Russ Kaufmann

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Archiving Reports

Russ Kaufmann — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:10:00 GMT

While the OCS Resource Kit has some nice tools, I am not especially happy with the Archiving CDR Reporter. Yes, it is good for the basics, but sometimes it just doesn't have the features that I need.

Some optional 3rd Party tools that you may want to consider include the following:

I am sure that there are others, and I believe that the new Symantec IM Manager also supports OCS 2007 R2.

iPhone and Office Communications Server 2007 R2

Russ Kaufmann — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:55:00 GMT

One of the biggest road blocks when it comes to deploying OCS 2007 R2 is the lack of iPhone support.

Sure, you can use Windows Mobile devices, and yes, they rock. I love Windows Mobile. The new WM 6.5 version is even better.

However, I have also learned to love the iPhone and realize that there are way too many decision makers that use the iPhone to ignore it as a platform.

Thanks the team at Modality, there is an option that enables the use of the iPhone as an OCS mobile client. Check out their website at http://www.modalitysystems.com/idialog for more info.

Windows Mobile Device Emulator

Russ Kaufmann — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 14:36:00 GMT

One of the labs in our course includes using the Windows Mobile emulator to show how to install and use the Mobile Communicator client for Office Communications Server 2007 R2.

The question always comes up, "How did you guys set this up?"

The answer: http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2008/09/04/260.aspx

Planning Tools for OCS

Russ Kaufmann — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:04:00 GMT

I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to remind everyone that there are some great planning tools for OCS 2007 R2 and that they really should be used before deploying OCS. The more pre-planning and testing that is done results in fewer surprises and fewer resume updates.

The main tools include:

Planning Tool for Microsofot Office Communications Server 2007 R2
Edge Planning Tool for Office Communications Server 2007 R2
Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Capacity Planning Tool
Office Communications Server 2007 R2, PreCallDiagnostic Resource Kit Tool

The first tool is the Planning Tool for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2. This tool provides hardware requirements as well as topology diagrams for the proposed environment. This tool will ask a few questions including About the OCS services that will be used in the environment, including:

A/V Conferencing
Web Conferencing (Live Meeting)
Communicator Web Access (CWA)
Enterprise Voice
Monitoring
Archiving
Response Group Service
Conferencing Attendant
Conference Announcement Service
Outside Voice Control
Group Chat
Device Update
Federation, including Public IM

Then the wizard will ask for more information regarding:

High Availability - is it needed?
Number of Sites
Number of Users per Site
Number of External Users

And finally it asks about the services that will be needed for the users, such as how many will be using CWA and how many will be using Enterprise Voice.

When finished, you get a nice diagram of the enironment and sizing requirements.

The next planning tool is the Edge Planning Tool for Office Communications Server 2007 R2. This tool provides several reports for the configuration of the Edge environment.

The wizard asks several questions that include information on:

The firewall configuration
Using a single Edge or multiple in a redundant configuration
Type of certificates: internal certs or third party certs
SIP domains that will be supported
Web and/or A/V conferencing
Number of NICs per Edge server
Name of the Access Edge, i.e. SIP.CompanyName.com
and IP addresses
Conference Edge name and IP addresses
A/V Edge name and IP
Edge server name and IP address (meaning the name for the server itself, not the roles on it)
Director: None, Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition?
FQDN of the Director
Internal pool name
Remote access
Anonymous access
Automatic discovery
Federation: automatic discovery for federated partners
Allow list and Allow list information
PIC and its provisioning information
Reverse Proxy information

After the information is input, the Edge planning tool spits out several reports, including:

Best Practices Report
OCS Admin Report
Certificate Report
Firewall Report
DNS Report
Custom Documentation Report

The reports that are provided are excellent. They provide a great deal of information and the steps on implementation. I really like that you can take the reports and give them to the proper administrators when you have a large organization with delegation of administrative rights.

The Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Capacity Planning Tool can provide some good guidance when it comes to planning the environment for the number of planned users. It should never be used in a production environment.

The StressConfig.exe tool is run on a back end server (yes, SQL) and not on an OCS front end server. The documentation walks you through setting up client computers for the stress testing and is configurable so that you can stress based on Enterprise Voice implementations as well as other OCS services.

The last tool that I use on a regular basis for planning is the Office Communications Server 2007 R2, PreCallDiagnostic Resource Kit Tool is part of the OCS Resource Kit for the 64-bit version and there is a separate download for the 32-bit version. This tool is fantastic for helping troubleshoot voice issues for users that are outside of the office and for branch offices that have relatively slow WAN links to the main office. Running the tool will tell you what you can expect for your call quality.

Phone Number Normalization

Russ Kaufmann — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 10:11:00 GMT

Jeff Shertz has a great blog on Active Directory phone number normalization. I absolutely love his single rule that will normalize everything that I have thrown at it along with his excellent description of the information.

http://blogs.pointbridge.com/Blogs/schertz_jeff/Pages/Post.aspx?_ID=26

It is a fantastic read, and I highly recommend it.

QoS and OCS 2007 R2

Russ Kaufmann — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:55:00 GMT

One of the biggest issues for larger organizations deploying OCS 2007 is their desire to use QoS to monitor and manage voice traffic.

In the past, the only way to provide the description information (DSCP) to be used for Q0S with OCS traffic was to do the tagging at the switch port as the OCS voice packets were not tagged.

Now, according to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd441192(office.13).aspx if it possible to configure OCS for QoS using WMI and registry entries.

This post is dedicated to the great/fantastic team at Park Nicollet.

OCS 2007 R2 Documentation

Russ Kaufmann — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 13:33:00 GMT

Just as an FYI, if you didn't already know - the OCS team has many of its documents here that mirror the documentation in the .chm files.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E9F86F96-AA09-4DCA-9088-F64B4F01C703&displaylang=en

I recommend coming back on a regular bais and seeing if anything has been updated.

OCS 2007 R2 Databases Best Practice

Russ Kaufmann — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:29:00 GMT

There have been a some issues that jump out when planning the SQL environment that raise some concerns.

What versions of SQL are supported?
What are the implications regarding the different databases for the different OCS roles?
What are the implications regarding collocation with 3rd party application databases?

1. What versions of SQL are supported?

Answer: SQL 2005 with SP2 including both 32-bit and 64-bit, and SQL 2008 including both 32-bit and 64-bit.

Additional Info: You have to be insane to not use a 64-bit version because of the memory support limitations in 32-bit.

2. What are the implications regarding the different databases for the different OCS roles?

Answer: Lots. There is some confusion because of some Microsoft documentation. The documentation tends to lead us all to believe that you must have a separate SQL instance for each of the OCS databases: pool back-end, archiving, Quality of Experience (QoE), Response Group, and Group Chat. This just isn't the case when it comes to support and certainly is not the case when it comes to databases in general. Microsoft will support a single instance hosting the different OCS databases.

Additional Info: Performance should always be a concern when planning the SQL environment for OCS. The different databases might be best implemented on different servers for performance reasons. There is absolutely no reason for each of the databases to be installed in separate instances on the same server. It is a management nightmare to have so many instances involved in supporting OCS. The only real concern is that you can't use the same SQL instance to support multiple pools because each pool's back-end has the same database names. In the case of the other OCS databases, they can be collocated because they do have different database names, however, you need to keep an eye on performance.

3. What are the implications regarding collocation with 3rd party application databases?

Answer: See the answer for question number 2 above.

Additional Info: See above as well. It comes down to performance, database names, and support issues with different applications having different needs for patching and service packing.

Best Practice: Do not collocate OCS databases with other databases for non-OCS applications if it is at all possible. The requirements for service packs and patches may cause issues with other application databases if they are all in the same instance. Host the OCS databases on separate servers as needed for performance reasons.

User Access Control and OCS 2007 R2 Updates

Russ Kaufmann — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:28:00 GMT

I was struggling with this issue when trying to install updates from the available updates list found here: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=968802

The issue is a simple one, once you read the documentation - you must run the updates from a command prompt that is running with elevated privledges.

This is true even if you have disabled UAC (which I would strongly discourage).

Simple, but it was aggravating to me.

Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 have RTM'd

Russ Kaufmann — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:25:00 GMT

This is awesome news for everyone that has learned to love Windows 7 in its beta and release candidate versions. It is awesome news for me because I love Windows 7.

See the official announcement for Windows 7 for more information. Also see the official announcement for Windows Server 2008 R2 here.

To summarize the announcement:

Build 7600 is the RTM build for Windows 7
General Availability to be October 22nd
Lots of new Powershell cmdlets for Windows Server 2008 R2
Big improvements in Hyper-V and Live Migration
DirectAccess
Many other great improvements

Whooo hooo! I am excited and can't wait to install the RTM code.