Communications Server ‘14’ gets its new name – Lync

Our NDA has been lifted and we can now reveal the new name for the Communications Server '14 '.

The child has been named Lync, which is a combination of the words Link and Sync. Microsoft describes the name as more in line with the experience you get with a true unified communications product.

The forthcoming Communications Server "14" will thus be called "Lync Server 2010 and clients:

• Lync 2010 (Corresponding Office Communicator)
• Lync Attendant Console (As in OCS 2007 R2)
• Lync Attendee to participate in web conferencing with audio-video when you do not have Lync (For example, external users who previously would have used Live Meeting Console)
• Lync Web App which is the web-based client for web conferencing (without IP audio / video)
• Lync Devices are network units running Lync Phone Edition phones or conference units connected directly to Ethernet and Lync Server.

Lync Server is available as a download in Release Candidate version on Microsoft's website. This version will work until February 2011th. There is also a Planning Tool ready, and Attendee console, see the Microsoft Download all Lync downloads.

In addition to downloads, you can take a look at www.microsoft.com/lync or the press release.

One stop shop for all your OCS patches

Microsoft has created a really useful Updates Resource Center with all the latest and greatest patches listed for both Office Communications Server and the clients.

You can also find the updates at this RSS feed.

Note this is meant as a One Stop Shop, it is NOT the place where you’ll be notified first on a new OCS/OC patch.

Good work Microsoft ;-)

Maybe I should redefine “Office 2010 x64 fully working with OC” ?

I have now been working with Office 2010 x64 a week or so as per my post Office 2010 x64 now fully working with OC and LiveMeeting Add-in. I have some intermittent problems though – when I log-in everything works fine, then on occassion I get an -

The problem appears after a while and then disappears again later. Integration seems to work fine except that this problem appears from time to time – did anyone get the same error or no error at all? (Perhaps with only one Exchange mailbox – I have two Exchange mailboxes which has other issues – so it may be part of this problem).

Office 2010 x64 now fully working with OC and LiveMeeting Add-in

First part of the solution was the January Office Communicator Update to 6907.83 that solved the Outlook integration issues/error (Which forced me to “downgrade” to 32 bit Office).

The last part of this solution was the release of the 64-bit LiveMeeting add-in which can be found here and while you’re at it the update to the LiveMeeting console can be found here.

Before upgrading do remember that there is a problem with file uploading in LiveMeeting – only supported file format is native PowerPoint files. Also remember the workaround to make updating OC running 64 bit OS work correctly.

Happy installing/upgrading to 64 bit  ;-)

Workaround for Client Version Filtering problem using 32 bit OC on X64 OS

My colleague Claus-Ole also found and fixed the problem, but Michael Sneeringer (A OCS MCM) was kind enough (hint, hint) to describe the problem and solution in Client Version Filtering on Windows x64.

Getting Communicator Mobile 2007 R2 running on Nokia S40/S60 devices

 

As the current documentation for the Office Communicator Mobile 2007 R2 client for Java (used by Nokia S40 and S60 devices, among others) is a bit sparse in regards to client setup, I thought I would share this with you.

 

As you are probably aware, CoMo R2 for Java utilizes components from the Communicator Web Access server, but the thing you need to be aware of is this:


The Server Address (URL) that you enter when configuring the client on your mobile device has to point to the Communicator Web Access URL, not the Access Edge (typically sip.domain...)

 

Thus, if you need to support Java clients using CoMo R2, you need your CWA published externally through a reverse proxy (ISA/TMG recommended) - and those clients need to input a different URL than the Windows Mobile CoMo R2 clients (which use the Access Edge URL).

 

Hopefully, this will be spelled out in more detail in the documentation in a future revision.

Updates to Communicator Mobile available

Just in case you haven’t seen then there is a new update for Communicator Mobile that include some nice new features (Including support for WM 6.5).

Furthermore there is now support not logging on when using roaming networks(Which is nice when you’re in the US and Roaming data costs 12$/MB !!).

 

Find the update at getcomo.com (Directly from your mobile) at the Download Center and/or read more about the feautres at the Communicator team blog Communicator Mobile Just Got Better.

Little neat “trick” in Communicator Mobile

(With the chance of exposing how little I know about the Mobile client and/or how much of the user documentation that I have actually read).

This is the screen you get when you are logged on to Communicator Mobile on your device -

So when I want to change my status and or sign-out I have until now single-clicked the “Available” icon, waited for the application to start and then signed out/changed status.

What I have recently figured out is that you can click-and-hold to get a menu like this -

The same is of course possible when you are logged out -

And here is a small trial with a video showing the process -

Want to dial 1-800-flowers or 1-866-MSONLIN from OC ?

Many don’t realize that this is possible from Office Communicator (RTM or R2) – allthough I have showed it to the students at most of my boot camps.

OC according to my testing supports what is called E.161 mapping of characters to numbers (also known as ANSI T1.703-1995/1999, and ISO/IEC 9995-8:1994 or most probably similar to what you see on your mobile phone), so if you write e.g. +1800flowers in your OC client it will look like this -

The only rule is that you have to start with  a number, otherwise the client will think that you are trying to lookup a person in the Address Book.

As you may know Microsoft supports RFC3966 and here is what the RFC says about this (Thx to Dennis Klama for this pointer) -

5.1.2.  Alphabetic Characters Corresponding to Digits

   In some countries, it is common to write phone numbers with alphabetic characters corresponding to certain numbers on the telephone keypad.  The URI format does not support this notation, as the mapping from alphabetic characters to digits is not completely uniform internationally, although there are standards [E.161][T1.703]   addressing this issue.

What happens in OC, is that the character/number mapping is taking place client side and therefore the actual URI only consists of numbers.

Furthermore, my testing shows that OC supports the International standard for character to number mapping, but you should be aware that different countries in the past have had different regional implementations of the mapping. Furthermore the use of vanity numbers is unusual in Europe.

For your reference I have created a table mapping of characters/numbers that OC and E.161 uses

abc	def	ghi	jkl	mno	pqrs	tuv	wxyz
2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9

Connectivity information in OC 2007 R2

My colleague, Claus-Ole, just pointed me to a neat trick that I didn’t know of. In OC you can, like in Microsoft Outlook 2007, press Ctrl key while right-clicking the OC Icon and voila up comes a menu item called “Configuration information” -

Where you get a lot of information on your connection type, autoconfiguration ABS download etc. Read more about this neat little feature at the source Office Communicator Configuration Information.

MUI for Office Communicator 2007 R2 available on TechNet

Late yesterday, the Multilingual User Interface (MUI) Pack for Office Communicator 2007 R2 was released for download on Microsoft Technet.

The following languages are included in the MUI:

Arabic
Bulgarian
Catalan
Chinese - Simplified
Chinese - Traditional
Chinese Hong Kong
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Estonian
Finnish
French
German
Greek
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Latvian
Lithuanian
Norwegian
Polish
Portuguese (Portugal)
Portuguese (Brazil)
Romanian
Russian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Swedish
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian

Get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=E7871DCD-8173-4866-A0C2-AF8659092ACC&displaylang=en

Viewing the downloaded Address Book file in readable format

For troubleshooting reasons I have often looked in the garbled ABS file (GalContacts.db) that is downloaded to the Office Communicator client in the %userprofile%\appdata\Local\Microsoft\Communicator\ folder. I just stumbled over this tip for creating a version of the ABS file in CSV format that is saved in "My Received Files".

Set the following registry key to enable the CSV file creation and then restart Office Communicator.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Communicator]
"DumpContactstoCSVFile"=dword:00000001

View Jeff Schertz full tip (with screenshots) in his post Viewing the OCS Address Book (for Humans).

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 is RTM'ed

On the 19th of December Office Communications Server 2007 R2 was Released To Manufacturing (Build 6907), so it is in good time for the official launch on February 3rd.

We have been working with R2 since the Beta and are currently working hard to develop our material for our 4 days on-site Voice training delivered on R2 (Now based on RC, but will be updated to RTM before the first trainings start in January). Our new training will include training on all aspects of R2, but as usual with a special focus on Voice integration.

New in this version are a lot of things like telephony enhancements and new clients including the Attendant Console (A group based switchboard solution) an updated "Office Communicator for Windows Mobility R2" (Nicknamed CoMo) that includes phone state on mobile phone calls and One Number features (I will do a review of this client later), Dial-in conferencing support (Including CWA support for external clients) and of course enhancements to the overall architecture (Including a move to a 64 bit Server platform) and not least an updated CWA that now supports Desktop Sharing also for external users and non-Microsoft browsers ... and much, much more that I will talk about later (Or that you can find at other blogs).

The official launch of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 will be a soft launch and Inceptio (the company I work for) is participating as a sponsor for this event, that you can sign up for here.

What will we do in terms of spreading the word on R2?

I have had plans to publish information on R2 earlier, but I didn't since it was hard to determine what information was OK to publish and what was not (And I like my MVP benefits to much too risk it). I will now start posting information on R2 starting with the new Windows Mobility client.

Furthermore I will be speaking at Exchange Connections (March 15-18 2009) and I currently have three sessions (Subject to change).

OCS 2007 R2 from PowerPoint to Reality

So you have seen all the nice presentations and demos from Microsoft on Unified Communications and bought the idea!? As you probably guessed, it usually is a tad more complex than the marketing slides tries to convince you, so in this session I will give you the tricks for implementing OCS 2007 R2 in your organization successfully. After this session you will know where to focus your attention before, during, and after your deployment project, including advice on where to focus your attention in terms of the organizational implementation.

Tips and Tricks for Maximizing Your Investment in Unified Communications
So you have OCS 2007 R2 and/or Exchange 2007 implemented in your organization and you are starting to realize your investment by using presence, click-to-dial, one Unified Messaging inbox etc., but maybe you want even more ROI on your investment? In this session we will do a lap around the platform and look under the hood for developers. We will look at and demonstrate how to integrate business processes with Exchange 2007 SP1 Web services, how to build services that manage communications, and also take a look at Windows Workflows that talk and IM.

What Does it Take to Voice-Enable Your OCS 2007 R2 Deployment?

How do you provide OCS 2007 R2 and Exchange with its own voice? This session will focus on all the voice capabilities of OCS and Exchange. We’ll discuss the possible scenarios and how to enable them in your environment. This will include detailed discussions on the actual capabilities of the different solutions and based on experience from real-life deployment the efforts required to implement and maintain the different voice scenarios ranging from a pure standalone Enterprise Voice scenario to a full PBX and UM integrated dual forking scenario.

See all of the sessions here.

Lastly we have our training sessions including 2-4 day (based on previous experience) OCS 2007 R2 Voice Boot Camps that we deliver on-site in Europe, both as open and closed training sessions. They Include level 3-500 training on OCS 2007 R2 infrastrucutre and Voice related subjects and we bring a full lab environment including powerful portables, network, telephony equipment (E.g. Nortel CS1000, Gatewasy and/or soft PBX) wideband GN2000 headsets, and much more. The newest addition to this is our 2-day developer training on R2/Exchange 2007 SP1 (Get more info in this by contacting me at my.initials@inceptio.dk).

So I guess 2009 will be yet another busy year ;-)

CU out there !

Office Communicator Mobile update

Just a quick note to point your attention to the latest release of Office Communicator Mobile (2007 Release).

A couple of fixes in the new release, most notably KB954769, which now enables login to Communicator Mobile when running in High Security mode - the update makes Communicator Mobile use NTLM for both medium security and high security mode.

Update description and list of fixes: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=954767

Update download link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2eea3e24-f216-4887-92b0-f37d942e26e0&displaylang=en&tm

My favorite free Office Communicator tool – quick dialer from ESTOS

My favorite tool for Office Communicator is the ESTOS PhoneTools for Office Communicator and it works so well that I thought I would return the favor by doing some free advertising for ESTOS ;-)

The tool provides the ability to highlight a phone number in any program / web page like this one from our webpage at Inceptio -

 

After which you can press a hotkey (F8 is default) to dial the number. The configuration is very simple, you install it and then configure the following options -

Notice that the phone number you highlight doesn’t have to be normalized, it will use your normalization rules to convert the number to E.164 format.

The product works perfectly fine with Office Communicator 2007 and R2, I personally haven’t had any issues with.

Go check it out at the ESTOS PhoneTools website.

Presence the WPF way

Last time I described how to embed the presence controls onto a WPF form via the WindowsFormsHost control. Since some great things has happened. George Durzi at Clarity Consulting has released the presence controls for WPF. Its now more simple to implement presence in WPF. A persona list can be implemented like this.

<Window x:Class="NewUCControls.Window1"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:presence="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Samples.Office.UnifiedCommunications.PresenceControls;assembly=WPFMOCPresenceControls"

    Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300">
    <Grid>
        <presence:PersonaList Name="personaList1" Loaded="personaList1_Loaded" ShowDisplayName="True" ShowToolTip="True" ShowDetailedToolTipText="True" ShowContextMenu="True" ShowAvailability="True" />
    </Grid>
</Window>

Loading personaslist is also easily done by:

List<string> sipURIs = new List<string>()
{
    "someone1@somewhere.org",
    "someone2@somewhere.org",
    "someone3@somewhere.org",
};

personaList1.SipUris = sipURIs;

and the result will look something like this

Communicator Presence Controls in WPF

Last night I was preparing some ideas for a demo application I need later this week. The demo app had to look good and should be fun and interesting in the making. So I decided to code the UI in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Code in XAML for WPF is simple and one will soon get the hang of it. So I went using some ListViews filled with data via LINQ to SQL and a data class. When I came to implementing Office Communicator 2007 functionality I realized that the “Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 Presence Controls” did only exists as Windows Forms User Controls and not as WPF user controls. Facing the choice of coding my own controls or try to make use of the existing Win Form controls I browsed around and found a XAML tag which enables you to host a windows forms control on a WPF page and the great part about it is really easy to use:

1. Download the above mentioned controls from Microsoft and install them.
2. Include the managed controls into you WPF project solution.
3. Add the WindowsFromHost tag to the WPF XAML page.
4. Add the necessary XML name spaces. Look for xmlns:q1 and xmlns:q2 in the example below
5. Add the xml tag for persona list control - "q1:Personalist"

<Window x:Class="WPFHostingPresenceControls.Window1"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:q1="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Samples.Office.UnifiedCommunications.PresenceControls;assembly=PresenceControls"   
    xmlns:q2="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Samples.Office.UnifiedCommunications.PresenceBase;assembly=PresenceControls"
    Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300">
    <Grid>
        <WindowsFormsHost Name="windowsFormsHost1">
            <q1:PersonaList x:Name="plMyPersonaList"/>
        </WindowsFormsHost>
    </Grid>
</Window>

Here after you can populate the list via code:

public partial class Window1 : Window
    {
        public Window1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            plMyPersonaList.AddRange("pli@inceptio.dk", "someone@inceptio.dk");
        }
    }

and when you compile you should have something like this.

New update for OC 2007 and security enhancement

My colleague Claus-Ole just pointed me to a new update on Office Communicator 2007.

This update fixes four problems and especially interesting is a fix for Terminal Server users and a enhancement to security in the High Security Policy mode, where the ABS, Custom Presence and Tabs URL's now require HTTPS. Following are the fixes -

951870 - Event IDs 8239 and 8206 are logged when you schedule and then cancel a meeting in Communicator 2007

949498 - Error message when a Communicator 2007 user sends a message that contains only Japanese characters to Communicator 2005 users: "<Username> cannot receive message in the format you used"

951871 - The presence status changes to Away for all Terminal Server users when an administrator locks the desktop or lets the screen saver run in Communicator 2007

951868 - Registry settings for certain protocols are overwritten, and Communicator 2007 becomes the default application for these protocols when you log on to Communicator 2007

Find the KB here and the download here.

Mac Messenger 7 available

As announced earlier Microsoft has updated the Mac Messenger client to also support Office Communications Server 2007. Following are a few snippets (Source) showing some of the OCS related functionality of the client (It still supports Windows Live)

P2P or multi-party audio/video conferencing -

Searching the Address Book -

Use of Mac OS X Bonjour  to detect location and ability to add personal messages

Download from here.

High-Definition Video and Roundtable Hardware Requirements

Historically Microsoft published a really good whitepaper on RTAudio and QoE, but information on how the RTVideo Codec works has been sparse. But at a presentation today at Interact 2008 more details were revealed (and we where promised that more details will appear, as video gets more and more attention).

Besides all the interesting stuff about High Definition video in next versions, I just briefly wanted to touch on a few things that applies to the current versions -

P2P Video Calls with VGA quality requires Dual Core (And Quad for HD in wave 13)

So you probably know that you can change from CIF to VGA quality on P2P video calls (Not conferencing) by changing a registry key. They are documented in the release notes for OC 2007 and referenced here -

To enable VGA video in a point-to-point video call, users need to set the following registry keys on both endpoints -

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\RTC\Quality]
"MaxAllowedSendVideoSize"=dword:00000002
"MaxAllowedReceiveVideoSize"=dword:00000002

And restart Communicator.

But what is new to me is that the hardware requirements are actually Dual Core processors for optimal quality. It is not enforced, so VGA quality will be started with one processor, but may fall back to lower quality due to lack of CPU resoucres. In wave 13 Microsoft is talking about enforcing this requirement, so VGA will not start if you are not running from a Dual Core. In terms of HD (720P) conferencing the current requirement is going to be Quad Core processors and again the requirement will be enforced.

Roundtable quality requires Dual Core

Dual Core Processors are required for Roundtable Panorama Video but again it is not enforced, so Roundtable and Panorama Vidoe quality will be started with one processor, but may fall back to lower quality due to lack of CPU resoucres).