Filter Pack found here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5cd4dcd7-d3e6-4970-875e-aba93459fbee&displaylang=en

And then and a handful of hotfixes for Windows 2008 R2.

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB982867/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4520

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB983440/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4410

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB977020/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=4115

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/KB979744/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=3993

The last three patches request a reboot.  Now I started the Exchange 2010 SP1 install, left it up after it told me about the missing patches and tried again.  Nope, you do have to restart the server.  So install them in the order above, click no on each reboot and restart on the 979744 patch at the end.

Now, while my server is rebooting, I must say these are some strange patches and hopefully Microsoft goes ahead and releases these as non-hotfixes.  Some admin’s may have an issue install hotfixes to get to SP1.  When you are downloading the hotfixes, make sure to grab Windows 6.1 x64 versions.  I should also note that this is for a Exchange 2010 server multirole box (CAS, HT, MBX).

Lastly, over on the Exchange blog they did commit to releasing an update to Outlook 2007 that will allow it to connect to Exchange 2010 SP1 Personal Archives.  Welcome news for any organization that cannot upgrade to Office 2010 right away.

More details tomorrow on initial improvements including some screenshots and DAG install directions.

Background: Clients connect to their registrar server.  This server can be the same server that hosts the user services or a separate box.  For example, a standard edition server is a good example of a register/user services.  The survivable branch appliance (SBA) is an example of a server that is only responsible for registrar.  Services/data come from another source (standard or enterprise pool).

New Features:

Backup Registrar Pool - Every pool can have a backup registrar pool that will accept connections for that pool.  The backup registrar while it detects the primary online will not accept connections.  However, once the backup registrar can no longer connect to the primary it will start accepting connections.  Client workstations when they login cache information about their registrar pool - both primary and second.

Example A

Let’s use two standard edition servers as an example.  User A is currently assigned to Pool A.  User B is currently assigned to Pool B.  Pool A is the backup to B and vice versa.  When User A logs into their workstation, they will get the FQDN and IP information of the SIP registrar.  User A will successfully login to Pool A.  Now if Pool A experiences a failure (drive crashes, BSOD, etc.) then Pool B will start to accept requests for Pool A users.  User A client will disconnect and then client will refer to it’s cache lists of pools, attempt to connect to Pool A again - fail and then registrar against Pool B.

The user will be reconnected and will be available to take/receive phone calls.  This is important.  User A’s data (contacts, information, etc.) were all stored on Pool A.  That is gone.  The pool information is not be replicated from server to server, so although User A is able to login, they will not have access to anything that requires the datacenter.  So you would be able to do in-house IM, desktop share, etc.  But nothing that requires the MCU - so no conferencing, adding a third person to IM, etc, etc.  This is great for your small/medium business that cannot afford an enterprise ready HA scenario/SQL Cluster but want HA for phone calls.

MOC 14 Client - Taken from Tech Ed 2010

Example B

In this example, we have two enterprise pools and each pool has two front-end servers.  In this scenario, if User A is connected to Pool A - Server 1 and that server were to fail.  The client would disconnect, attempt Pool A - Server 1 - fail and then connect to Pool A - Server 2.  The user information/contacts still exist on the database server and the user simple see a momentary failure.  This is similar to people see today with a R2 Enterprise Pool behind a HLB.  Now the difference in Wave 14 is that we no longer need to use a HLB for that failover.  Instead, you configure and use DNS Load Balancing (think DNS Round Robin - just fancier).  So the client has cached all of the servers in Pool A and Pool B and is able to reconnect to the correct registrar server.

If Pool A were to completely fail in this example, users would connect to their backup registrar pool (Pool B) and resume activities.  Again, they would be able to make/take phone calls.  IM, desktop share work.  Precense and conferencing doesn’t.

Branch Resiliency - I wrote about this in the New Featuresdiscussion before.  So the concept behind the SBA is a hardware based appliance that can support up to 1000 users at a remote location.  This server, acts as a registrar server.  What is isn’t, is an actual pool.  What it does have is T1/E1 cards for PSTN access, is a gateway and provides a failover in the event WAN failure to the primary location.   The SBA is a hardened version of Windows 2008 R2, will become a domain joined server and kinda act/feel like a normal server. 

Example A

In this example we have Pool A at the primary location (Standard or Enterprise) and a location with SBA.  Users at the SBA location would use that server as their registrar when they logon in the morning, but all of their user services (IM, Presence, Conferencing) are then hosted on Pool A.  In the event of a WAN failure at the SBA Office, users would continue to stay connected with their client but would drop into a mode that does not allow conferencing, etc.   Now, note that calls coming into that SBA Gateway would not have access to Exchange 2010 UM, you may not have Voice Mail.  There are some other options coming forward on this one.  If the SBA were to fail at the remote location, the users would not see any difference to their experience.  Outbound calls could go out the primary Pool A location, depending on what you setup for routing rules.  In bound calls to the SBA would fail if the device was dead/down.  Again, there are some options here that we can speak about later.

Lastly, it is important to note that when I home a user against an SBA and they connect via the edge (outside) they will traverse your network from your primary location, through the WAN and to the SBA to register.

One more note about the SBA.  Users who have already logged into a remote location with an SBA and the WAN is currently in a down state will have all of their information cached.  A new client however, will not have the SBA information cached.  In this scenario you need to have a DHCP server at the branch (or use the “mini-dhcp” server that comes with the SBA).

Example B

Same basic scenario as above but what happens if the WAN is down (and a local user in the branch).  The SBA would detect a failure, the client would determine there is a failure and as such the client would drop into the more basic mode (see picture above).  So if the WAN is down, I continue to make/take calls through the SBA.  Local IM, desktop share work.  But conferencing again is down.  I could call the PSTN conferencing number if I needed to get into conference call.

If the WAN is down and I’m on the edge, I actually have all of my services because the edge is at the location where my primary pool is and that is my backup registrar.

So hopefully everyone see that HA is greatly improved in Wave 14.  There are some additional HA scenarios with split datacenters (one pool in two datacenters) that we can talk about later.

We’re currently finalizing a video series of some of our internal deployment features, which we think is impressive stuff.  But before we post how great all these tools can be at a process improvement level, I wanted to take a moment (OK, several moments) to consider the personal implications of UC.  Please note my comments are largely focused at mobile knowledge workers - an ever-increasing group it seems - and perhaps most specifically at the younger workforce generations of that group.  Work from anywhere, with anyone, on almost anything - sounds great, doesn’t it?  And it can be great, if done correctly.  One of the major problems, as I see it, can lie in the work-life balance of the users of all the communications technology.  Because when you can work from anywhere, people also work any, and often all, the time.  Disengaging from work when you have teams spread across time zones, or with partners all over the world, can be difficult, causing you to drag too much work into your non-work life hours.  When work is a place you go to and leave on a scheduled basis, it is more possible and likely you can “leave it behind”.  Anywhere and always, all too often partners in the sabotage of our balance. 

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a UC&C advocate of the first order.  I just think we need some new workforce training, to teach people how to handle the distractions that large email volumes and constant contact can bring.  I recently read a blog post from Tony Schwartz at the Harvard Business Review site (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/08/savoring_your_time.html) that I think sums the issue of being able to disengage up in many ways.  Tony talks about how difficult it is to step away and appreciate life, the risks of working too much, and being unable to know who you really are unless you’re working -  sound familiar?  When was the last time you really took a step back and relaxed without a huge to-do list hanging over your head?  Study after study says we’d be more productive if we rested more, yet we’re all up late trying to catch up, hammering out our all-too-often ignored emails.  Seriosly, read the article, and maybe even buy his book “The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working” (http://www.amazon.com/Way-Were-Working-Isnt-Performance/dp/1439127662) - it will probably do you good.

Like anything else, identifying the problem and setting a goal is only half the battle; we need good habits to be productive, and many of us don’t have them. You can pick your own poison, but I think we can all take a good lesson from the “older” generation that grew up without all this constant electronic contact by trying to communicate better, not just with a greater volume.  I’m forced to admit that on a per-hour basis my father, a career city mamager, was probably much more productive than I am, due in some measure to the fact that he was freer to focus on each task at hand.   But we can’t go back, even if we’d like to, and there are many good things about our current tools; the issue is how to live with and not under the control of them.  For that, I’d strongly suggest task management guru David Allen (http://www.davidco.com/) and his “Getting Things Done” approach; it offers some outstanding real-world use and management techniques for managing the chaos we all seem to live in.

So, my advice, and I’m going to try and take it myself as well:  Take a deep breath. Use some vacation up -  and really take it.  Close the laptops during meetings and focus on the people around you.  Check email on a scheduled basis, not jumping at every “ding” as it arrives.  Schedule time to collaborate, don’t just fire off emails.  Consider if your organization can do a better job of truly collaborating, not just killing itself with a large volume of communications. 

Again, I’m still a big UC&C fan.  So, if your organization needs some help automating and improving live connections between people via UC&C, we hope you’ll reach out to us.  But not right now – It is Sunday night. I’m off to take a nice long walk, and I’m leaving my “phone” at home….I get way too many emails on it. 

Doug Splinter, CTO, Convergent

The topology of the complete solution has 4 components:

• SIP Fax carrier – this can be a certified IP-PBX, Gateway, or SIP trunking provider.
• Exchange 2010 – For automated fax delivery to email, Exchange 2010 can be used for “single number” faxing.
• Dialogic SR140-LL – the FOIP driver
• Microsoft Fax Services – Included with Windows 2008 and 2008 R2, the Microsoft Fax service leverages to SR140 driver to offer point and print solution, with end users connecting to a standard Windows Printer share for outgoing faxes.

Complete information about the Dialogic SR140-LL, including certified platforms and trunking providers can be found here. I’ll be posting a complete end to end configuration example in the near future. Until then, happing faxing!

Luke

Topology/Install

• Everything is different.  We now have a CMS (Central Management Store) which is a database which stores all of the configuration of MCS.  All of the information that was once hosted in AD, now is in a SQL database.  The interesting thing is that all of this information is replicated to all MCS servers.  So that means a SQL Express install on every MCS server!  For some this sounds crazy but the design actually works really well.
• Planning is key.  Everything is done in topology builder which allows you to configure everything about your design.  So all servers, certificates, everything.  So when you go to actually install your front-end server there are no questions at all.  Because all of the work was done in the topology builder.  This in theory makes the install easier.  It doesn’t necessarily make the design any easier.
• Survival Branch Appliance (SBA) allows you to deploy MCS to remote locations and allow for failover.  So the SBA is actually running an embedded version of Windows 2008 R2 and has a copy of the CMS database.  So if the connection between remote site and main site fails, users will continue to be able to make/receive phone calls (assuming you have local PSTN access - the SBA have T1/E1 support).  Users would not be able to IM/Web Conference anymore.  So the client goes into failover mode which is just making/taking phone calls.  If you need IM/Web Conference failover, then you would need to continue to deploy a pool server at the remote location.
• Dial plans are gone - they are now called sites and it gives you more flexibility over rules and such.
• Mediation server is gone if you have a gateway that supports Media Bypass.  The role is basically added to the front-end and the gateway becomes responsible for the RTAudio to G711 translation.  If you don’t have a gateway that can do media bypass, you will still need to have a separate mediation server.

Management Tools

• Everything is web based now.  So the MMC is gone.  This is both a positive and a negative.  I’ll do an in-depth look at Bigfin later.  I like lots of it and don’t like certain other things.  But all and all this is a very positive step forward.
• PowerShell - If you haven’t learned PowerShell yet, you need to!  Everything in MCS can be done via PowerShell.  There are some commands (like Exchange) which can only be done via PS.
• RBAC is now in MCS.  So you can give very granular control to different groups of people.  Want to give the helpdesk a very specific feature of the web tools, you can now do it.
• HLB gone (almost).  So no longer do you need a load balancer for SIP traffic.  That can all be done via DNS Load Balancing.  However, the ugly secret no one talks about is that you still need a HLB for webtraffic to multiple front-end servers.  That said, should be easier to setup.  And maybe we will see support for NLB.  HLB’s are still very much needed for the edge however.

Voice Features

• Call Admission Control - You can setup very specific rules for who can make calls across WAN links based on the total amount of data being consumed.  The nice thing is that you can use PSTN to bypass the WAN when it is full and you can make certain users override CAC (i.e. someone really important).
• Music On Hold - Every user has it.  Every user can set it to whatever they want on their machine.  This can be restricted via GPO - thank god.
• E911 Support - It exists but does require some additional requirements but the location based services that E911 is built on is very powerful.
• Private Lines - You can configure up to one private line for a person for inbound calls.  It doesn’t adhere to DND.  Outbound calls all come from your primary number and there is no way to have someone monitor/view a private line (i.e. admin/boss scenarios).
• Common Area Phones - It’s been well documented that new phones are coming.  They are stand alone phones requiring no computer.  Some models support hot desking and other advanced features.
• Call Parking - It exists.  No paging system exists.  So handy but not quite where everyone is going to want it for check box comparisons sake.

Random Other Tidbits

• No more CWA server role.  It’s gone and just exists on the front-end.  That means, no more CWA deployment just so users can set pins for dial-in conference bridge.
• Pins still exist for dial-in (as noted above) but the pin is also used for hot-desking.
• Caller ID.  You can do all sorts of fun things with inbound/outbound caller ID directly from MCS now.  No more having to do it on the gateway.
• Separate AV Conference Server.  Depending on how big your deployment is (about 10k users) you can separate for performance.  Otherwise, it’s still on the Front-End
• Director.  Still exists but it’s different now.
• RCC Support.  It’s there.  Not gone like some predicted.
• Dual Forking.  It’s gone.
• Response Groups.  They still exist but are more powerful.  No more limits on questions and such.  The web interface still limits but can go as many with PowerShell.

More information is coming soon including install screenshots and such as soon as we get the OK.

While you will obviously want to use a Med server and the native audio hooks for in-house frameworks, and in most scenarios where MS endpoints will be in the loop, if you’re writing high-end IVR components, you may want to leverage the direct SIP stack instead.  If you’re new to UC dev, stick with the med server.  But if you’re writing a bot to make 15k outbound calls/day, love the MS dev environment, and want to use a separate audio path (or even an app-specific SIP service provider??) without impacting your normal business OCS deployment, apparently the Microsoft UC dev team now has an answer for you…

Check out the link here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=B20967B1-6CF5-4A4B-B7AE-622653AC929F&displaylang=en

 Happy coding, all!

 - Doug

I’m almost certain (because I have friends in many other companies, some of whom work at the companies above) that every vendor faces these issues, and while we’re all certainly happy to demonstrate and illustrate our platform values, features and advantages  to our potential customers, I do have a request of the enterprise customer and vendor community:  try to keep an open mind as to the value of not just one of the vendors, but to the value of what you can build by combining solutions across them. 

 As a “middle ground” UC consultancy, Convergent has spent a significant amount of time building and integrating solutions using our Microsoft UC platform alongside of other platforms such as Cisco or Avaya.  While I certainly realize there are efficiencies and cost saving to be gained by consolidation, and appreciate the benefits of a rationalized/dynamic IT Enterprise Architecture as much as anyone (plug: please, read the book Jeanne Ross wrote on IT EA if you get a chance or re-read if you haven’t looked at it lately, it is a great review) it seems to us that too often enterprise customers, with the sometimes avid support of UC vendors,  are encouraging an overly competitive landscape rather than looking for a joint solution that leverages several to achieve the best overall results.

In the mid-market, I realize that pure cost considerations may force a single platform, and enterprise customers clearly want to and should hold platform choices to a minimum, but let’s be honest – not everyone is good at everything.  By leveraging the strengths of a variety of platforms and UC vendors your enterprise organization may be able to achieve results much quicker than by only evaluating one. 

While the sales side of the vendors may not always talk about it, significant work is done by almost all of the key UC players at an interoperability level to ensure you can build cross platform solutions.  And while Microsoft, in our opinion, may be the most developer-friendly of the platforms, almost all offer the ability to extend and integrate with external systems. 

So, next time someone tries to make a UC decision a company one vs. company two scneario, take a step back and see if perhaps the right answer isn’t leveraging several vendors strengths to your business advantage.  While there may be some overlap and duplicate investment involved, the overall business value return may more than compensate for the hard cost side of the equation.  And let’s not forget that part - the final goal of unified communications is to build solutions that solve business challenges and deliver outstanding value to the organization.  Nothing in there says the solution needs to come with a single vendor tag on it…

As an example, Convergent will be releasing a new Microsoft OCS-integrated product soon (mid-July, based on current testing)  called the Presence Integration Manager for Vocera.  For those who don’t know, Vocera makes a rather spectacular wireless communications solution focusing on the health care, hospitality, retail and library services markets, with health care being the strongest market - you can check out a Vocera YouTube overview video here.

While Microsoft US and Vocera are impressive on their own, we’ve developed some fairly deep integration between the two targeted towards the health care market, and thought we’d share an initial video of the presence integration as an example of what we can do.   The initial video showcases displaying the presence of Vocera badge users to users in the Communicator client, so users who sign in to a badge will show up as “Vocera - Available” or “Vocera - In a call” in a similar manner to how Communicator Mobile shows presence for Windows Phone users. 

This example, while powerful, is just the beginning - the final product version will add some IM, contact sync and other advanced features. 

Please drop us a note on what you think of the concept video - we’d love the feedback!

 - Doug

Now for a quick note from the legal department.  This is all a review of what has been seen in public screen shots.  It is not a review of the final product.  These are my personal opinions on the product and not that of Convergent.  Lastly, all information found here is “public” information.

So here is what Office Communicator Wave 14 looks like.  A few things should immediately be noticed about the new client.  It looks very different.  And I think that is a good thing.  The OCS R2 client looked institutionalized to a degree.  Now is the new client to “fisher price”, one could make the argument but overall the client looks much sharper than before.

Navigation

You can see four tabs.  The Contacts tab is currently highlighted.  Contacts can be displayed as either full height (as pictured) or back to the single one line version where you cannot see the person’s picture.  All of the normal functionality from R2 looks like it is there and a user could never leave this tab and they would have replaced the usability of the R2 client.  But we have more.

Next to the content tab is the activity feed.  Looking at some screen shots of the second tab we can see we have a “facebook” like news feed.  These are all of the notes, out of office messages for your contacts.  Now at first I questioned the idea of the “news feed”.  But as I thought about it, I often hovered over notes when I saw people had new notes to get a roll-up of what was happening in my company.  So I was already doing the action, it was just taking me a lot of time to complete it.  So I think this is great.

Now I do have some questions and concerns.  Is this now social networking?  Will the Outlook Social Connector plug’in feed into this also?  This is a fine line for Microsoft to walk.  They want to give information but they don’t want to create a system where people are not being productive because they are too busy checking their “MOC Updates”.

The third tab is the conversation history.  Which is a great add-on to the communicator client.  To be able to quickly retrieve a conversation and pick up where you left off will be wonderful.  I cannot think of any reason this is a bad thing.

The last tab, the telephone tab, is nothing more than a big dial pad and voicemail.  For some this will be great addition to communicator.  Some people found it very difficult to dial numbers.  For others it will just be a security blanket.  And then the last crowd won’t care at all it’s there.  Personally, I have no problem typing numbers into the search bar but others found this to not make sense.  So if this drives adoption this is a good thing.

In the next article we will cover some of the other interface changes we can glean from the screen shots provided so far.  Have a great couple of days everyone.

One issue I ran into when setting up the integration was with the current documentation at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff468700(office.14).aspx. The document states the following:

At the prompt, type the following command:

Add-ADPermission -Identity (get-exchangeserver).DistinguishedName -User (Get-User -Identity <AppPoolAccount>| select-object).identity -extendedRights ms-Exch-EPI-Impersonation

<AppPoolAccount> is the application pool account for the Project Server service application noted in the previous procedure.

This would probably work fine in an environment with one Exchange server, but in the event you have more that one Exchange server the “Get-ExchangeServer” cmdlet would return an array of servers, causing the command to fail with “Cannot bind argument to parameter ‘Identity’ because it is null.”

To fix this the command will have to be run against every server running the Client Access Role. One way of doing this is to use the following PowerShell commands in the EMS:

$CAS = get-exchangeserver | where { $_.ServerRole -match "ClientAccess" }
$CAS | foreach-object {Add-ADPermission -Identity $_.DistinguishedName -User (Get-User -Identity DOMAIN\AppPoolAccount | select-object).identity -extendedRights ms-Exch-EPI-Impersonation}

Which will then return:

NOTE: If this is the first time running the command the WARNING message will not be displayed – they only show up here because the command had already been run

After running these command the rest of the Exchange/Project Server integration steps can be completed successfully.

Luke