Category Archives: UC&C

Very cool news from Microsoft on Friday: they’ve released the production version of the Exchange Load Generator (LoadGen) tool, formerly codenamed “Swordfish”. There are 32-bit and 64-bit versions available, both of which include documentation. LoadGen is a major change from the older LoadSim tool, in that it’s tailored to better reflect actual performance of Exchange 2007 + Outlook 2003/2007. Kudos to Jeff Mealiffe and his team at Microsoft for this release (and thanks to Jessie Zhu, who helped me figure out how to effectively use it!) Look for more on LoadGen in this week’s Exchange UPDATE newsletter.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

MVP Jeff Centimano asked a good question on a private mailing list about why he couldn’t get his 32-bit test server to fetch automatic anti-spam updates from Microsoft Update. Answer: that functionality is purposefully disabled in the 32-bit builds, since they’re not supported for production use. Scott Schnoll has a great blog post that describes the other differences between 32- and 64-bit Exchange 2007 (plus the differences between Standard and Enterprise).

Bill Gates has a new job. Dial 425 707 7500 to find out what it is.

Just got a press release from MS’ PR firm: Exchange 2007 releases to manufacturing tomorrow, 8 December. (So does Forefront Security for Exchange server, btw). Happy news! Congratulations to the team.

Technorati Tags: Collaboration, Exchange 2007

I still haven’t had time to play with configuring Asterisk to work with Exchange UM, but luckily other folks have. Alan Dutton has just posted instructions on how to connect Asterisk to Exchange UM. The configuration looks fairly straightforward, by Asterisk standards anyway. I look forward to testing it; eventually I’ll have to go back and update my old post on the topic. Well done, Alan.

Ryan pinged me because he was getting this error on a test Exchange 2007 VM today. I hadn’t seen it before, but asking some smart friends quickly produced a reasonable answer: this is the message an Exchange edge or hub transport server produces when it’s low on RAM or disk space. How low? You’ll get this if you have less than 4GB free on the queue volume. That seems like a lot, but given how large disks on transport servers are likely to be, it’s probably reasonable. Anyway, freeing up more space on the queue volume solved the problem, so I’m blogging it for the next person who runs into the same error.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007

I missed this first time around, but thanks to the power of NewsGator I got a second chance. Ed takes a critical look at Gartner’s new report about Exchange 2007. Ed said a couple of things that got me to thinking.

First up: Gartner said “We believe integrating voice mail with e-mail creates business efficiencies via common access and command services, and that it will become a cornerstone of the unified communication and collaboration movement.” Ed said:

Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t get this. I hate voicemail, and the fact that e-mail and instant messaging have replaced it over the last few years has been a most welcome development. Why would I want anyone to do anything that encourages more of it?

Well, first off, if Gartner is praising something that you don’t have, it’s natural to downplay its utility. However, Microsoft is making a choice play here. If you want to use voicemail as a peer to IM and e-mail, you can. If you want to get e-mail on your phone, you can. If you want to save money by consolidating your voicemail infrastructure, you can. If, like Ed, you hate voicemail and want to avoid it, now you can deal with it without ever picking up a telephone; from your desktop client or Web browser, you can see who called you and listen to the messages when necessary. The point is that MS is making these things possible as a fully-supported part of the product, not a separate (and poorly integrated) add-in. In the comments to Ed’s original post, Henry Ferlauto offers some excellent reasons why unified messaging is cool, including unifying the inbox and providing CYA/evidence tracking.)

Second, Ed says

It’s interesting how many customers seem to be listening to Microsoft’s pitch for Exchange 2007, with its emphasis on unified messaging, without accounting for this additional cost. Microsoft is smartly using the halo of the Exchange brand, but the reality is they are pitching a new product at a substantial cost as the main innovation of this supposed-upgrade.

But that’s the beauty of Microsoft’s approach! If you don’t want or need voicemail capacity, you don’t have to pay for it. If you don’t want or need the other items in the enterprise CAL, don’t buy them. If you only want hosted filtering, for example, just buy it from EHS and ignore the bundling option. Given that IBM has a large number of add-ons for mobility and wireless, IM integration, and other features that are included in Microsoft’s core collaboration products, I would think Ed would welcome this pay-as-you-go approach.

Ed does have a legitimate point about Gartner’s upgrade numbers. In my experience, most analyst firms, and even software vendors, routinely miss upgrade market share predictions. I suspect that Gartner is going to miss low, and that more than 40% of the Exchange installed base will be on 2007 in the three-year window they predict. We’ll have to wait and see, though.

Technorati Tags: Exchange 2007, Unified Messaging

Not much activity on the UM front lately, as I’ve been moving into my new office in what used to be the attic. This is a huge upgrade, so I decided to upgrade my phone from my old AT&T deskset to a Mitel 5340. This required me to do several things.

First, I relocated the Mitel 3300 and Intel PIMG to my equipment rack on the other side of the basement. I ran a single silver-skin phone line to it for my work phone line (xxx-xxx-8308). I interconnected it with the house network and verified that I had connectivity to the upstairs office. The upstairs drop is actually plugged into one of the power-over-Ethernet (PoE) ports on the 3300cxi so the 5340 can get power.

Then I moved the 5340 upstairs; that was simple enough. It has a jack on the underside that acts as a passthrough, so the 5340’s plugged into the wall, and my desk switch is plugged into the 5340. Unfortunately, the 5340 only passes 10Mbps out, at least according to my switch. No big loss for my environment.

Then the fun began. From the minute I plugged the 8308 line into one of the LS (loop-start) ports on the back of the 3300, I could place outgoing calls by lifting the handset and dialing 9. So far, so good. However, the phone display said “ANALOG”, which wasn’t really what I wanted. The label for that display comes from the trunk service assignment name, which you can change. There’s a separate option in the class of service (“Display Dialed Digits During Outgoing Calls”) that fixes that.

My basic setup is this: three handsets at extensions 5001, 5002, and 5003, plus two analog lines ( xxx-xxx-8305 and xxx-xxx-8308). My desired end state is to have both analog lines ring all 3 handsets, e.g. just like a POTS phone would. That way I can answer either line from anywhere. So far, I’ve gotten 1 line to ring 1 handset, which is progress. Here’s how:

1. I created a circular hunt group, 5000, using day and night COS 1.
2. I modified trunk service assignment for trunk 9 (the 8308 LS line) to have a non-dial-in answer point of 5000.
3. On the multiline key set assignment page, I assigned handset 5001 button 2 to be label 8308, type key system, ring type ring, button DN 5308.

At that point, I had a new button on the handset labeled “8308”. When I placed an incoming call from my cell phone to xxx-xxx-8308, my conventional wired phone would ring, but the deskset connected to the 3300 wouldn’t. I then went back and modified the trunk service assignment answer point to be 5308, vice 5000. That did the trick.

I still have to hook up 8305, then verify that the hunt group sends 8308 to the other handsets. Once that’s done, I’ll be in pretty good shape, and it’ll be time to configure the PIMG to start answering 8308.

(I’d like to say I figured this all out myself, but that would be a flat-out lie. Thanks to the friendly folks on the Mitel forum at tek-tips.com!)

Technorati Tags: Mitel, Unified Messaging

One acronym you’ll see a lot in the UM world is “class of service”, or CoS. A class of phone service is just a set of options– think of it like a group policy object. The Mitel 3300 lets you define multiple CoS objects, then assign them in various combinations. For example, you can define a day CoS that has one set of behaviors, then a night CoS that acts completely differently (perhaps it turns off inbound ringing, or disallows all outbound non-emergency calls). You can define multiple CoS objects and assign them to different extensions, and there are different types of CoS for handsets, trunks, and other various types of objects.

Technorati Tags: Mitel, Unified Messaging

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, except when I blog it!!

Right now, I’m in the main ballroom at the Mandalay Bay, waiting for David Lemson to start his Exchange session keynote.

8:09: Talk about each of the areas where we decided to put features into the release. 4 more sessions this afternoon covering mobility, admin, transport, and how to get started on deployment. Show of hands: who’s installed a beta build of Exchange 2007? About 25% of the audience. Some of the things shown today aren’t in the beta.

8:19: core focus in Exchange 2007 in 3 areas: built-in protection, anywhere access, operational efficiency. Familiar slide, as it’s been the leadoff for most tof the MS presentations since Jan 06. Comparisons between Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007 in various areas (HA, etc). DAS instead of shared storage for clustering brings huge savings in many environments.Nice change: 14-day deleted item retention out of the box. Restore any database to any server via recovery storage group because all servers are in same admin group.

8:22: move-user-configurationOnly cmdlet: rehome a user’s mailbox very rapidly. Nice feature; I didn’t know about it. New best practice: do weekly full backups from the passive cluster node, coupled with CCR. No more daily backup requirement. “Big burrito”: nifty chart: same hardware and user load. 0.6 IOPS Exchange 2003 4GB, 0.32 IOPS Exchange 2007 4 GB, 0.13 IOPS Exchange 2007 8 GB: 78% fewer IOPS/user. (Ed: this is pretty sweet! 4GB of RAM is much cheaper than disk spindles.)

8:28: new compliance approach: create managed folders, then users move mail they need to keep into managed folders. Delete everything else! (Ed: this puts the onus of figuring out what to keep on users– many of whom will hate this.)

8:32: automatic Kerberos and TLS for all internal server-to-server mail, with automatic/opportunistic TLS (ed: finally!) “Domain Authenticated” e-mail uses mutual TLS, but no real details on how this works. Pre-licensing for RMS prefetches RMS use license on the hub transport server– useful feature for travelers.

8:40: demo of Outlook safe sender aggregation.

8:45: slight error in Forefront slide: he says you can have 7 concurrent AV engines, but you can only run 5 at a time (out of the 9 available). Recovery PIN for mobile devices lets you unlock a mobile device by getting a recovery PIN from within OWA– new post-TechEd feature. Exchange UM demo, which went better than any of mine ever did thanks to a better audio setup (and a better presenter :)) Screenshots of OWA, mobile device, and Outlook search: same search experience, driven by new, faster content indexer.

8:55: calendaring improvements, including the availability service. Eliminates calendar latency by allowing auto-tentative-acceptance of meetings. (Ed: this is one of my favorite features so I’m glad to see it getting some play!) Built-in resource booking. Scheduled OOF with rich text. Set OOF from a Windows Mobile device. Internal vs external OOF, with separate messages. “LinkAccess” provides admin-controlled access to UNC paths and SharePoint sites throuh OWA or from mobile device.

9:01: “open as web page” document transcoding: doc attachments converted on the fly to HTML (with pretty good fidelity). Better embedding of OWA in SharePoint. Now we’re down to the feature grab bag: improved ExBPA,

Big finish: RTM in December. 80K mailboxes in production at MS, all inbound mail filtered by Exchange 2007. December or bust!

I was really excited to see a huge new set of guides for configuring various PBX systems to work with Exchange UM. However, once I started looking at the configuration notes, I found that they’re still pretty basic (and in some cases empty). However, it’s encouraging that Microsoft is planning to work with its partners to get better configuration guidance out there.

Sometimes you actually want one account to have access to all the mailboxes in a database, on the store, or in an organization. In Exchange 5.5, you could just use the service account; in Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003, you have to resort to various kinds of tomfoolery. In Exchange 2003, the Domain Admins and Enterprise Admins security groups (and the built-in Administrator account) actually have an explicit deny ACE that prevents you from using these accounts to gain service access. What about Exchange 2007?

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