SSTP VPNs

Read the Cable Guy article about the upcoming support in Windows Server 2008 for SSTP (Secure Socket Tunneling Protocol) VPN connections e.g. VPN using SSL.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to dig up any information about client OS support. Maybe Vista SP1 has it?

Update: Thanks to Steffen for explaining that the abbreviation is SSTP not STTP :) Likewise, he told that Vista SP1 will support SSTP.

Publicly routable IP address needed for A/V Edge server

As I discussed in my TechEd Post one of the results of my speaks with customers and the PSS engineers supporting OCS, is going to be a posting on STUN/TURN and ICE and how to configure networks/firewalls on the OCS 2007 A/V Edge Server.

Chad Lacy apparently started the party with a good posting on why it is necessary to use a Public Routable IP address on the Office Communications Server 2007 Edge Server (The short answer is STUN, which Microsoft co-developed with Cisco).

Find Chads post here Publicly routable IP address needed for A/V Edge server.

The definitive guide to Exchange Server 2007

Quick note - If you only want to read one (very large) whitepaper on Exchange then look at Technical Architecture of Exchange Server 2007 and skip the rest ;-)

New UC and VoIP As You Are site

Here you can see to PBX's talking to each-other discussing Rip 'n Replace versus "VoIP as you" are meaning that Microsoft Unified Communications is an integration story, but stop reading this and move on to the VoIP As You Are site for a better explanation (They are just hilarious - remember to click the text on the orange tape and the speech bubles for further discussions ;-)

Also check out the new Microsoft UC site - it has been totally renewed.

Source: LCSKid

Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging and Asterisk

I had a few questions regarding this during TechEd and my answer was each time, haven't tried it but it's documented somewhere. I Googled it and here it is -

Accessing Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging: Introduction

This how-to guide takes you through the steps required to access Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging features, such as Outlook Voice Access, using the open source tools Asterix/Trixbox and sipX.

TechEd day 1 - leaving for home early ;-)

The Roundtable device I am going to use for some of our UC Bootcamps has arrived in the office so I'm leaving TechEd early (Can't wait to play ... eerh work with it ;-)

For once I attended the Keynote and it was actually quite interesting - especially the vision around driving down cost using the Dynamic Systems Initiative. See the whole keynote at Virtual TechEd.

I had some concalls yesterday, so I only attended a few sessions, most interesting part of the day was more discussions with people from different product groups and a good dinner with one of my Microsoft contacts (Always interesting to talk to peers and especially learning about different cultures/backgrounds).

Nothing much else to say about yesterday - today I had a good MVP Deep dive session and talks with different program managers around the OCS SDK.

The result will be an updated version of my Populating users in Office Communicator / LCS post for Office Communicator 2007 including controlling Access Levels centrally (Access levels are basically showing some presence information like calendaring and phone details to selected contacts only - e.g. your own Team or Company).

The other result of yesterday will be a posting on STUN/TURN and ICE and how to configure networks/firewalls on the OCS 2007 A/V Edge Server.

First day at TechEd

So I arrived late saturday evening and got at good nights sleep (6 hours time difference doesn't matter when you've used 17 hours to get from Aalborg, Denmark to Orlando).

Sunday was an MVP Welcome Event day, where I got to meet some of my MVP fellows for the first time and talk to different program managers in roundtable discussions.

The most fun part though was Party with Palermo. It's good to see that some of my MPV fellows are party animals and I also met a fun group of TechEd party crashers (Where's The Party ;-)

I really look forward to a week full of interesting sessions, meetings with contacts, fellow MVP's and product groups. Maybe I see you there!

Btw. if you're from Denmark or Nordic countries then perhaps we should get together for lunch thursday at 11.30 (We meet outside N212) - find more info in the group "Danes attending Tech-Ed 2007"

RTAudio overview

Microsoft has released a small whitepaper to the public detailing the some of the features of RTAudio -

The document provides a functional description of the Microsoft RTAudio speech encoder and decoder. A list of core capabilities is provided. Also, a detailed list of features such as rate control and forward error correction is included to show how the codec can be used in Voice over IP and other IP Ntwork-based media communication solutions. Finally, the document includes information for licensing this technology from Microsoft Corporation.

As part of the MVP programme and the OCS Voice TAP I have been delving quite a bit into RTAudio and RTVideo (As preparation for delivering Unified Communications Bootcamps to the largest Microsoft partners in Europe) and there are some really interesting inventions and advancements that I hopefully can talk more about as OCS comes closer to its release date.