The Three UC Amigos

Exchange 2010 Federation Part III

2009-10-28T19:17:45Z

Federated Sharing offers two ways to share information with recipients in external organizations (Outlook Live/Exchange Online): 1) Organization relationships and 2) Sharing policies. Organization Relationships You can select between the following levels of availability information shared using an organization relationship: Free/busy access with time only Free/busy access with time, plus subject and location What’s great about this is you can scope which users to...(read more)

Exchange 2010 Federation Part II

2009-10-28T18:59:06Z

OK. Now we have a cert. Prerequisites The domain used for establishing a federation trust should be resolvable from the Internet. This requires that the domain be registered with a domain registrar, and the DNS zone for the domain be hosted on a DNS server accessible from the Internet. If the organization receives Internet e-mail for the domain, these requirements are already met. A valid X.509 certificate issued that meets the requirements for federation trusts. The certificate must be issued by...(read more)

Exchange 2010 Federation Part I

2009-10-28T18:42:35Z

So we must be talking about Identity Management. Nope. In this case we are talking about federating calendars between on-premises and cloud services such as Outlook Live and Exchange Online (when our back-end moves to Exchange 2010). This can also be used to share calendars between your school and partners to shared their availability information (free/busy) for scheduling meetings. In previous editions of Exchange we had to use tools like the inter-org replication tool to provide this type of integration...(read more)

Get some free Exchange 2010 training and chapters while it lasts

2009-10-14T05:09:29Z

Now that we have RTMed Exchange 2010 – where can I get some training? Well, if you act now you can use the free Exchange Server 2010 e-Learning Clinics for a limited time: Clinic 6899: Exploring Features of Exchange Server 2010 (two hours) Clinic 6900: Introduction to Exchange Server 2010 (one hour) Clinic 6901: Exchange Server 2010 in an Enterprise (one hour) Learn about the new unified messaging features, effective deployment scenarios, development platform options, and more. Take a look...(read more)

Exchange 2010 RTM. Woohoooo!!!!

2009-10-09T17:52:13Z

General Availability early Nov. http://msexchangeteam.com/default.aspx Enough said. I’m excited....(read more)

Da Dump

2009-10-08T20:03:15Z

Introduction The Dumpster. In Exchange 2010 we introduce the new Dumpster 2.0. This is a completely different Dumpster than what we’ve had in the past. An end user can do a soft delete or a hard delete on a message. The soft delete is when the item has been deleted from the deleted items folder – this item is placed in the dumpster. The hard delete is when an item has been marked for purge out of the store. There is also a hard delete via Outlook when a user uses Shift-Delete and this places...(read more)

Looking for OCS 2007 R2 voice training for your telecom staff?

2009-10-06T18:02:52Z

If you are looking for some voice specific training for your telecom team for OCS R2 there is an unique offering over at www.OCSforum.com . Tom Cross, the CEO of OCSForum, has setup hosted sandbox labs to test your voice configurations as well as in person training and online training. Sample of Live Online training Accompanying animations that show OCS voice scenarios Here are some sample course outlines: OCS 101 course with 5 day virtual lab: Explore Microsoft’s OCS-Office Communications...(read more)

Does OCS R2 provide ACD functionality?

2009-10-06T02:28:49Z

I was asked this by a university in Colorado: The answer is not directly out of the box however there is a feature in OCS 2007 R2 that provides a subset of ACD features (mostly departmental ACD features) called a Response Group Service. What is a Response Group Service? A new feature provided in OCS 2007 R2 is called the Response Group Service. It provides inbound call routing capabilities to call agents. There is no additional license required for this feature. Response Group...(read more)

Federate with Google Talk and Jabber and even AOL without a PIC license

2009-10-02T07:31:27Z

A lot of schools have been asking me when our XMPP gateway was coming out and it finally hit the web today. The XMPP Gateway federation interoperability has been tested between OCS 2007 R2 as well as OCS 2007 and Jabber XCP Server 5.4 and the current version of Google Talk. The OCS 2007 R2 XMPP Gateway is supported by Microsoft Support. The XMPP Gateway is licensed as Additional Software to OCS 2007 R2, meaning there is no additional license cost associated with deploying the Gateway for OCS...(read more)

What does Exchange Online and Office Communications Online look like?

2009-09-22T19:23:03Z

I have had many school districts and universities ask for demos and overview of our cloud offerings for Exchange and OCS. Here are some screen shots I put together of the BPOS offering: What is BPOS? BPOS is Microsoft Online’s Business Productivity Online Suite consisting of 4 main components: Exchange Online Office Communications Online SharePoint Online Office Live Meeting There are two flavors of BPOS. BPOS-S is BPOS Standard which is a multi-tenant approach and is capped at around...(read more)

What can I be doing now to prepare for Exchange Server 2010?

2009-09-11T23:16:08Z

I was asked this by a school district in Washington State which had Exchange 2003/2007 already deployed. Here are a few ideas I came up with for them: Step 1: Clean up Exchange, Active Directory, and DNS Run Exchange Best Practice Analyzer 2.8 with update ( ExBPA and ExBPA update ) from a workstation – fix any errors listed. I heard ExBPA may have a downloadable update to include pre-Exchange 2010 installation infrastructure analysis, similar to the pre-Exchange 2007 installation analysis...(read more)

New Outlook for Mac coming in next release of Mac Office

2009-09-09T05:08:03Z

Looks like the Mac Business unit is busy improving the Exchange email clients for the Mac. First they released the new Entourage EWS update and next they will be releasing a brand new Outlook for Mac in the next major release of Mac Office: Outlook for Mac releasing in the next version reflects the team’s commitment to further develop the Mac’s leading productivity suite. This new application will deliver significant changes — ultimately allowing for increased productivity across platforms,...(read more)

Where can I grab some OCS 2007 R2 Deployment and Administration Guides?

2009-09-04T06:01:21Z

This is a pretty common question I get from customers. Here are some great R2 guides/documents in Word format or all the 38 R2 guides/documents listed below combined into ONE CHM format file (great for quick R2 reference searches). Very useful for OCS administrators, etc. Download either format here . Here is a list of R2 guides available: OCS 2007 R2 Administering CWA OCS 2007 R2 Administering Group Chat OCS 2007 R2 Administering OCS OCS 2007 R2 Backup and Restoration...(read more)

There is an app for it

2009-08-27T22:14:23Z

Mark found this the other day. I’ve got screenshots now. If you have CWA installed all you need to do is download and install the client. From a company called Modality Systems. Check more here . I have some customers testing now. They are able to find contacts in OCS, can do Multiple IM conversations at once (see middle screen), you can also manage your presence status and control multiple channels of communications. Nice to see other clients for OCS....(read more)

Exchange 2010 Release Candidate available for evaluation download

2009-08-18T17:43:40Z

The RC milestone has been reached and made available for your evaluation as of today. Please download here and kick the tires in a non-production setting. Some HW prerequisites for the evaluation (Beta specs not updated for RC as of yet): Processor: Must be x64 architecture RAM:...(read more)