OCS 2007 R2 Audio Conferencing Deep Dive tonight

FYI - I’m presenting an Audio Conferencing Deep Dive tonight (March 2nd 20.00 CET and 11:00 AM Pacific )

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032441774&Culture=en-US

Event Overview

Are you familiar with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 dial-in conferencing and want to go deeper into the technical details? Or, are you thinking about deploying dial-in conferencing but have not yet done so? Attend this webcast for a demonstration of how Communications Server 2007 R2 works in practice, and get a detailed look at component interactions and call flows.

Presenter: Dennis Lundtoft Thomsen, Technical Evangelist, Inceptio Learning Solutions ApS

Dennis Thomsen works for Inceptio Learning ApS as a technical evangelist, educating Microsoft partners worldwide on bleeding edge technologies. He blogs, twitters, and writes articles on unified communications (UC), and he is writing a book on Microsoft UC to be published in the third or fourth quarter of 2010. Dennis's work focuses on large-scale enterprise and hosted Microsoft Unified Communications projects. He holds several Microsoft certifications and an Executive Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree with specialization in management of technology. Dennis was awarded a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award in 2007, 2008, and 2009.

View other sessions from Unified Communications: Control Your Infrastructure

It’s a level 2-300 presentation and it’s my first webcast, so don’t expect to much ;-)

ATE Schedule for TechEd Berlin

I’m in Copenhagen waiting for my flight to Berlin. If you want to touch base then I have booth duty at the UC Ask-The-Experts (and Dennis ;-) area Tuesday from 15:15 – 18:15 and Friday 11:30 – 14:45.

CU there !

MVP for yet another year ;-)

Dear Dennis Thomsen,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2009 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others.

At Microsoft, we believe that technical communities enhance people’s lives and the industry’s success because independent experts, like you, help others extract greater value from products and technologies through the free and objective exchange of knowledge. As a Microsoft MVP, you are part of a highly select group of experts that represent technology’s best and brightest who share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others.
On behalf of everyone at Microsoft, thank you for your contributions to technical communities.

Thank you to Microsoft for the award, I really appreciate working with Microsoft and getting access to the information and resources that the MVP award opens up for.

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 !

CU @ TechEd EMEA ?

I will be in Barcelona next week and look forward to seeing some of you there! There is a lot of content on OCS 2007 R2 and I plan to attend most of these sessions to get some inspiration for our own R2 training offering.

If you want to catch-up then feel free to send me ‘sip’ call/IM or e-mail me at myinitials@inceptio.dk otherwise I will be in the Ask-The-Expert (or the MVP foolish enough to volunteer ;-) area for Unified Communications Monday from 19-21 and Tuesday from 13-17.

Microsoft Mac Messenger update / Bloggers lunch at Interact08

Today at Interact 2008 I was invited to a Bloggers Lunch hosted by Eileen Brown. It was really good use of time and we had some interesting discussions with key Microsoft Executives including Kim Akers, UC Marketing General Manager; Eric Swift, UC Marketing Senior Director; David Lemson, Exchange Group General Manager and Amritansh Raghav, Office Communications Group, General Manager.

As part of the lunch we got what all bloggers want - news not previously announced (and that we are allowed to blog about) - so here it is ;-)

Microsoft is going to release a updated version of Mac Messenger that integrates with Office Communications Server 2007 and will include the following features -

• Rich presence
• Instant Messaging
• Audio/video
• Directory search
• Dual sign-in with Live Messenger / OCS

So good news for all you Mac users out there. I was actually invited to participate in the beta's for this client - but my company is Mac-free area (all though I'm pretty impressed by the Vista capable MacBook Pro line of notebooks )

MVP Award for 2008

Some good news (for me anyway). On April first I received my MVP Award for 2008 and this (almost ;-) personal note from Mr. Ballmer himself -

As the independent voice of users worldwide, your influence on technical communities is felt in many ways—enhancing people’s lives and contributing to our industry’s success. We’re deeply grateful to you for sharing your feedback, comments, answers, and expertise with technical communities. In recognition of your commitment, Microsoft is pleased to honor you with the Most Valuable Professional Award. Thank you for empowering the community with your outstanding leadership!

Steven A. Ballmer
Chief Executive Officer
Microsoft Corporation

Thank you for your exceptional contributions to technical communities! It gives us great pleasure to present you with the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award for the technical expertise you generously provide to others. By sharing your knowledge, experience, and objective feedback, you inspire and help people to solve problems and discover new capabilities every day. We are honored to welcome you as a Microsoft MVP.

Rich Kaplan
Vice President, Supportability & CPE
Microsoft Corporation

Passed the 70-638 OCS Beta Exam ;-)

Not that I was worried in anyway :-S but other bloggers and some of my students from my Unified Communications Bootcamps already reported that they had passed the exam (Called 71-638 while in beta) .... and I haven't received an e-mail about passing.

I'm in Seattle this week and was chatting with a colleague who haven't received an e-mail either, so I re-checked today and yes I did indeed pass it ;-)



Now again, I wasn't really worried - but I guess I will treat myself with an extra beer tonight at Jillians ;-)

Microsoft Unified Communications Partner of the year

Last night Inceptio received the Microsoft Unified Communications Partner of the year award ;-)

According to Microsoft this was due to our contributions to Unified Communications area in the past year delivering lots of Proof of Concepts, UC Bootcamps and UC projects, furthermore we contributed to the fact that UC and Microsoft now has become interconnected terms.

Thank you to all of my colleagues and all of you out there who helped Inceptio succeed in the UC space !!

PowerShell training in Denmark

I normally do not use this channel for commercial things, but this time I find it relevant as it is linked to one of my favorite subjects - PowerShell. I just finished creating a training course for PowerShell called PowerShell 1, 2, 3. The idea is to split the training up into 2 to 3 small courses targeting the level of knowledge your are aiming at achieving. Between the courses, you are expected to use and explore PowerShell, so you get the learning-by-doing combined with course training. Read more here and read our brochure here. Sorry, but it is in Danish. The training itself can be held in English (all the material is in English) and outside Denmark, if wanted. In case you are interested in this, email info(at)inceptio(dot)dk.

Congratulations! You have received the Microsoft MVP Award

Dear Dennis Thomsen,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2007 Microsoft® MVP Award!

The Microsoft MVP Award is our way of saying thank you and to honor and support the significant contributions you make to communities worldwide. As a recipient of Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional award, you join an elite group of technical community leaders from around the world who foster the free and objective exchange of knowledge by actively sharing your real world expertise with users and Microsoft. Microsoft salutes all MVPs for promoting the spirit of community and enhancing people’s lives and the industry’s success everyday.

To learn more about the MVP Program, visit: www.microsoft.com/mvp

What can I say other than thank you! Especially to the brilliant Microsoft people in Charlotte, Turkey, Redmond and Denmark who helped me getting this award and in developing my competencies around Live Communications Server and Unified Communications (You all know who you are ;-)

I look forward to joining the MVP community and especially to contribute more to the community on the subjects of Office Communications Server and Unified Messaging.

My MVP profile can be found here.