Category Archives: UC&C

Remember all the goodies I mentioned here? They’re all here. Expect review-age in the next week or two.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Unified Messaging

Good news: the pipeline of review equipment for unified communications is starting to fill up. Currently I have a GN 9350 headset (summary: love it, bought several for our office; expect a more complete review later this week) that can work both with desk phones and VoIP softphones like Communicator and a Samsung 225uw monitor with an integrated camera and mike. I just heard from my Polycom contact that I should expect a grand slam from them in the next two or three weeks: a CX100, a CX200 (aka “Catalina”), a CX400 (aka “Orca”; I’m especially interested in testing this), and the elusive CX700. I’m also eagerly awaiting the arrival of a Dialogic DMG1008 gateway, which provides 8 analog ports for use with an OCS 2007 mediation server. (For a good rundown of Dialogic’s product line, see this deck; I haven’t found anything as clear on their own site yet.)

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Unified Messaging

Ed Banti briefed me on Exchange 2007 SP1 a couple of weeks ago, but the things he told me were under embargo until the 14th. I wasn’t able to post then, but I wanted to share a few notes on things we discussed.

So far, MS is well-satisfied with the number of customers: more than 900,000 downloads of the beta, moving to over 300,000 full evaluations and 260,000 trial usages of the packaged virtual machine demos they’ve been shipping. The Unisys-hosted trial system has been hosting an average of 1000 trial accounts per week; all of these numbers exceeded the product team’s expectations.

The Exchange team focused on two primary areas when deciding what to include in SP1: general planning inputs (including customer feedback and features that were in early 2007 betas but didn’t make the release) and feature criteria (including improving the OWA feature set and hitting particular customer scenarios for HA and management, among others). The result of this focus is a set of features that cover the “three pillars” originally used as the rationale for Exchange 2007’s launch: anywhere access, operational efficiency, and built-in protection.

What does this mean in practical terms? Here’s a laundry list:

• improvements to unified messaging and support for OCS 2007, including using Exchange UM to provide voice mail services for OCS calls. IMHO the big burrito here is being able to generate a message waiting indicator (MWI) for Communicator clients, but the new security features (including SRTP and secure SIP support) are welcome too.
• Public folder management tools in EMC, plus public folder access from within OWA
• Support for Windows Server 2008 (“Longhorn”), as well as support for Windows Vista for the Exchange management tools. One major change from the original plan is that the UM role can now run on Windows Server 2008; the original plan called for it to run on Windows Server 2003 only.
• Expanded support for clustering (including clustering support in the EMC)
• SCR
• A greatly Improved OWA, with support for custom forms, a server-side rules editor, the return of S/MIME support, and better support for self-service functions like remote device wipe and deleted item recovery. Bonus item: the HTML document transcoder now displays Office 2007 docs properly.
• support for slipstream installations
• several new Web services, including public folder access, delegate management, delegate access, and folder-level permissions
• 28 new Exchange ActiveSync policies for various aspects of device behavior, including encryption, authentication, and device, network, and app control. Note that these policies require Windows Mobile 6.0 devices, but they give you some nifty new features (like policies to turn off WiFi or cameras, or to enforce the use of S/MIME).

One of the biggest changes in SP1, of course, is the long-awaited standby continuous replication (SCR) feature. Beta 2 of SP1 includes SCR, so you can begin testing it in your own environments. I’m looking forward to setting up CCR on Longhorn, which should be a lot of fun to experiment with. In addition, the OWA improvements help make OWA that much more useful, especially for organizations that require S/MIME. Microsoft naturally warns that you shouldn’t use SP1 in production, but it’s fine for use on test and demo systems.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Unified Messaging

Microsoft’s really come a long way in how they market their products. Exchange 2003 offered a test-drive version of Outlook Web Access, and Exchange 2007 has expanded on that theme by offering test-drive and downloadable versions. OCS 2007 has upped the ante by offering some very cool virtual labs that you can use to play around with the OCS software. You can do a variety of things, including setting up UM on an Exchange 2007 server, setting up conferencing, and deploying Communicator 2007. My personal preference is usually to download the bits and set up my own VMs, but this is a nifty time-saving way to play with OCS with minimal investment of time on your part. 

If you work in the messaging or UC space, and you’re not reading the VoiceCon ENews and VoiceCon UC eWeekly e-mail newsletters, you probably should be. The last two issues have been particularly interesting: Enews issue 181 pointed out what a huge impact the iPhone’s going to have on the mobile device industry, and issue 30 of the UC eWeekly has some sage advice about buying (or not buying!) PBX systems.

Technorati Tags: Mitel

With all the hype surrounding the iPhone, I thought I’d stick my oar in the water and talk about iPhone from the perspective of someone who depends on Windows Mobile devices to get my daily work done. Over the last couple of years, I’ve chronicled my experiences with various Windows Mobile devices, including the Treo 700w. Despite its flaws, I’ve come to depend on the Treo to help me stay organized and in touch when I’m traveling or otherwise out of the office. I’ve recently replaced the 700w with a pre-release device from a major OEM running Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional, and it’s a major improvement over WM5. In particular, the new Exchange 2007 support features (HTML mail and message flagging chief among them) really give me a productivity boost.

Originally I wasn’t going to buy an iPhone, but once I got my hands on one my resolve weakened, and quickly. I ordered one from AT&T on July 4th and had it in my hands on the 6th. I added it as an additional line on my existing AT&T plan, and I was off to the races. (And no, I don’t think the iPhone plan price is excessive; as for the device price, I’m betting I’ll get more than $600 worth of value from the device over its lifetime.)

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing an irregular series of posts on various aspects of the iPhone vs the other device I’m using. There’s a lot of good in both platforms; likewise, each of them has some shortcomings. Which one will win? That’s a misleading question, as there are too many different dimensions of use to pick a single winner. Stay tuned to see how it comes out!

Technorati Tags: iPhone

John is on the road again; this time he’s at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver, showing off a very cool new solution we’ve built for a major international relief organization. The solution uses Z5’s extremely cool Nomad hardware platform, which is enough to make it cool in a doomsday sort of way. Perhaps Z5 will let me borrow one as part of our family emergency preparedness plan.

Technorati Tags: 3sharp

The Exchange team blog has a wonderful explanation of the ins and outs of Exchange 2007 certificate management and issuance, including a guide to using the elusive SAN certificate. Go read it now.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

So, I’ve been using (and loving!) Exchange 2007 UM at two sites: my home and our office. At the office, we’ve all noticed an annoying behavior in the default auto-attendant: after you specify the name of the person you’re calling, it asks you to press 1 to leave a voice message. If you ignore that prompt, it says “Okay, dialing…” and does its thing. We couldn’t find a way to turn it off, until I noticed this unobtrusive checkbox in the UM auto attendant properties dialog:

It turns out that, in this context, “Allow callers to send voice messages” really means “annoy callers with prompts to leave voice messages instead of putting them through and then letting them leave a VM if the called party doesn’t answer”. Unchecking that box provided exactly the behavior we were looking for.

Technorati Tags: 3sharp, Exchange 2007, Unified Messaging

I’m in phone-shopping mode again. I was thinking about getting in line for an iPhone, but I think this new phone suits me to an R a T.

Great news: Microsoft is changing the Exchange 2007 licensing model so that you can use managed default folders (part of the “messaging records management” feature set) with the standard client access license (CAL). Originally, to use managed folders you had to pony up for the Enterprise CAL, which also includes Forefront, Exchange Hosted Filtering, unified messaging, and premium journaling. You also still need the Enterprise CAL if you want to use managed custom folders. Still, this is a welcome change. I still think the Exchange licensing model is complex and confusing to customers, but now it’s a bit better.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

Glad to see someone else in the press picking up on this: Michael Osterman just posted an article wherein he points out that claims that 25% of the Exchange installed base will migrate to Linux are, shall we say, overblown.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

So I’ve gotten three or four requests for detailed instructions on how to fix the situation that happens when you say “no” when Exchange 2007 setup asks if you have any pre-Outlook 2007 clients. In that case, Exchange doesn’t create a public folder store, but you need one for legacy client support. To fix this problem, here’s what to do in a brand-new Exchange environment:

1. Launch the Exchange Management Console
2. Expand the Server Configuration node, then select the Mailbox node and select the server you want to create the PF store on.
3. Under the Database Management tab, select the storage group that you want to contain the public folder database.
4. In the Actions pane, click New Public Folder Database. Give the database a name and a path, then click New.

Once the database has been created, stop and restart the MSExchangeIS service.

If you already have Exchange servers, you shouldn’t need to do this. If you decide that you want your Exchange 2007 server to publish free/busy and OAB information through public folders, follow the steps above, then see this article for information on how to add replicas of the needed folders to the Exchange 2007 server.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

I looked all over the place to find documentation on how to set up Office SharePoint Server 2007 to hold journal reports generated by Exchange 2007. I finally found it after paging through about 10 zillion Google results. Here, for your edification, is the topic I found: “Plan e-mail message records retention” in the MOSS 2007 planning & architecture docs. With a little luck, soon Google, Live Search, et al will pick this article up so that searching for something sensible like “sharepoint 2007 exchange journal reports” will find it.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

I’ve been waiting for this since Thanksgiving. Microsoft’s finally started releasing details of the devices its partners are building for use with Office Communications Server 2007. It’s important to note that individual partners, including Polycom, NEC, and LG-Nortel, are building these, but that Microsoft is providing the “Communicator Phone Experience” software for some devices. CPE is a radical departure from the standard model of having a button-driven user interface on the phone that talks to the PBX; CPE-equipped phones have a friendly Communicator-like GUI and rely on direct communications with the OCS server to get configuration and presence information. (In fact, you log on to these phones using your Windows credentials– how cool is that?)

Some pictures to whet your appetite are at Microsoft’s UC press gallery. I’ve requested review units of the Polycom phones and will report back here once I’ve had a chance to experiment with using them.

Technorati Tags: Unified Messaging