This is the only current book that covers Live Communications Server 2005. Fortunately, it’s a good introduction. Joe Schurman has written a readable, useful book that covers much of what you need to know to install and manage LCS, even if you are fairly inexperienced. The book assumes medium familiarity with Active Directory, and it helps if you have some Windows admin background.
Schurman’s book, which also credits Randy Thomas and Bob Christian as co-authors, contains nine chapters and two appendices the first chapter is a discussion of LCS features, along with some coverage of features that only work when you use Office Communicator 2005. The feature descriptions are useful, but they don’t provide much more depth than you could get from Microsoft’s own website.
The second chapter claims that its purpose is “to provide guidance through the sales and deployment process of LCS 2005 at how to thwart competition in enterprise instant messaging market, which has been dominated by IBM.” This struck me as odd, although because the book is aimed at professional consultants, perhaps it should not have. There’s some detailed information on how to pitch existing Sametime customers on the idea of using LCS, and a good bit of material on the differences in scalability, user interface, and feature set between the products. Unfortunately Schurman doesn’t capitalize on this introduction by providing detailed migration guidance elsewhere in the book.
The third chapter focuses on integration between Microsoft Office and LCS. This is one of the strong points in Microsoft’s communication stack, but it’s a short chapter, and again largely echoes what you can already get for Microsoft’s own marketing materials.
Chapter 4 begins the real meat of the book with a detailed discussion of preparing the Active Directory environment for LCS installation. Schurman includes a list of changes to the Active Directory schema, a good explanation of the Active Directory groups that LCS expects and a discussion of the specific steps required to prepare the schema, the DNS, and group policy objects for LCS and Office Communicator’s installation. There are some holes; for example, Schurman doesn’t explain the difference between setting up SRV records for environments that use SIP over TCP versus those who use SIP over TLS. The differences are minor, but someone who is new to LCS might not understand that difference immediately. The discussion on GPOs for Office Communicator is good, though. Schurman also includes a step-by-step description of how to set up a test group policy object to check proper application of Communicator settings. There is also a good discussion of the ins and outs of certificate deployment for LCS, something that has tripped up many first-time LCS deployments.
Chapter 5 covers the actual installation of LCS including the differences between the standard and enterprise editions. The enterprise edition, with its logging, load balancing, and high availability features, is slightly more difficult to configure and set up, but not much more difficult to install. Schurman also spends time talking about additional LCS roles, including the archiving service, the access proxy, and the director. There’s about a page of coverage of actually installing Office Communicator and Windows Messenger, but it’s not terribly useful because it’s not very detailed.
Chapter 6 covers configuring LCS. To me, this chapter was not nearly detailed enough. Schurman touches on concepts like how to configure federation, how to configure remote call control, and how to integrate with outside services, but the details are skimpy. For example, the discussion of remote call control points out the user advanced settings dialog for individual users in LCS. Unfortunately, he doesn’t explain what any of the URI fields are for, what should be in them, or how you tell if they’re filled out properly. This is true of much of the rest of this chapter: if you already know what values to put in the fields, you don’t need to book, and if you don’t know what to put in the fields, the book won’t help you much. Perhaps I’m being unfair; it took me several days of concentrated digging through the LCS documentation, with lots of help from my PBX vendor, to get remote call control working. On the other hand, as LCS becomes more popular, and as more companies deploy remote call control and telephony integration, it’s reasonable to expect that a professional level book would include that.
Chapter 7 is only about eight pages long. It covers integrating Microsoft Operations Manager with LCS. I didn’t read it, because I’m not using Mom. Chapter 8 is interesting; it’s a collection of various “enterprise implementation lessons learned”. These lessons include what to do if you have a multi-forest deployment, which specific ports must be open between client and server; best practices for remote access; and a very brief discussion of how to estimate the amount of time required for a Sametime or Exchange instant messaging migration. Interestingly, there’s a section on implementing LCS for military and private-sector environments where security concerns, slow satellite links, or other considerations make things more challenging. While this was interesting, I can’t imagine that it would be of great value to many readers.
Chapter 9 is all about troubleshooting. It’s really more a collection of frequently asked questions than anything else unfortunately it doesn’t say anything about remote call control, the troubleshooting process for which is nonintuitive even to experienced LCS administrators.
Appendix A is a test plan which might be very useful to consultants who want a test plan to verify that there are no hidden gotchas in their LCS deployments. Unfortunately many of the troubleshooting steps, particularly for Office Communicator, don’t tell you what remedial action to take if the test fails. This certainly comes with experience, but it would’ve been nice to see more detail included in the test plan itself. Appendix B is a sample design showing the Active Directory structure, the associated LCS design, and detailed descriptions of the architecture used in a test implementation.
Overall, I recommend this book, though with some reservations. It’s certainly better than nothing, and it is the only LCS book on the market right now. Unfortunately, this book alone wouldn’t be enough for anything more than the most simplistic LCS deployment. Microsoft has a wealth of LCS deployment guidance on their website, and you should thoroughly familiarize yourself with it before you attempt to LCS deployment, even if you have this book in hand. I hope that for the next edition, Schurman will revise and extend material that’s already in the book to provide the additional depth than a book with “professional” in its title really merits. It saved me more than enough time to make up for its modest cover price, so I’ll be keeping it.
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