the UC Guys

Using the OCS Web Scheduler

There is a little known tool called the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Web Scheduler that allows organizations supporting users that don’t run Outlook or don’t have the Outlook Add-ins for OCS, to schedule Live Meetings or Conference calls.  This is a great tool if you support Lotus Notes users or other non-Microsoft Outlook based clients that want to leverage OCS Audio/Video Conferencing via Microsoft Office Communicator or Microsoft Office Live Meeting.

From the MS site: The OCS Web Scheduler is a 64-bit tool for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2. It provides a Web-based alternative to the add-in for the Microsoft Outlook messaging and collaboration client for the purpose of scheduling a meeting using Office Communications Server 2007 R2. It also provides a browser-based conference management experience that includes operations such as:

• Scheduling a new Live Meeting conference or conference call.
• Viewing and modifying details of an existing conference.
• Listing all existing user schedules of a Microsoft Office conference.
• Deleting an existing conference.
• Sending an e-mail invitation to conference participants by using a configured SMTP mail server.
• Joining an existing conference.

Deploying the Web Scheduler is straight forward.  A full readme file with instructions comes with the installer so be sure to read this as it contains all the info you need about getting it installed.  The Web Scheduler can be in installed on any OCS Server that hosts OCS R2 Web Components.  As well, you will require an SMTP server like Exchange Server for sending the email invitations that the Web Scheduler creates.

Once you install the msi you will need to do a couple of things:

1. Activate the Web Scheduler by running an LCS command.
2. Define the SMTP server for the Web Scheduler to use.  This can be done by an included VBS or by modifying a config file on the OCS server hosting the Web Scheduler.

Here is a quick tour of the experience.  The default sign on page will be https://yourdomain/Conf/Ext/Login.aspx 

After entering your credentials you are taken to this page where you may Schedule a Live Meeting, Conference Call, or download the Live Meeting Console.

 

Choosing the Schedule a Live Meeting you get the following:

 

As shown above, you are able to input the details for your meeting such as all the presenters and attendees as well as defining the security of the meeting (Open, Closed or Anonymous) as you would in the Full Console.  If you are running OCS R2 Audio Conferencing you can specify that the meeting is a PSTN meeting.  If not you can input a third party audio conferencing provider.  After you click Schedule the meeting invitations are sent out and you will receive an invite via email.  You can then view and edit the meeting on the main screen of the Web Scheduler.

Overall the Web Scheduler is a very useful tool again if you need to support clients that don’t run Outlook.  A couple of limitations of this scheduler is that if using OCS R2 Audio Conferencing, the scheduler doesn’t use a users’ default bridge ID and Passcode.  It uses random ones for every meeting meaning the organizer needs to check the meeting invite prior to opening the bridge for their meeting when opening the bridge from a PSTN device.  As well you apparently cannot customize the text in the meeting invite either.  At least I haven’t found a way to do this yet ;-)  If you do please let me know.

Exam 74-404: New OCS Voice Exam (Beta) now available

Microsoft has made Exam 74-404 available as a Beta through Prometric.  The beta exam is current titled 71-404 “Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 – U.C. Voice Specialization” The final release is anticipated to be ready by April 2010.  If you take the exam and pass you will not need to retake the final version.  It is expected that you do provide feedback on the questions if you take the Beta Exam is this will assist Microsoft in weeding out weak or poorly written questions.  There are no preparation materials available at this point however it is recommended that you take the OCS 2007 R2 Ignite training as well as have experience in setting and configuring voice on OCS 2007 R2 including connectivity to the PSTN and IP/PBX systems.  You can find more info about the exam here. 

Publishing OCS Edge External FQDNs for Internal Resolution

I recently started a new project whereby we are upgrading an OCS 2007 R1 installation to OCS 2007 R2.  On our first day of planning the client was hosting a kickoff meeting using Microsoft Office Live Meeting.  I was at the client site with my laptop connected to their internal network but could not join their Live Meeting.  I would get the classic error:

This seemed strange to the client as they had regularly hosted external participants given they had a full blown Edge server deployment and allowed Anonymous participants.

After the meeting I did some further investigation by enabling verbose tracing in the Live Meeting client.  The Application Event Log is no help in this circumstance so you need to enable verbose logging in Live Meeting as this isn’t done by default.  To do this I created the following two entries:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Tracing\uccp\ LiveMeeting]

"EnableFileTracing"= DWORD:00000001

"Tracing"= DWORD:00000001

After re-attempting to join the meeting and getting the error a log file is created in the %TEMP% folder.  Look for the latest pwconsole-debugNN (where NN is some number) 

There is a lot of info generated but after combing through it I found the following:

[MC] 18:21:17:785 GMT [PID 10700] [THREAD 9576]  [E] [X-PSOM]  caught std::exception: Unable to resolve host name: web.mycompany.com

Boom – It then immediately was clear that this organization had not published their OCS Edge FQDN’s within the internal DNS.  A quick ping test confirmed this host was unknown.  After determining what the Edge FQDN for web conferencing was, I hardcoded into my host file and we tested again.  This time I was able to join the meeting!

Some may think that this scenario is obscure and likely not to affect them since their customer and vendors would connect from outside the corporate firewall.  However, in larger organizations it is quite common for vendors and customers to meet together onsite.  I often have vendors onsite and vice versa.  In this case I was onsite and was attempting to join a Live Meeting anonymously for which I needed to be authenticated by their Web Conferencing Access Edge Server.  I could not reach it hence the error I received.  The server was reachable to me via IP but only once I hardcoded the hostname locally.  This obviously would not affect internal users since they would authenticate directly against their OCS FE server they were signing onto.

DNS is critical to OCS deployments.  Careful consideration is required when planning for publishing the required records to support all the use case scenarios in your OCS environment.

Check out NextHop on Technet

Dr. Rez and co have done a great job putting some fantastic content about OCS and Unified Communications on "NextHop" up on http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ocs/ee465814.aspx

Check it out!

Direct SIP: Cisco Unified Communications Manager 6.1

 

Microsoft has published a great “how to” on doing direct SIP with CUCM 6.1 here

The follow-up to this on configuring the Mediation server is here

 

These are great articles and exactly what you need when doing OCS 2007 R2 integration with Cisco CUCM.

Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging (UM)

I recently had the opportunity to attend an Exchange 2010 Ignite session and wanted to talk about what was new with the UM role in Exchange 2010. 

Exchange 2010 UM Architecture

The architecture is the same as in Exchange 2007 so nothing new to report here.  You can still do direct SIP integration with approved IP/PBX’s or you can use a certified VoIP gateway when your PBX can’t natively communicate with Exchange UM.

Exchange 2010 UM Administration

Since Exchange 2010 introduces the concept of Roles Based Access Control (RBAC) this feature extends into new UM roles with respect to Administration.  There are 3 roles:

• UM Administrator Can administer all Exchange UM functionality
• UM Recipient Administrator -  Can Provision UM mailboxs, facilitate PIN resets and clear lockouts
• UM Prompt Administrator – can update Dial Plan and Auto Attendant prompts

You can create your own custom roles that allow for even more granular UM administration if required.  This is a great enhancement as in almost all accounts I have worked with the Messaging Teams and Voice Teams are always separate and Exchange UM has always introduced political issues when it came to doing administration.  This solves that issue and allows the Voice team to retain control over the voicemail functionality .

MP3 Codec Support

MP3 codec support has been added to Exchange UM.  Although its not as good of a codec as WMA in terms of compression and quality, it is still a very popular format and allows for better support on Blackberries and iPhones.

Message Waiting Indicator (MWI)

This was a sore point for many Exchange UM customers that still used traditional IP/PBXs and required the light to flash on their phones.  You needed to use a 3rd party to do this.  Well now this functionality is built in.  As well, you can do SMS notifications.

Voice to Text Transcription

Exchange 2010 can transcribe an audio voicemail into text as part of the body of the voicemail.  This is great for visually previewing what a voicemail is regarding and even better since that text is then indexed by Outlook!  Fantastic for finding old voicemails.  This is also nice while in meetings or somewhere you can’t just play your messages out loud.  I’m told the transcription feature 75% accurate and will likely improve in future releases or updates.  This feature is very Exchange Server CPU intensive so Exchange only do transcription when not very busy.

Personal Auto Attendant

Another nice addition is the ability to create conditions when a user can’t reach you.  Rather than just leave a message you can setup alternative options for the user.

There are 4 kinds of conditions that you can configure with using Call Answering Rules:

• Caller ID
• Time-of-the-day
• Free/busy status
• Automatic email reply is enabled/disabled

There are 3 kinds of actions supported by Call Answering Rules:

• Find-Me (Exchange UM will attempt to locate you on up to two different phone numbers)
• Call Transfer (Have UM transfer the call to someone else)
• Leave a voice mail

You can record different messages for each call answering rule if you like as well.

Better CallerID Lookup

Exchange 2010 UM has a more enhanced process for adding CallerID information to Voice Mail messages so the experience should be improved over EUM 2007.  You can see the entire process here.

Protected Voicemail

Exchange UM now supports Microsoft’s IRM meaning you can mark voicemail messages as private if required just as you would with email messages.  For example you can leave a voice mail message and specify that it cannot be forwarded.

Fax Support

Native Fax support in Exchange UM has been deprecated in E2010.  Instead you must use a 3rd party fax product to support faxing to inbox.  This has cause some controversy but Microsoft claims it will allow for both fax send and receive rather than receive only in E2007 UM.

You can download Exchange 2010 for evaluation here: http://technet.microsoft.com/evalcenter/dd185495.aspx

BlackBerry Enterprise Server Support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2010

RIM has announced support for Exchange 2010:

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/services/server/exchange/2010support.jsp

Office Communications Server Team Blog : Interoperability support between Cisco and Microsoft products in unified communications

Microsoft has recently clarified the deprecation of Dual Forking and Remote Call Control (RCC) in future releases of Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007.  Specifically, the Microsoft Unified Communications Open Interoperability Program (OIP) will no longer provide vendors the opportunity to certify their products against OCS with support for Dual Forking and RCC. Direct SIP will be the only remaining functionality to certify against. 

This has many customers that have recently deployed products that had included certified support for Dual Forking & RCC in the OIP (for example Nortel’s Converged Office for OCS) concerned about what the future held for them.  Well according to this article, Microsoft will support these installations into the next release of OCS (Wave 14).  However, net new installations would NOT be supported in Wave 14 where Dual-Forking and RCC are concerned.  While the article doesn’t specifically say how much more time this gives these customers before they are faced with the prospect of what to do once the next release after Wave 14 appears, I would suspect they have until late 2011 before having to make this decision.

You can read the entire article here:

Office Communications Server Team Blog : Interoperability support between Cisco and Microsoft products in unified communications

KB974571 Strikes Again!

I was working on a Nortel Converged Office installation and while building out the OCS Proxy Server I encountered the following error when trying to activate the OCS Proxy role:

Failure [0xC3EC78D8] Failed to read the Office Communications Server version information. This can happen if the computer clock is not set to correct date and time.

The time was fine on the machine.  Fresh from experiencing a similar issue, I checked the installed list of patches as this server was fully built and patched (Server 2003 R2 x64) before we installed OCS 2007 R1 and found that KB 974571 had already been applied.  So we downloaded the patch, applied it (which updates the registry) and tried the activation process once more.   Success!  The activation worked this time. 

I really hope this gets resolved in a rollup fix soon as it will likely strike some unsuspecting OCS Admins :-)

See the full details of this KB here along with the updates to the issues that may occur. 

The Integration Myth

Despite vendor assurances, you can not integrate every unified communication component with every other component.

Presence status = Busy (trying to cram a square peg into a round hole)

According to the "integration myth" espoused in the glossy marketing brochures and "product roadmaps" everything integrates with everything else:

• All room-based video conferencing endpoints integrate with all desktop videoconferencing software.
• Desktop software vendors integrate with any existing PBX.
• Mobile phones work with everything.

Unfortunately, this is only a "myth" – and I use this term in the colloquially manner to refer to a false story.

And the story is often a sad one because customers make choices without knowing how the story ends.

Customers, who adopt a "best of breed" mentality, choose individual components and then expect to combine these components in order to achieve a superset of features. Visually they expect…

Unfortunately, because not everything can be integrated with everything else, the reality is often "swiss cheese":

Instead of a superset of the combined features, they either get nothing to work or they get most of the combined features to work but several core features may fail to work (the "holes").

And these "holes" of missing functionality that appear in integrated scenarios can turn into "black holes" sucking up hours and hours of troubleshooting time and effort trying to get the integrated solution to perform as per the "integration myth", a story which often does not have a happy ending.

As a concrete example, take Microsoft OCS 2007 R2 integrated with a Nortel CS1000 (aka "Converged Office").

Here are the user-accessible call control options provided natively by OCS 2007 R2:

And now here are the call control options exposed on the same dialog box after the integration:

After integration the Nortel CS1000 can arguably still implement many of the features no longer under user control (for instance team calling-like functionality via hunt groups) however these are no longer easily controlled and manager by end users.

There is nothing wrong with integrating Microsoft OCS and a Nortel CS1000. In fact the integration (although unsupported by Microsoft with R2) provides remote call control and telephony presence. What is wrong is that the "integration myth" suggests mashing up various UC components will yield a superset of features.

As PBX vendors add more desktop features, desktop vendors add more PBX features and mobile vendors (aka RIM) suggest all you need is a mobile phone, the effort these vendors spend on integration code diminishes.

From a desktop perspective, as Microsoft Office Communication Server itself includes more and more native features, the number of supported and certified integrations shrinks. As time goes by, OCS supports less integrations with traditional telecom gear.

 

As frustrating as this may be, it actually does makes sense.

Because OCS 2007 R1 did not include "meet me" audio conferencing capabilities, Microsoft pursued an integration with the Nortel Multimedia Conferencing (NMC) bridge to provide this functionality. When OCS 2007 R2 was released with its included "meet me" capabilities – it no longer supported the integration with NMC.

When OCS "wave 14" is released in late 2010, its goal is to include enough of the standard pbx features so as to no longer require integration with a pbx.

Turning our attention towards RIM, while they implemented a BlackBerry Office Communicator client for OCS 2007 R1 they appear in no hurry to release a client that supports OCS 23007 R2. Why would they? RIM would prefer you adopt their Mobile Voice Server as more of a core element. And until RIM itself provides all of the pbx call control features required, they are more interested in integrating MVS with traditional pbxs then they are in enabling OC on mobile devices.

Here's the central point. The philosophy of unified communications, at its core, values integration above feature count or feature depth.

Accordingly, "best of breed" and "unified communications" are diametrically opposed approaches.

A best of breed approach drove organizations to purchase stand-alone video conferencing units, many of which still gather dust in the corner of meeting rooms. Unified communications suggests that a desktop videoconferencing system with integrated audio and tied into presence, instant messaging and calendaring may not only be "good enough" but may in fact bet better. Better because it may lead to improved simplicity, efficiency and effectiveness. In short, it might get used and actually save a company money.

The best unified communication solutions deliver key business functions using the fewest number of vendors. Adding more vendors to the mix often reduces the number of accessible or supportable end-user features.

The "integration myth" would have you believe everything can be integrated with everything else. Remember this is only a myth. Think medusa: snakes for hair, a face that turns people to stone. Reality is not always pretty.

As you plan a UC integration, figure out your key business requirements, figure out the fewest number of products that provide the key features and make sure you are working with someone who has combined the selected products before. Document, plan, pilot.

Presence status = available (Content playing with round pegs and round holes)

Have you tried to force a square UC peg into a round hole? Did perseverance or frustration win out? I'd love to hear your stories.