I’m Going to TechEd US!

Every year, like many of you, I submit proposals for TechEd. In recent years, they’ve been less than successful – the competition is very fierce and there is so much great content to choose from. I almost have to feel sorry for the Microsoft folks having to wade through hundreds of proposals.

This year, I submitted three talks, two around PowerShell and one around OCS. To my great surprise and delight, one has thus far been accepted! YEAH

The accepted break out sessions, part of the Unified Communications track, is entitled “SIP - Naked In All Its Glory”. The abstract for the talk is:

This session will look at the key protocols behind Microsoft's OCS product, in particular Session Initiaion Protocol as well as Real Time Transfer Protocol (RTP) and Session Description Protocol. A short discussion on TCP, TLS, and PSOM will also be given. The talk will focus on looking at the SIP and related protocols "on the wire". We'll dive in to using NetMon as well as OCS's Snooper tool. Troubleshooting SIP will be the final part of this talk.

I’m still waiting on the other two talk proposals. The other proposed talks are PowerShell related and are titled: “PowerShell and WMI”, and “Writing Production Quality Power Shell Scripts with PowerShell V2 and Windows Serer 2008 R2”. I await the verdict on those two talks, but would like to think that at least one will get accepted

Irrespective of the PowerShell talks, I’m really excited that I’ll be a speaker again. LA, here I come!

Technorati Tags: TechEd US,TechEd,OCS,PowerShell,SIP

OCS Voice Ignite - Phase 2

I'm in Copenhagen this week, running the first of the Phase 2 Voice Ignite sessions. The initial phase of VI involved re-deliveries in 6 cites (Orlando, Barcelona, Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, Paris and Scottsdale). These were big events at big venues mainly taught by MCS consultants and a few GK folks. Phase 2 is smaller regional re-deliveries. We've here in Copenhagen for the first of these (Reading UK, Paris and Austin Texas are the other three of these that are booked thus far).

The biggest issue with these regional re-deliveries is setup. With phase 1, we had support from Microsoft's TSG team (and 1st class they are too). For the the phase 2 deliveries, we're on our own. Like every first run of deep rich training, we've had issues (power, the wrong cables, etc) - nothing we can't and didn't solve. Just more stress!

But - with these challenges behind us, we're now steaming ahead with the training and folks seem to be pretty happy.

Technorati tags: OCS 2007, Voice Ignite, Office Communications Server 2007, Global Knowedge, Microsoft

PIC Licensing for OCS

I had an interesting comment on this blog recently based on an older blog article. The question was around the Public Internet Connectivity licenses and whether they were still available. I checked with some great folks in Redmond and got a pretty clear answer: PIC is still alive and is being sold. Rumours of its demise seem premature and/or in error.  Hope the helps.

My Redmond contact also pointed me to the Office Live Communications Server PIC page which should answer all the relevant questions.

Technorati tags: OCS Licensing, PIC, OCS 2007

Learning Plans for OCS 2007

Over in my corporate blog, I jotted down some links to information that helps you learn more about OCS 2007. Take a look at my Learning Plan for OCS 2007 - and please provide comments.

 

Technorati tags: OCS 2007, OCS Training, Global Knowledge

OCS 2007 Inter-Operating with Nortel CS 1000

In researching the OCS Learning Plan I  found a neat web cast you can download from Microsoft web site.  The main starting page for this  webcast is on the MS TechNet site. This page requires you to log in with a MS Passport, which takes you to the live meting site from where you can pick up the webcast. A little long winded process wise, but a good webcast!  In addition to the 8mb WMV file, you can also download just the PowerPoint slides (14.2MB ), or just an mp3 podcast.

This is, for me most useful as it shows how to do this interop and explains many aspects of the Nortel products, including more details on the ICA solution. I am looking forward to working more with the Nortel and the ICA tools in some upcoming work.

Technorati tags: OCS, Nortel, web-cast

Communicator 2007 Hotfix Package

 Microsoft has released a hot fix for Office Communicator 2007.

As noted in the KB article (Description of the Communicator 2007 hotfix package: October 5, 2007), this hot fix package includes at least 15 separate bug fixes.

This is probably a must-add hot fix for OCS 2007 users.

Technorati tags: OCS, Office Communicaor 2007

Download details: Office Communications Server 2007 Software Update Service

 One neat aspect of the new Microsoft OCS related handset (the Tanjay phone) is that it can get updates via WUS. This download: Office Communications Server 2007 Software Update Service helps to provide the updates.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, OCS, Tanjay

Office Communication Server 2007 Videos

 Microsoft has published two downloadable videos promoting OCS 2007. Known as the Evil Presence videos, the first shows how an organisation can use OCS, while the second looks at the roundtable.

To get the downloads, see:  Unified Communications - Office Communication Server 2007 Videos

Technorati tags: OCS, Evil Presence, Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft

OCS 2007 TechNet Forums Are Back!

The TechNet web forums are back up. Microsoft changed the URL to address the forums to reflect that the product had achieved RTM (i.e. dropping the "beta" from the URL). It looks like this happened without changing other links to the forum. Anyway, they're back up!

The content on the OCS forums still says "beta", but the RTM is definitely on-topic. I hope that the eye-candy will be updated soon to reflect RTM. It would be nice if this content was also shared with an NNTP feed.

For OCS users wanting NNTP support, there is one newsgroup (microsoft.public.office.communicator) on MS's NNTP Server news:msnews.microsoft.com. Hopefully a richer set of newsgroups will be forthcoming. I'm sure trying!

Technorati tags: OCS 2007, TechNet, OCS TechNet Forum, OCS NNTP Support, TechNet Forum NNTP

OCS TechNet Forum Down

The TechNet OCS 2007 Beta on-line forum at: http://forums.microsoft.com/Ocs2007publicbeta/default.aspx?SiteID=57 is down. It's been down since Friday morning. The outage has been reported, but not yet fixed.

These forums were about the OCS 2007 beta product (and are, or at least were, still missing any links to NNTP). Now that OCS has hit RTM, there is a need for both forums and newsgroups that support the final RTM, product. These are coming, I'm told by folks at Microsoft, hopefully with full gating between on-line forum(s) and NNTP newsgroups.

When I get more information, or if the site suddenly comes back, I'll post more more information.

[Later - 17:45 Saturday Aug 25 - Evening]

I've seen Tata Moraes comment - sadly I have no idea when this forum will be back up. Plus it's a bank holiday weekend at least here, so everyone's away. You could try posting in the microsoft.public.office.communicator newsgroup, although strictly speaking OCS posts are probably off topic there.

[Still Later - 19:00 Monday Aug 7 - 1900]

The outage continues. This appears to be an error in the change over to RTM support and the forums should be back soon. There will be RTM forums, but don't know yet about newsgroup support.

Technorati tags: OCS Forums, OCS, TechNet, Microsoft

Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit Tools

 Microsoft has posted the updated  Office Communications Server 2007 Resource Kit Tools for free download. One cool tool is Snooper.exe which can help you parse SIP and C3P protocol logs, including those generated by OCSLogger.exe.

These tools are a must have if you are using OCS!!

Technorati tags: Office Communications Server, OCS Resource Kit

A Nice Unified Communications Blog

I just found a useful new blog: Unified Communications blog. Based in Netherlands, with some links that are Dutch orientated, but it looks good (and it's in English!).

Looks a great reference! I'm linking to it on my corporate blog too!

Technorati tags: UC, Unified Communications, Office Communications Server, blog

Office Communicator Blog opens for business

Now that  Office Communications Server 2007 has been released to manufacturing, it's time to ramp up the excitement around the product.  Microsoft has opened a new blog whose focus is Microsoft Office Communicator, the key OCS 2007 client. The content on the Microsoft  Office Communicator blog.

Technorati tags: Office Communications Server, Microsoft Office Communicator, blog, Microsoft

OCS 2007 Reaches RTM!

The long  wait for OCS 2007 is now (nearly) over. During last week, while teaching OCS to British Telecom, I saw that RTM had been achieved at last. Customers on the TAP program can now download the evaluation version of OCS (and Microsoft  Office Communicator), and the general customer base should be able to get their hands on the full version by the end of August. The formal launch is scheduled for October.

Microsoft is also working on three official training courses: 5177 (a one-day class covering IM and presence), 5178 (2 days on conferencing) and 5179 (2 days on OCS and Voice). These are meant to be available by launch (although I'm not betting on this!). As the MCT reviewer for these three courses, I'm excited about the content and scope - the courses have the potential to be very good.

You can visit the Microsoft Unified Communications web site (http://www.microsoft.com/uc).  For more details on the product and it's features, see the TechNet OCS  library Sub-Site (although the landing page does not display well using FireFox). If you are not up to speed with OCS, then a good starting point is the Technical Overview.

Technorati tags: OCS 2007, FireFox, TechNet

Office Communications Server Forums

Microsoft has setup a series of Office Communications Server 2007 Beta Forums. The forums are part of the TechNet forums and cover the entire OCS 2007 product. If you have questions about OCS, this is a place to ask them.

[LATER] The OCS forums have moved - see my later blog post at: http://tfl09.blogspot.com/2007/08/ocs-2007-technet-forums-are-back.html

Technorati tags: Office Communications Server, OCS 2007, TechNet, Microsoft

OCS 2007 Ignite -It Rocks

Last week, I was in Munich delivering the OCS Ignite workshop for a very interesting group of partners and MS employees from eastern Europe. It was a great couple of days - some great hands on lab exercises, good documentation and (thanks Microsoft!!) great hospitality. The Ignite workshops are being deployed around the works by Microsoft, assisted by Global Knowledge (i.e.me) in EMEA. 

We also discovered some very interesting issues with VMs - we hit what appears to be the bug described in KB Article 875485. I say "appears" - I now have the hot fix noted in this article but have not yet been able to test it. What is intriguing is that the problem did not exist on all machines - only 5 of the 14 were hit (copying updated VMs to these machines cured 4). This is not the first time I've seen Exchange based Virtual Machines have curious VPC/VS related issues - the Exchange UM training sometimes suffers from VM issues too.

For MCTs, this is great training to go on - and I hope to be able to run some Town Hall events later in the summer. Watch this space (or this one).

 

Technorati tags: OCS, Office Communications Server, Exchange 2007, VM, VPC, Virtual Server, Global Knowledge

Gaming Google

In my day jobs over the past few years, I've worked for a MS certified training organisation. As such, we are always looking at ways to improve Google hits. Those hits, and the results of those hits, makes Google an important aspect in the marketing of my employers. Using tools like Adwords to give a better shot at eyeballs is one way. But the main Google (and MSN Search for that matter), unsponsored, results that I belie help with the way the company is perceived by the web-using public. It can also drive business in an increasingly transaction-driven commodity market.

In a recent post, Robert Scoble discusses gaming of Google, via PayPerPost. Their business model is described in a post by John Chow: "What PayPerPost does is allow advertisers to buy a blog post – often referred to as a paid plug. Instead of buying normal banner advertising, the advertiser would pay the blogger to write about their product or service. This of course raises many ethics and credibility issues.".

And Scoble seems to agree with Chow about the ethics. I agree that most of the more respected technical writers (and this includes bloggers and traditional print journalists) are not likely to go in for this.

No respected writer is going to say they like something, if they don't. I expect them to say they think something is cool (or it sucks) is because they genuinely believe it so, and certainly not because they were paid $2 for it.  

Scoble asks if PayPerPost's approach is likely to lead to more sales. Of course any firm wants loads of inbound links. But Robert is probably right that if this takes off, Google will find a way to remove the bias, leading back to the status quo. We will see.