Tin Cups and String: The Convergent Microsoft UC Blog

So this is always a hot topic with people as they look at OCS 2007 R2.  If this is going to become my primary phone system, what kind of failover do I get with this system.  (Completely side note here - but I always find it funny when people ask this question and yet in [...]

As you probably know from the topic of this blog, at Convergent we implement Microsoft Unified Communications and Collaboration solutions.  Customer deployments aside, as UC&C advocates we’ve tried to make ourselves as much of a case study on how to leverage the technology as possible.  And while we certainly had some learning curve challenges at [...]

When designing a complete UC deployment fax services are a significant part of the architecture. Until recently physical fax boards were required in a fax server and (if you’re using Exchange 2010) a 3rd party fax server was necessary to provide inbound and outbound fax services, often requiring a significant capital expenditure. In July Dialogic [...]

One June 2, 2010 Microsoft rather quitely released an update (rev. 6907.205) to the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 UCMA SDK 2.0.  One little-noticed or discussed feature (so far) is the apparent inclusion of a SIP stack in the SDK for deployment as part of a UCMA application.  What does this mean for us as OCS developers leveraging [...]

I’ve been getting asked more frequently of late why enterprises should choose Microsoft over another vendor they may be considering as their UC platform.  To me, this is kind of an odd question to ask of any vendor in a quick overview meeting context, since I think people should start at their overall business requirements, [...]

If you know anything about Convergent, you know we eat and sleep Microsoft UC deployment and development.  While this blog has historically focused mostly on the deploy side, we’re beginning to put up solutions/examples of how to leverage your deployment with both custom and packaged add-ons, to share our experiences from this side of our business as [...]

Today was an eventful day in the land of Microsoft with the release of Office 2010, Sharepoint 2010, Project 2010, and Project Server 2010. One of the cool new features of Project Server 2010 is the ability to directly integrate with Exchange 2010 (and thus, Outlook 2010) without the need for a client install. This [...]

Quality can be an issue when you’re trying to record custom greetings to use with Exchange 2007sp1’s limitations of 8KHz, 16-bit, Mono sound files.  Sound Recorder is often used to handle the recordings, but it doesn’t do it well.  While researching a way to handle this better I stumbled upon a freeware application called Audacity [...]

For those of you that have had to apply the numerous hotfixes to OCS 2007 R2 servers I’m sure you’ve asked the following questions:
 
1. What version am I running now?
2. Does this hotfix apply to this server?
 
Thankfully Microsoft has (inconspicuously) released an application that will answer both of those questions for you. Using the latest [...]

Microsoft has released another round of OCS 2007 R2 hotfixes… many welcome bugfixes included!
 
Microsoft Ofiice Communicator 2007 R2 Client Update can be found here. Updates include:

976045 (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976045/ ) Error message when you try to add a contact to Outlook in Communicator 2007 R2: "Cannot connect to Microsoft Office Outlook to add a contact because Outlook [...]