The Three UC Amigos

IBM Sametime Federation with OCS 2007 announced to today

This is some good news on the IM interop front.

Announced at VoiceCon today:

IBM and Microsoft plan to support interoperability between Sametime and OCS, commencing with Sametime version 8.0.2 and OCS 2007

• IBM currently has a working system of OCS and Sametime in its lab
• IBM plans to make the supported interoperability described above available in late Q4 2008
• Both IBM and MS will make Presence and IM interoperability between Sametime 8.0.2 and OCS 2007 and higher commercially available to all interested customers, at no additional cost beyond standard licensing of Lotus Sametime and OCS respectively
• IBM and MS have leveraged SIP/SIMPLE to establish this interoperability

In other federation news, Cisco announced SIP/SIMPLE based Interdomain Federation with LCS 2005/OCS 2007 as part of their Unified Presence 7.0 in September 2008.

Net: With OCS 2007 you can now Interdomain federate with the following IM systems:

• Other schools/partners/vendors running OCS
• MSN/Live
• Yahoo
• AOL
• Cisco’s Unified Presence 7.0
• IBM’s Sametime 8.0.2

We are working on some other IM interop scenarios to be announced at a later time.

Exchange Server 2007 SP1 now supported on VMWARE

I get this question from schools around support for Exchange Server 2007 support on VMWARE and our answer used to be it is not supported up until about a month ago. With regards to Hyper-V, Exchange Server 2007 is also supported. Click here to see my Exchange 2007 and Hyper-V post.

As of October 2008, VMWARE has passed the Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) program for hosting Exchange Server 2007 as a 64-bit guest.

Below are the requirements:

• VMWARE ESX 3.5 Update 2
• Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 later versions are supported
• 64-bit Windows Server 2008 as guest OS

Here is a list of support boundaries and recommendations when running Exchange Server 2007 on virtualization:

Microsoft supports Exchange Server 2007 in production on hardware virtualization software only when all the following conditions are true:

• The hardware virtualization software is Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V technology, Microsoft Hyper-V Server, or any third-party hypervisor that has been validated under the Windows Server Virtualization Validation Program.
• The Exchange Server guest virtual machine:
• Is running Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) or later.
• Is deployed on the Windows Server 2008 operating system.
• Does not have the Unified Messaging server role installed. All Exchange 2007 server roles, except for the Unified Messaging role, are supported in a virtualization environment.
• The storage used by the Exchange Server guest machine can be virtual storage of a fixed size (for example, fixed virtual hard drives (VHDs) in a Hyper-V environment), SCSI pass-through storage, or Internet SCSI (iSCSI) storage. Pass-through storage is storage that is configured at the host level and dedicated to one guest machine.
  Note:
• In a Hyper-V environment, each fixed VHD must be less than 2,040 gigabytes (GB). For supported third-party hypervisors, check with the manufacturer to see if any disk size limitations exist.
• Virtual disks that dynamically expand are not supported by Exchange.
• Virtual disks that use differencing or delta mechanisms (such as Hyper-V's differencing VHDs or snapshots) are not supported.
• No other server-based applications, other than management software (for example, antivirus software, backup software, virtual machine management software, etc.) can be deployed on the physical root machine. The root machine should be dedicated to running guest virtual machines.
• Microsoft does not support combining Exchange clustering solutions (namely, cluster continuous replication (CCR) and single copy clusters (SCC)) with hypervisor-based availability or migration solutions (for example, Hyper-V's quick migration). Both CCR and SCC are supported in hardware virtualization environments provided that the virtualization environment does not employ clustered virtualization servers.
• Some hypervisors include features for taking snapshots of virtual machines. Virtual machine snapshots capture the state of a virtual machine while it is running. This feature enables you to take multiple snapshots of a virtual machine and then revert the virtual machine to any of the previous states by applying a snapshot to the virtual machine. However, virtual machine snapshots are not application-aware, and using them can have unintended and unexpected consequences for a server application that maintains state data, such as Exchange Server. As a result, making virtual machine snapshots of an Exchange guest virtual machine is not supported.
• Many hardware virtualization products allow you to specify the number of virtual processors that should be allocated to each guest virtual machine. The virtual processors located in the guest virtual machine share a fixed number of logical processors in the physical system. Exchange supports a virtual processor-to-logical processor ratio no greater than 2:1. For example, a dual processor system using quad core processors contains a total of 8 logical processors in the host system. On a system with this configuration, do not allocate more than a total of 16 virtual processors to all guest virtual machines combined.

I also recommend you contact VMWARE for additional recommendations prior to deployment of a production Exchange Server 2007.

For more information about the support for Exchange Server 2007 on virtualization, visit the following Microsoft Web site:

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=124624

For more information on SVVP see here.

For a list of other Microsoft applications supported on virtualization technologies see here.

I'll just use NTBackup

For years I've used NTBackup to backup Exchange database files. This is no longer possible in Windows 2008. I used this to backup files to disk and then copy these to tape SAN.  This is no longer possible on Exchange 2007 SP1 server on Windows 2008 because Windows 2008 has removed the option to take file based backups to disk. NTBackup is able to read and restore data from old backup sets, but is not be able to create new backups.

This is because Windows 2008 has a new Windows Backup utility that performs block-level backups using VSS and can only backup full volumes. Backups are created as an image of the original volumes using VHD files, with VSS used to track and store changes. This means that you cannot store backup sets on the same volume as the original data and that you need to choose an empty volume as the backup target.

When upgrading to Windows 2008 keep this in mind and look at other solutions to backup Exchange including using DPM. Some info on this:

· http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/library/00162c92-a834-43f9-9e8a-71aeb25fa4ad1033.mspx

· http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=173e6e9b-4d3e-4fd4-a2cf-73684fa46b60&DisplayLang=en

Correction - Thanks to tr!!! The Exchange Team is working on a resolution to this. No date has been set yet but don't expect full parity with the experience with Windows 2003 and NTBackup. http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2008/06/18/449031.aspx

Exchange UM - Cisco Update

Cisco Call Manager 4.x is now supported for integration with Exchange UM. That's right you can now integrate your CCM without upgrading to your infrastructure saving lots of money and including new features like:

Embedded Auto Attendants

IVR for integration with Calendar and Contacts

Single Message Store reducing licensing and infrastructure cost

Single Directory which reduces administration overhead.

For all updated info on integration with Exchange UM check out the Telephony Advisor -

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc164342.aspx#supPBXAudio

The config notes for configuring Cisco Call Manager and Audiocodes via IP-to-IP SIP Trunking.

from the notes....When Cisco CallManager Version 4.x is implemented alone (i.e., directly interfacing) with Exchange Server 2007, certain Exchange Server 2007 functionalities are not supported such as Auto-Attended, MWI, and T.38 fax transport mode. Therefore, Cisco CallManager version 4.x suffers feature limitations when operating with Exchange Server 2007. Upgrade to Cisco CallManager Version 6.x seems to resolve these issues, but the trade-off is an extremely costly investment.

R2 video demos

Here are six nice videos on TechNet Edge put on from the OCS product team:

TechNet Edge:

1. “Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and the new Attendant Console” | Presenter: Jamie Stark

2. “What’s New in Conferencing with Office Communications Server 2007 R2” | Presenter: Renee Lo

3. “What’s New in Office Communicator, Communicator Web Access, and Devices with Office Communications Server 2007 R2” | Presenters: Huat Chye Lim and Ashima Singhal

4. “Group Chat and Office Communications Server 2007 R2” | Presenters: Ashima Singhal and Bob Serr

5. “What’s New in Mobility and Anywhere Access with Office Communications Server 2007 R2” | Presenter : Avi Sagiv

6. “What’s New in Administration and Management with Office Communications Server 2007 R2” | Presenter: Anand Lakshminarayanan

UC Amigos invade Educause – Come by and say hello

Come see us in the Microsoft Booth tomorrow morning for Q & A, etc. We have some cool things to check out including two RoundTables, a SmartBoard and Microsoft Surface (very impressive demo).

I truly enjoyed speaking with many universities yesterday in the booth from around the world about Live@Edu, Exchange UM, Exchange CCR, Exchange storage, and OCS voice/conferencing. 

On Thursday, we have an ‘Ask the Experts’ UC session scheduled from 9 to 10am at the Microsoft booth.

As Bill mentioned earlier, we also have a UC roundtable meeting planned today. Join us if you can:

Title of Meeting: UC Roundtable Gathering group meeting

Meeting Overview: Meet with Microsoft to discover how  provide convergence with existing voice environment and reduce costs for improved ROI or “VoIP as you are”.

Date:  Today

Time: 1-3PM EST

Location: Peabody Hotel, Room- Challenger Room on Mezzanine Level (3).

Orlando FL. during Educause 2008

Agenda:

· OCS R2 discussion/Q & A

· Federation discussion and benefits

· Peer best practices

· Partner engagement strategies

· Microsoft programs- Voice Pilots and Lighthouse

· Partner solutions: 

· Feedback and Future Topics of discussion

For those who cannot attend in person:

· Toll-free: (866) 5006738
Participant Code: 222345

Addendum to previous post: When an Outside Caller leaves a voicemail, I get ‘A message from an unrecognized number’ in Outlook Voice Access

In my previous post around this, I mentioned there is an Exchange 2007 Rollup3 needed to resolve this problem but I need to be a bit more clear on that suggestion. The Rollup3 only resolves this behavior when the recipient of the voicemail is in one dial plan and the caller, who is also UM enabled, resides in a different dial plan. 

So what about people who leave voicemails from the outside?

The most common voicemail scenario, where the Rollup3 fix does not apply, is when someone calls from a number outside of your school/campus. The voicemail will appear in your inbox, where you can see the Caller-Id digits in the voicemail, but when you listen to this message in OVA it says ‘A message from an unrecognized number’.

                                                   External voicemail

Why does it do that?

I pinged the Exchange UM product team about this scenario and here is what they said:

OVA doesn’t play the caller id in the voicemail header by design.  Exchange OVA says “A message from…” and is followed by one of three options:

1. Caller name: if Exchange UM recognized the number as belonging to a particular person via GAL or local contacts lookup

2. “an unrecognized number”: if Exchange UM receives a number, but couldn’t match it to a person via GAL or local contacts

3. “an unknown number”: if Exchange UM didn’t receive a Caller-Id number whatsoever

Exchange UM does not read the digits out in case #2 by design because many people found it tedious to hear a 10 digit number spewed out at them in the header. 

What are my workarounds?

You have two options here:

1) To hear the Caller-Id digits read out, you will need to say “envelope information” after listening to a voicemail within OVA.

Excerpt of OVA voice commands and DTMF.

Note: You can grab all the OVA commands here. Makes for a useful quick start leave behind at a person’s desk.

or

2) For frequent outside callers, add them as local contacts in your Outlook client which will change OVA to read the caller name vs. an unrecognized number. You could also add them as contacts in the global address book if they are globally used contacts.

OCS R2 - Keynote at VoiceCon Amsterdam

Cached or not?

When planning for larger mailboxes a couple of areas need to be addressed. First where is the hit? on the server or on the client. If the client is less than 2GB than the client (Outlook 2003/2007) should be in cached mode. The client requires the RAM and hard disk to perform with bigger mailboxes. For example a 1GB Mailbox a client should have at least 1GB RAM and a 5400 RPM disk. With a 2GB Mailbox a client should have 1-2GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM Disk. It is possible to have mobile users with over 2GB Mailbox size but it's important to note that the RAM/Disk performance is shifted to the client and experience will vary by the parameters of the client.

Moving beyond 2GB Mailbox(OST) can be addressed by looking at what you are syncing. Review this blog from the Exchange team: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2007/12/17/447750.aspx

As you can see the bottleneck is the client as you continue to synchronize with larger and larger mailboxes. So you have 3 choices:

• Increase I/O on client for OST
• Move transactions for these clients to online mode
• limit the folders you are synching to the client.

Using the Storage Calc for 1000 Mailboxes on a single server with a 2048 mailbox quota size the IOPS/Mailbox changes considerable between Cached at .48 to online with 3.39. This change would need to be reflected in your design.

Another area that can affect poor performance is the number of items a container holds.

This issue occurs when an Outlook user works with items in a folder that contains many items. Outlook must perform several operations against the Exchange server to retrieve the contents of a folder. Therefore, when there are many items in a folder, additional processing is required to respond to the Outlook requests.

You can help avoid poor performance in Outlook by carefully managing the number of items in folders, especially the Outlook folders that are heavily used. These folders include the Inbox, Calendar, Tasks, and Sent Items folders and any other heavily used folders.
The recommended number of items in a folder depends on several factors. These factors include the client's proximity to the server, the storage infrastructure, the load on the hard disks, the number of users, and the number of restricted views.

It's recommended that you maintain a range of 3500-5000 items in a folder.  You can create more top level folders or create sub-folders underneath the inbox and sent items folders. When you do this the cost with the index creation is greatly reduced if the # of items in any one folder doesn't exceed 5K.

Solutions to help with mailbox management include:

• Use folder hierarchies to help keep the number of items in a folder to the recommended values.
• Use mailbox manager policies.
• Use client-based archiving solutions.
• Use server-based archiving solutions.
• Use mailbox size limits.

OCS 2007 Release 2 details announced today

We have been tight lipped about R2 for some time now and it has been hard as we have been wanting to share all the R2 goodness coming in a few months.  Finally, at VoiceCon today, we let the cat out of the bag.

Here is a highlight of some of the features coming in OCS 2007 Release 2 (Note: the screen shots I added here are beta and are subject to change):

Next-Generation Collaboration

•Dial-in audioconferencing. Office Communications Server 2007 R2 enables businesses to eliminate costly audioconferencing services with an on-premise audioconferencing bridge that is managed by IT as part of the overall communications infrastructure.

Internally at MS, the plan is to switch to OCS for our primary audio conferencing bridge with an estimated savings of over $4 million dollars per year.

•Desktop sharing. This feature enables users to seamlessly share their desktop, initiate audio communications and collaborate with others outside the organization on PC, Macintosh or Linux platforms through a Web-based interface.

This is accessed via Communicator Web Access where you hit this with your IE, Safari,or Firefox browser across platforms.

•Persistent group chat. This enables geographically dispersed teams to collaborate with each other by participating in topic-based discussions that persist over time. This application provides users with a list of all available chat rooms and topics, periodically archives discussions in an XML file format that meets compliance regulations, provides tools to search the entire history of discussion on a given topic, and offers filters and alerts to notify someone of new posts or topics on a particular topic.

This comes from our Parlano acquisition and has already gained a lot of interest in the schools I have demoed this to. I setup various chat channels such as the Engineering Channel, the Economics Channel, IT support channel, the sky is the limit with what you could do with your school here.

Enhanced Voice and Mobility

•Attendant console and delegation. This allows receptionists, team secretaries and others to manage calls and conferences on behalf of other users, set up workflows to route calls, and manage higher volumes of incoming communications through a software-based interface.

This replaces the Communicator Client for a receptionist, administrative assistant they can perform blind transfers, consultative transfers, import their bosses contacts, pre-stage recurring audio meetings, etc.

•Session Initiation Protocol trunking. This feature enables businesses to reduce costs by setting up a direct VoIP connection between an Internet telephony service provider and Office Communicator 2007 without requiring on-premise gateways.

I can see a lot of interest here since you can save quite a bit by using Direct SIP vs. using on-premise hardware such as a Session Border Controller. We are working as part of the SIPConnect working group to ensure there is fully interoperability with OCS.

•Response group.A workflow design application manages incoming calls based on user-configured rules (e.g., round-robin, longest idle, simultaneous), providing a simple-to-use basic engine for call treatment, routing and queuing.

This can be used for simple call group queuing/routing such as a departmental IT group it also has hold music, autoattendant speech recognition such as “Say ‘Printers’ for Printer support” and the recipient will receive an inbound call with a contextual reference such as “Printer help”.

•Mobility and single-number reach. This extends Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile functionality to Nokia S40, Motorola RAZR, Blackberry and Windows Mobile platforms, allowing users to communicate using presence, IM and voice as an extension of their PBX from a unified client.

New Developer Tools for Business Applications

•APIs and Visual Studio integration. This improves the efficiency of everyday business processes by enabling businesses to build communications-enabled applications and embed communications into business applications.

You can setup UC call flows with Visual studio 2008 and leverage an SDK for Speech server.

The worldwide launch of OCS 2007 R2 is February 3rd and you can sign up for the launch here:

http://www.microsoft.com/communicationsserver

There will be plenty more R2 information coming from the product team as well as in our blog around things like moving to R2 from RTM OCS, the new 64-bit requirement, etc. Stay tuned!

Hear how K-12 School Districts saved up to $15,000 a month with OCS!!!

Webinar: Streamlining your communication and Collaboration.

Agenda: Unified communications technologies, including unified messaging and web portals, help K12 administrators and educators streamline communications and collaboration across the district. But just what is a unified communications strategy, and what does it take to implement it?

Presentations by: Keith Price, Chief Technology Officer, Hoover City Schools in Jefferson County, Alabama; Debbie Karcher, Chief Information Officer, Miami-Dade County Public Schools; William E. Hagen, Unified Communication and Mobility Solutions Manager, Microsoft Education
Original webcast: 10/14/2008. Sponsored by Microsoft

Find it here: http://www.districtadministration.com/webseminars/webseminararchive.aspx#17

Come Hear the UC Roadmap & Meet the 3 UC Amigos at Educause 2008!!!

 Title of Meeting: UC Roundtable Gathering group meeting

Meeting Overview: Meet with Microsoft to discover how  provide convergence with existing voice environment and reduce costs for improved ROI or “VoIP as you are”.

Date:  October 29th 2008

Time: 1-3PM EST

Location: Peabody Hotel, Room- Challenger Room on Mezzanine Level (3). 

Orlando FL. during Educause 2008

Agenda:

·         OCS Future releases under NDA

·         Federation discussion and benefits

·         Peer best practices

·         Partner engagement strategies

·         Microsoft programs- Voice Pilots and Lighthouse

·         Partner solutions: 

·         Feedback and Future Topics of discussion

For those who cannot attend in person:

·         Toll-free:                        (866) 5006738
Participant Code:                        222345

How can I route out certain outbound domains to specific SMTP gateways?

I had a Rocky Mountain university ask how they could route specific internally defined SMTP domains that are sending out of the Hub Transport to an Encryption server. To accomplish this, a custom Transport Agent is required.  A transport agent is akin to the event sinks of Exchange 2003 where you have a custom .dll utilized. To read about what one is go here and how to write one go here.

I found a sample transport agent that provides similar functionality:

namespace FFRouting1
{
    public class SampleRoutingAgentFactory : RoutingAgentFactory
    {
        public override RoutingAgent CreateAgent(SmtpServer server)
        {
            RoutingAgent myAgent = new SRoutingAgent();
            return myAgent;
        }
    }
}

public class SRoutingAgent : RoutingAgent
{
    public SRoutingAgent()
    {
        //subscribe to different events
        base.OnResolvedMessage += new ResolvedMessageEventHandler(SRoutingAgent_OnResolvedMessage);
    }

    void SRoutingAgent_OnResolvedMessage(ResolvedMessageEventSource source, QueuedMessageEventArgs e)
    {
        try 
            {
                RoutingDomain myRoutingOverride = new RoutingDomain("contoso.com");
                foreach (EnvelopeRecipient recp in e.MailItem.Recipients)
                {
                    recp.SetRoutingOverride(myRoutingOverride);

                }

                EventLog.WriteEntry("FFRouting1 Agent", "My Routing Agent fired successfully",
                EventLogEntryType.Information, 555);
            }   

        catch (Exception except)
            {
                EventLog.WriteEntry("FFRouting1 Agent", except.Message,
                EventLogEntryType.Error);
            }
     }

}

Why does Exchange UM say unrecognized caller in OVA when name is resolved in the voicemail?

A question from a school in Utah:

The scenario was their Outlook Voice Access (OVA) was not correctly announcing the caller when the user was in a different dial plan defined in UM. This problem occurs if the voice mail message is from a user who is authenticated against a different dial plan. OVA announces "Unrecognized caller" even though the caller address is resolved correctly in Microsoft Office Outlook and in Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access. 

I found the fix: download and install Update Rollup 3 for Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1.  You can grab rollup3 here:

949870 Description of Update Rollup 3 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1

Exchange 2007 and Virtualization Part II

Mark posted earlier about Exchange 2007 virtualization.

My goal is to extend that post with information on the MBX Server Role. Microsoft support virtualization of all roles but the UM Server role. With respect to virtualization of the MBX role it's important to configure HA options that don't combine Exchange availability options with Hyper-V virtualization options. In other words Microsoft doesn't support using CCR or SCC with Hyper-V quick migration. Both CCR and SCC are supported in hardware virtualization environments. 

Virtualization snapshots are not application aware and can't be used with CCR for recovery.

Many hardware virtualization products allow you to specify the number of virtual processors that should be allocated to each guest virtual machine. The virtual processors located in the guest virtual machine share a fixed number of logical processors in the physical system. Exchange supports a virtual processor-to-logical processor ratio no greater than 2:1. For example, a dual processor system using quad core processors contains a total of 8 logical processors in the host system. On a system with this configuration, do not allocate more than a total of 16 virtual processors to all guest virtual machines combined.

Running Exchange 2007 SP1 in a guest virtual machine does not change the Exchange Server design requirements!!!!

The Exchange Server guest virtual machine must still be sized appropriately to handle the workload.

For details and guidance about sizing Exchange server roles, see:

• Planning Processor Configurations
• Planning Memory Configurations
• Planning Storage Configurations
• Sizing Client Access Servers
• Mailbox Server Storage Design
• Transport Server Storage Design

Supporting large mailboxes (for example, 1 GB and larger) requires the use of cluster continuous replication or hardware-based VSS solutions. Using hardware-based VSS is not possible in a hardware virtualization environment.

High Availability and Disaster Recovery Considerations

LCR, CCR, SCC, and SCR are all supported for virtualization environments.

Some hardware virtualization software includes features that support the clustering or portability of guest virtual machines across multiple physical root machines. For example, Hyper-V includes a clustered solution called quick migration, which combines Hyper-V host machines with Windows failover clustering. For more details about quick migration, you can download the Quick Migration with Hyper-V White Paper.

Choosing a High Availability Solution for a Virtualized Exchange Server

We recommend using the built-in Exchange Server high availability solutions for virtualized Exchange servers instead of hypervisor-provided clustering or portability solutions (such as Hyper-V's quick migration feature). The features found in Exchange Server (in particular, cluster continuous replication (CCR)) provide greater benefits than those found in hypervisor solutions that move virtual machines between physical root machines.

It is supported to deploy CCR or SCC using a combination of physical nodes and virtual nodes. As with all Exchange high availability configurations, you must ensure that all nodes are sized appropriately to handle the full workload during scheduled or unscheduled outages.

More info on virtualization for Exchange 2007 can be found on technet.