Your presence state when logged into OCS 2007 R2 expresses your willingness and availability to communicate.

By default the following presence states are available:

AVAILABLE, BUSY, DO NOT DISTURB, BE RIGHT BACK, and AWAY

Below some Q & A on Presence States :-)

Q1. Is it possible to appear offline?

A1. Yes :-)

How? Using the registry editor, or using group policies, you can add the following DWORD value to the client’s machine.

Location = HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator

DWORD_Value = EnableAppearOffline

Value = 1 (to enable)

You will need to exit communicator and relaunch.

Q2. Where does OCS get Presence Information from?

A2. Presence can be set manually, and can be derived from calendar information, out of office notes, and so on.

A very nice overview of presence and how the aggregated information is gathered and published to users can be found in this TechNet article

How Presence Powers OCS 2007

Q3. When setting my state to “Do Not Disturb”, my team members can disturb me, how come?

A3. This is by design.

When you set your status to “Do Not Disturb”, it will depend on the level of access granted to your contacts, if they can or are not allowed to disturb you.

When given the Level of Access of Company – Public – Blocked - Personal, that contact will not be able to disturb you, and see that your status has been set to “Do not disturb”.

When changing the Level of Access for a contact to Team, they won’t see the status of Do Not Disturb, but they will see a Busy state  “Urgent Interruptions Only”, and they will be able to send IM or issue a Communicator Call to you. (Changing the Level of Access, doesn’t require anybody to relaunch communicator).

Q4. Can I configure custom presence states?

A4. Yes.

You can configure up to 4 custom presence state per OCS-enabled user.

The process is clearly described in this article:

Configuring Custom Presence States in Communicator 2007 R2

And if you want to see how to this in a video, here’s a link to a chopstick I recorded a few months ago:

Custom States Communicator

Ilse

Yesterday Scott Schnoll and I had the honor to deliver a one-day pre-conference fully dedicated to the wonderful world of Microsoft Exchange 2010.

A few questions came up during and after the sessions, and one of them came from Tom De Caluwé who was interested in seeing how secure Remote PowerShell is. During my talk on Managing Exchange, I gave a demo on how you can use PowerShell v2, and connect to your Exchange server by establishing a persistent connection to it using the cmdlet new-pssession, as shown in the figure below:

$a = New-PSSession –ConfigurationName microsoft.exchange –ConnectionUri http://<FQDN of your CAS Server/powershell/

Import-PSSession $a

It is save to connect using http, since you use Kerberos encryption. Tom was interested in knowing what was encrypted, if the entire session was encrypted, or just the initial setup.

To make sure, we sat down, and used a network monitoring tool to see what happens when connecting to Exchange from another domain-joined machine using Remote PowerShell.

After establishing the persistent connection to my Exchange 2010 Client Access server  named demodc.nwtraders.com, we decided to create a mailbox-enabled user called Bumbalu, and this is what the sniffering gave us:

Looking at the output, it was clear that the session was HTTP-Kerberos-session encrypted :-)

Just as a double-check, we removed our user Bumbalu and we created it again, with a different password (all the rest was the same).

And then Tom used a tool to compare both sniffer results and the differences between the two streams came down to:

• different time
• different content-length
• different content all-together :-)

Remote PowerShell rocks :-)

Ilse

When talking about Exchange Unified Messaging, and often recurring question is “which languages are supported for which features”.

Time for an overview.

Link to bookmark 1 = Understanding Unified Messaging Languages

In this TechNet article the following information can be seen:

There are several key components that rely on UM language packs to enable users and callers to interact effectively with Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging in multiple languages. Each UM language pack includes a Text-to-Speech (TTS) engine, the pre-recorded prompts and support for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Voice Mail Preview for a specific language. This topic discusses UM language packs, the UM components that use the UM language packs, and how UM language packs, after they're installed, can be used to configure UM dial plans and UM auto attendants to use other languages.

Meaning, the following features are available in every UM language pack:

• Text-to-Speech translation so that content (e-mail, calendar, contact information, etc.) can be read to callers in the language of the UM language pack.
• The pre-recorded prompts, for example "After the tone, please record your message. When you’ve finished recording, hang up, or press the # key for more options." in the language of the UM language pack.
• Support for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) which allows callers to interact with UM using the voice user interface (VUI) in the language of the UM language pack
• Grammar files that are used by a UM server to lookup the names of given users in the directory in the language of the UM language pack

And Voice Mail Preview is only available for a few languages, being:

While configuring my demo environment, I noticed the following error message when trying to configure a set of Call Answering Rules for one of my demo UM-mailbox-enabled users:

“The phone number you tried to dial has been restriced.” interesting…

In order to be able to configure a call answering rule, which will transfer a received call to another number, we need to configure Exchange UM.

Let’s have a look.

Step 1. Configure Dial-In Rule Groups

By default, every UM-enabled user is allowed to dial any other UM-enabled user associated with the same dial plan. But, by default, any UM-enabled user is not allowed to dial external telephone numbers from inside the organization.

In order to enable UM-enabled users to dial any-one inside/outside the organization, from within the organization, you need to configure so-called dialing rule groups, which specify settings for in-country/region and international calls that will be placed by any UM-enabled user from inside your organization.

Both the Exchange Management Shell, and the Exchange Management Console can be used to create those groups.

Using the EMC, go to Organization Configuration, Unified Messaging, and right-click to select the properties of the dial plan, your UM-enabled user belongs to.

Select the property page, called Dialing Restrictions:

And add the needed In-Country/Region Rule Groups.

For example, any number that will be dialed with a Number mask of 03456xxxx (like 034562001), will be dialed by your configuration using the Dialed number +323456xxxx (like +3234562001).

Step 2. Configure Dialing Restrictions (Dial Plan & UM Policy)

After creating all the required rule groups, you need to define the appropriate dialing rule entries on the Dialing Group Rules tab, and you need to add the appropriate dialing rule groups from the UM dial plan to the UM mailbox policy on the Dialing Restrictions tab.

For the Dial Plan:

For the UM Mailbox Policy:

Step 3. Configure your Voice Mail options

Voice Mail options can be configured using the Exchange Control Panel, accessible using both Outlook 2010 and OWA. When using Outlook, you will be directed to a URL (!).

You can configure a call answering rule to:

- simply transfer the call to another number

- find me at the following numbers

When configuring transfer, the call will be transferred, when configuring Find Me, the process is a bit different, as described below.

FIND-ME or Transfer Call To?

In this example, what happens when user Robin Marstboom calls Ilse Van Criekinge?

1. Robin calls Ilse

2. Call is forwarded to UM

3. UM will present Robin with the configured Call Answering Rule menu

With a Call Answering Rule set to

“If the caller is one of the following people: Robin Marstboom

Then press 1 to transfer to 2001

For urgent matters, press 2 to find me (@ number 034562002)

Press # to record a voice message”

Robin will hear the following information:

“You’ve reached the mailbox of Ilse Van Criekinge

For 2001, press 1

For urgent matters, press 2 to find Ilse Van Criekinge

To leave a voice mail message press the pound key”

4. When Selection Option 1,  Robin will hear from UM “Ok, dialing” and Call will be transferred.

5. When Selecting Option 2 to find Ilse Van Criekinge (Find –Me)

UM will tell Robin “Ok, dialing, at any time press the start key to quit and return to the main menu “ and will place the call on hold,

UM will place a call to the configured Find Me number (in our example that would be 034562002), and the phone will ring, when answered, the following information is given: “This is a call for Ilse Van Criekinge from Robin Marstboom, to accept press 1, to reject 2, to hear this message again press 3.”

After pressing 1, UM will say “connecting”, and Robin will be connected to Ilse.

If Ilse would select  2, Robin will get the following information back: “Sorry I was unable to reach Ilse Van Criekinge, returning to the main menu” and the menu will be repeated.

Ilse