compelling features we have.

·         Managing Contacts: You can now add Distribution Groups so that your contact list already stays up to date, you have a Recent Contacts group that dynamically changes to reflect the last few people you communicated with. You can drag and drop people to manage your contact list and use the new contact card for detailed information on people

·         Rich Presence: Communicator 2007 gives you great control over who can see what information about you. You can categorize people as “Personal”, “Team”, “Company” or “Public” and decide what information they get to see about you

·         Managing Conversations: All your conversations can be archived in Exchange and viewed via Outlook.  So now you can have a single view of your conversation history from all machines.

·         Office 2007 Integration: You can now initiate all your communications right from inside the tools you are most familiar with. You can also use OneNote to take notes during conversations and these are archived with the rest of your calls

·         Conferencing: You can add up to a 100 people in an IM, audio or video conference all with drag and drop ease.

·         And of course VoIP, VoIP, VoIP: With this release Communicator is a full featured soft phone allowing you to finally get rid of that plastic device called a telephone you were forced to have. Not only does Communicator have all the functionality you need – including Hold, Transfer and Conference – it also has features you haven’t seen in the telephony world – like adding a subject line to a phone call or marking the call as important. For all you mobile users – Communicator provides VPN-less access to voice so that you can make calls to anyone from anywhere without first having to dial in to your corporate network!

Speaking of which, I need to make a call to our team in Redmond congratulating them on this release and I am going to do it right from my hotel room in Zurich, Switzerland using Communicator 2007.

To download the Office Communications Server 2007 Public Beta and start to enjoy the power of IM/Presence, web conferencing and Voice…..click here.

-          Amritansh Raghav

Director, Office Communicator Team