Unify and Conquer

TechEd Australia Should be a Full Week

2009-09-14T21:57:00.001+10:00

Last week I attended TechEd Australia in the Gold Coast. I had a great time learning, connecting, talking, networking, teaching, socialising and presenting. Having said that I left the Gold Coast both drained and a bit frustrated.

While there was a lot of content there, there was an awful lot of content that was not there. I was lucky to be one of the speakers in the UC track. There were 12 sessions allocated for the UC track. Nine were focused on Exchange 2010 and three went to OCS 2007 R2. Now, granted, Exchange is a flagship product and 2010 is an exciting release. I would not take anything away from Exchange. But OCS 2007 R2 needed much more coverage. Rewind a year to TechEd 2007 and all the OCS 2007 R2 content was still under embargo so the result of the lack of sessions at TechEd 2009 is that R2 content has not really had a good airing at a large public conference in Australia.

This is not due to a lack of speakers – I submitted two other sessions that did not make the cut. I know other external speakers who put sessions forward that did not get a slot at all. I know the Microsoft UC guys could of done more sessions. Nor is it due to a lack of things to talk about. In pulling together content for our overview session Derrick Buckley and I drew content and inspiration from no fewer that 5 TechEd US sessions! Oh the detail we could of gone into if we had had the time. Edge Services, Conferencing Solutions, Group Chat Architecture and UC Applications could all easily be sessions in their own right.

So if we need more room in the UC track (among others) and we can’t trim back on the existing content because we need that too, what’s the solution. Simple really. TechEd Australia should be five days long, like the one in the US is.

Now, I know that events cost money and extending TechEd Australia to five days would not come cheap – but there must be a way. One suggestion I would put forward would be to combine TechEd Australia and TechEd New Zealand into one ANZ event. Surely it would be cheaper to run one event for 4000-5000 people than two for 2500 each. Also with fewer flights and nights of accommodation for the US speakers that hit Australia and New Zealand perhaps we could get more US speakers out here for the same money? More days, more colleagues, more experts and more content. It sounds like a winner to me.

Now – in reality this would probably mean canning TechEd NZ and just having one in Australia since there are no venues in NZ big enough to host an event that size. I use to live in NZ and I would of crossed the Tasman to attend TechEd in Australia if need be, but I’m sure there will be plenty of naysayers. Even now, if NZ builds a venue I would happily cross the ditch in the other direction to attend an ANZ TechEd in New Zealand.

I tweeted this thought the other day and got a few comments back from people who thought two more days would be great if their livers could hold out. What say you Microsoft?

UC Lunch at TechEd Australia

2009-09-03T11:49:00.003+10:00

Sydney UC and Melbourne UC are getting together for Lunch at TechEd Australia. This grand event is sponsored by Tandberg.

Come along for lunch, a chance to mingle with your like minded peers and a chance to win a Tandberg HD webcam. Click the Register button below to register via eventbrite.com.

August Sydney UC Meeting

2009-08-18T21:14:00.001+10:00

Well it has been a long time between we’re going to make up for it now! Today Johann posted details of our August meeting on the SydneyUC site. It is going to be a call session with Alloy coming along to tell us all about the SNOM OCS range of phones that they distribute in Australia.

The snom OCS Edition (snom Open Communication Solution Edition) combines the advantages of the open IP telephony standard SIP with the integration into Microsoft’s Office Communication Server 2007 and the complete Unified Communications solution.

snom phones are the first open-standard SIP phones with native Microsoft® Office Communication Server 2007 integration.

We are also hoping to have a TechEd Speaker Rapidfire session where we get all the UC track presenters we can find to present (or record) a 5-10 minute overview of what they will be presenting up at the Gold Coast. I’ve not heard how we are going at getting said speakers, but Derrick and I will be there, as will John Smith so we should at least have the important ones ;)

We are also scheming a bit of a UC focused meetup at TechEd – so those of you attending this year stay tuned.

TechEd ANZ Call for Papers Out Now

2009-05-08T08:44:00.001+10:00

Think you’ve got a good idea for a TechEd session for TechEd Australia and/or TechEd NZ? Well don’t just sit there – submit your idea and you may get the chance to present at TechEd this year.

Johann Kruse is the UC track owner and he tells us how with this post:

So how do you go about submitting a session? Go to the Call for Content tool and register with your email address and the RSVP code TechEdANZ. Fill in all the details and hit submit. You can come back to the site at any time to update or review the progress of your submission.

TechEd is always a great event – and often the sessions submitted by the community are among the best. Speaking or attending I look forward to seeing you there.

NET Whitepapers available on discussUC.com

2009-05-07T21:08:00.001+10:00

A friend of mine from NET Australia flicked me the following on Monday – I’ve just not had a chance to put it up.

Today NET Australia has made its most popular whitepapers available at discussUC.com. The white papers cover a range of topics such as:

SIP Trunking

Directory Based Call Routing

Enabling Resilient, Secure, and High Availability Voice Services in Microsoft OCS Deployments

Key Success Factors for Microsoft UC Implementations

NET Australia has made these papers available through discussUC.com as it is the largest subscribed Unified Communications websites in the region, with contributions from thousands of members worldwide.

http://www.discussUC.com

Great initiative NET. Thanks for contributing to the community! (not to mention making such great products in the first place)

Exchange 2010 Beta Released

2009-04-16T20:45:00.001+10:00

Microsoft have released the public beta of Exchange 2010.

There is a good overview that outlines the improvements you can expect in areas such as storage, availability, administration, access, compliance and more.

There is a wealth of additional information on the official Exchange 2010 site. I strongly encourage you to explore that site.

If you just want to jump straight in, however, you can download the beta here.

Have Fun!

Case Sensitive Certificates in OCS?

2009-03-19T22:11:00.001+11:00

I had a heck of a time getting OCS R2 and Exchange Unified Messaging playing nicely together. I had set up both environments and I could dial extensions in the OCS environment, but I could not dial the subscriber access number for Exchange UM.

In the event logs on the OCS Front End server I was seeing the following events.

Source: OCS Exchange Unified Messaging Routing

Event ID: 1040

The attempt failed with response code 504: EXUM1.domain.com.
Failure occurrences: 3, since 18/03/2009 11:34:48 AM.
Cause: An attempt to route to an Exchange UM server failed because the UM server was unable to process the request or did not respond within the allotted time.
Resolution:
Check this server is correctly configured to point to the appropriate Exchange UM server. Also check whether the Exchange UM server is up and whether it in turn is also properly configured.

----

Source: OCS Protocol Stack

Event ID: 1001

TLS outgoing connection failures.
Over the past 28 minutes Office Communications Server has experienced TLS outgoing connection failures 3 time(s). The error code of the last failure is 0x80090322 (The target principal name is incorrect.) while trying to connect to the host "EXUM1.domain.com".
Cause: Wrong principal error could happen if the peer presents a certificate whose subject name does not match the peer name. Certificate root not trusted error could happen if the peer certificate was issued by remote CA that is not trusted by the local machine.
Resolution:
For untrusted root errors, ensure that the remote CA certificate chain is installed locally. If you have already installed the remote CA certificate chain, then try rebooting the computer.

----

Source: OCS Exchange Unified Messaging Routing

Event ID: 1040

An attempt to route to an Exchange UM server failed.
The attempt failed with response code 504: EXUM1.domain.com.
Failure occurrences: 4, since 18/03/2009 11:34:48 AM.
Cause: An attempt to route to an Exchange UM server failed because the UM server was unable to process the request or did not respond within the allotted time.
Resolution:
Check this server is correctly configured to point to the appropriate Exchange UM server. Also check whether the Exchange UM server is up and whether it in turn is also properly configured

----

On the Exchange UM server I was just seeing the following event:

Source: MSExchange Unified Messaging

Event ID: 1088

The IP gateway or IP-PBX "OCSSTD1.domain.com" did not respond to a SIP OPTIONS request from the Unified Messaging server. The error code that was returned is "0" and the error text is ":Unable to establish a connection.".

----

This all pointed a certificate problem. But the certificates were all issued by an internal CA and both servers trusted the Root CA Certificate. The names in the event log matched the subject names on the certificates, in that they both have the FQDNs of the servers.

I tried reissuing the certificates but the problem persisted.

Then I noticed something – in a couple of events on the OCS Server it referred to the Exchange Server like this:

The error code of the last failure is 0x80090322 (The target principal name is incorrect.) while trying to connect to the host "EXUM1.domain.com".

But in my case the certificates had the FQDN all in lowercase like this:

exum1.domain.com

Now – it shouldn’t matter but by this stage I was clutching at straws. So I changed my powershell command and requested a new cert with the servername in uppercase. After I assigned this certificate to the UM server I restarted the Exchange Unified Messaging service and checked the event logs and low and behold – none of the events were logged.

I tried to make a call to Exchange UM and got a new error – which was progress and will be the subject of another post. At any rate the certificate issue was resolved.

HowTo: Install a new language pack for Exchange UM

2009-03-19T21:38:00.001+11:00

Installing a new language pack for Exchange Unified messaging is pretty easy. In addition to the default English US there are a number additional language packs on the installation media.

The following files are in the \UM directory on the media.

umlang-de-DE.msi
umlang-en-AU.msi
umlang-en-GB.msi
umlang-es-ES.msi
umlang-es-MX.msi
umlang-fr-CA.msi
umlang-fr-FR.msi
umlang-it-IT.msi
umlang-ja-JP.msi
umlang-ko-KR.msi
umlang-nl-NL.msi
umlang-pt-BR.msi
umlang-sv-SE.msi
umlang-zh-CN.msi
umlang-zh-TW.msi

Each of these MSI files is a language pack. These are also available for download from Microsoft.

Once you have your language pack you need to install it onto each Exchange UM server you want the language pack available on.

This is done by running the setup command on the CD. The command format is:

Setup.com /AddUmLanguagePack:xx-YY /s:<path to language pack>

where xx-YY is the language you want to install, which is in the name of the MSI file. For example I used the command below to install the Australian English on my Exchange UM server.

SydneyUC Meeting – the Good and Bad

2009-03-18T22:20:00.001+11:00

The March Sydney UC meeting was a blast. An absolute roaring success! As long as you were actually there. You see we were all hooked up to the Live Meeting well before the scheduled start time. And then 5 minutes before the start – the Live Meeting session dropped and we could not get back in. The irony of it all.

Apologies to the people who were unable to attend via Live Meeting. This is, unfortunately, one of the key challenges with cloud based services. You are utterly dependant on the cloud actually being available.

That aside we had a good session. I gave an overview of the portable OCS R2 lab I have been building. It has been an interesting experience and I encountered and conquered a few issues along the way.

Then Jeff Wang from Tandberg gave a great overview of the OCS R2 and Tandberg integration and interoperability story. It was a great story and Jeff presented it brilliantly. Scenarios demonstrated included:

OCS MOC client to room based system video call
Video phone to MOC client call
Video call forking to MOC and Video phone
Multiparty ad-hoc video including Tandberg and OCS endpoints
Scheduled multiparty video calls.

After that Wayne Lee from GN (Jabra) gave a session about Jabra’s background and product range. Wayne highlighted the benefits of using OCS certified devices and gave a good overview of the devices that Jabra offer today.

Over all it was a great session and we had a good turn out. We are planning another session in April, so keep an eye on the Sydney UC site, the RSS feed, our Facebook page or the #sydneyuc twitter tag.

Moving the Transport Dumpster in E2k7 SP1

2009-03-12T21:37:00.001+11:00

Chris Goosen has a great post about the Exchange Transport Dumpster and how to move it from its default location.

I won’t repeat it all here – check it out here.

March Meeting of Sydney UC

2009-03-10T21:22:00.001+11:00

Details of the March Sydney UC meeting are on the Sydney UC blog.

To save a click:

At the March Sydney UC Community meeting TANDBERG will demonstrate how the ubiquitous Microsoft Office Communicator video capability can be easily integrated into an organisations visual communication platforms. Specifically, the group will see how user friendly the TANDBERG-OCS integration is and how it can reduce user training requirements and increase usage and adoption of video to improve workflow and communication.
In addition TANDERG will share our roadmap showing the exciting additional features that are upcoming with the imminent release of Microsoft OCS 2007 R2, and how TANDBERG will integrate into Microsoft OCS R2 further to be one step closer a vision of completely Unified Communications.
Jabra will also be presenting on some of their new UC hardware including the M5390 and Dial 520 OC.

Sydney UC is also on Facebook, become a friend and register for events on our profile page.

Remember that if you can’t physically make the event the session will be available via Live Meeting around the globe. There is a link for the live meeting on the Facebook event.

Also – if you are using Twitter – keep an eye on the #sydneyuc tag for updates = we’ll be using that as well going forward.

Great post or OCS R2 licensing

2009-02-18T21:19:00.001+11:00

Mike Stay has a great post about OCS R2 licensing. It covers the ins and outs of R2 licensing including what has and hasn't changed from OCS 2007. Of course Mike also covers off the obligatory MS Licensing nuance. Great Post.

The First Actual Meeting of SydneyUC

2008-11-10T22:07:00.001+11:00

After announcing the group at TechEd Australia we've been waiting for the right time to kick it off proper. What were we waiting for? Content of course!

On the agenda will be Microsoft’s announcement of OCS 2007 R2, a discussion on the recent Microsoft/Telstra S+S announcements, as well as updates on the latest UC and mobility devices and hardware.

Where: Gen-i’s offices at Level 23, World Square, Sydney (World Square is 680 George St).

When: Tuesday, November the 18th. 1:30 Eastern Daylight Time

Hope you can all make it - but if you can't don't fret! This is a UC user group! As Johann posted on the Sydney UC site...

However for those of you who can’t make it or have prior commitments – we will also be making the meeting available through LiveMeeting and it will be recorded so you can watch later (details to come later).

See you then - and make sure you subscribe to the Sydney UC Feed

At last! Two Exchange profiles open at the same time

2008-10-14T21:48:00.001+11:00

While it is possible to have two Outlook profiles on one machine and to configure these profiles to point to different Exchange environments it has always bugged me that you can only have one profile open at one time. Until now.

Nick Randolph pointed out a really great little tool that allows you to launch a second, independent instance of Outlook in which you can open a different Outlook profile.

So, without further adieu, we are proud to present you with our "ExtraOutlook" tool that allows you to launch as many Outlook instances as you want. All you have to do is configure the profiles you want, and then type: ExtraOutlook.exe "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\OUTLOOK.EXE"

ExtraOutlook is available from HammerOfGod. Groovy.

Unified Communications will Transcend the Language Barrier

2008-09-18T22:29:00.001+10:00

There is an interesting new bot available for Windows Live Messenger that provides translation between English and several other languages.

Simply add "mtbot@hotmail.com" to you Windows Live Messenger contacts, then send a message to Tbot.

Tbot will ask you what language you want to translate from and to and then respond with translations when you type.

Now, you can always invite another person to the conversation, who writes in the language you are translating to and then chat back and forth.

This is very cool, even though it is still a bit clunky. However, I can see a time in the not too distant future where the translation service will be server side in the corporate instant messaging products. Imagine a US based employee chatting with an employee in Spain, with both parties typing in their own language. Or an English speaker collaborating with a business partner in China via instant messaging with real time translation. It does not seem that far fetched, does it?

Now ask yourself - what about speech? Today we can turn speech into text with a fair degree of accuracy. We can also translate text from one language to another and we can synthesise text back into speech. How far away are we from two people having a real time spoken conversation in which each participant speaks their own language and hears a translated version of the other party?

I believe it will happen one day.

Quick Tip: Testing DNS SRV Records with NSLookup

2008-09-11T14:45:00.001+10:00

Office Communicator relies on Service Location (SRV) records in DNS for auto-configuration. Frequently you can't create the external DNS record yourself so you need to ask your ISP or DNS provider to do it for you.

So if the service provider is swearing black and blue that the records have been created correctly but your external client is not finding the server checking your DNS configuration is a great place to start.

There is a tool in the OCS Resource Kit called SRVLookup that will fetch and parse the SRV records for a given domain for your review.

However if you are out and about and don't have the resource kit handy there is a quick and dirty way to check SRV records using NSLookup.exe in interactive mode from the command line. The screenshot below shows the sequence of commands needed to test for the _sip._tcp SRV record for the mycompany.com domain. Click for a bigger view....

Sydney UC Kicks off tomorrow

2008-09-03T17:44:00.001+10:00

Johann has posted up on the Sydney UC blog the details for the kick off meeting for the Sydney UC Group.

The first Sydney UC meeting will be held at the Harbourside Pie Cafe at 2:15pm on Thursday the 4th of September.

Come along and have a gourmet pie and a cold beverage, and meet your peers. This meeting is an informal meet & greet so we can catch-up and get to know each other over lunch.

Check out the full post for more details. See you there.

Our Demo Environment Rocks

2008-08-29T22:06:00.001+10:00

Derrick and I are putting the finishing touches on our demo environment for our session at TechEd Australia.

It consists of two host PCs each with a Quad Core processor, a pair of 500GB drives configured in a RAID 0 array for speed and 8 GB of RAM. These have Windows 2008 Server installed and are running Hyper-V. Between them they host 9 virtual servers. In addition to that we will be using a number of laptops as client machines.

If you come along you will see what OCS Edge Services can really do! Remote User Access, Federation, Web Conferencing and more. This will be a demo not to be missed. I can't wait!

We're launching a UC User Group at TechEd Next Week

2008-08-29T21:45:00.001+10:00

Johann Kruse, Derrick Buckley, James McCutcheon, Dr. Neil and I are kicking off a new UC User Group at Tech Ed Australia next week.

Johann has put up an initial post about the event on the group's blog.

If you work (or play) in Unified Communications, we are kicking off a new UC community next week at Tech.Ed in Sydney.

Come along and meet your peers in the industry, and see what we’re planning for the user-group.

This first session will be a meet & greet, and we will also present a roadmap of content in upcoming meetings. Future meetings will be held at Microsoft in North Ryde, as well as via LiveMeeting.

So if you are going to be at TechEd then please come and join us at lunchtime on Thursday September 4th, from 1:15pm-2pm. The room is still TBA but we'll keep you posted.

Speaking at TechEd Australia

2008-08-21T08:20:00.001+10:00

I am going to be co-presenting a session on OCS Edge Services with my good friend and fellow MVP Derrick Buckley. The session is on Friday the 5th of September at 11:45. Here's the details.

UNC316

Office Communications Server 2007 Security: Architecture and Edge Services

One of the core value propositions for Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007, is the fact that unified communications can be used anywhere - at work, at home, or on the road. In this session, we discuss the edge aspects of OCS 2007 for voice, media conferencing, remote access, public internet connectivity and federation, along with the edge server roles. We discuss various edge server deployment topologies. We also discuss NAT and firewall traversal with discussion on how OCS 2007 uses ICE, STUN and TURN for audio and video.

If you are coming to TechEd in Sydney this year then make sure you get it in your session builder now!

Use VBScript to Set the Country for an AD Contact

2008-06-25T17:52:00.001+10:00

I was recently asked to produce a VBScript that would take data imported from a very useless CRM system as a CSV and create contacts in Active Directory.

All was going swimmingly until I got to the last field of the contact - country. The source database allowed free text for this field and AD expects to get a 2 letter ISO country code.

I found a web site with the country codes listed and copy and pasted it into Word.

Next I selected all the text and pressed Shift+F3 to toggle it all into upper case. This gave me a long list in the format

COUNTRYNAME XX

Where XX is the corresponding country code. (For example, Australia is AU)

I copied and pasted the resulting list into Primal Script. This is where Primal Script came into its own and saved me hours.

I created two new Snippets in the Primal Script Snippet manager

The CountryCase snippet contains the following code:

Case "$SELECTION"

If I select a country name and double click the CountryCase snippet it replaces it with a correctly indented Case statement with the selected text inside the quotes. The snippet also included a new line character, so the associated country code would be on the next line.

Case "AUSTRALIA"

AU

The CountryCode snippet contained the following code:

strCC = "$SELECTION"

which would create a line of code that sets a string to the selected country code. Again this was appropriately indented and contained a newline character after it.

Case "AUSTRALIA"

strCC = "AU"

The result was that I could double click the country name, double click the Country Case snippet, double click the country code, then double click the CountryCode snippet and I had added that case to the SELECT statement. Within 35 minutes I had added a massive Select Case structure that handled hundreds of countries.

The result is too long to post here, but if anyone needs it drop me a comment or an email.

Interesting post about Outlook/Communicator integration

2008-05-22T08:14:00.001+10:00

The communicator team blog has a brief overview of the integration available between Outlook and Office Communicator and how this works.

Communicator Presence can be found throughout Outlook (Presence is the colored bubble that appears next to a person’s name).
In addition, conversation history (as well as missed-call history) is stored in Outlook to allow for a single location to search and review all prior communications. Finally, Communicator obtains calendar and out of office information from Outlook and/or Exchange and uses that information to affect your Presence state.

An interesting read, I've not given much thought to how this works because it just does.

Help fight spam - configure SenderID

2008-05-08T22:00:00.001+10:00

Recently there has been a flood of NDR spam that has been hitting organisations that has been - frankly - a pain in the butt for them. The way this type of spam attack works is simple. The bad guy generates anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand bogus emails advertising pills, watches or whatever they are selling. They send these to bogus users at real organisations, but they create the messages with a valid sender address. It is the sender address that is the real target of the spam attack.

On receiving the email the receiving server looks up the recipient address and finds that it does not exist. No one here by that name... Most mail servers are configured to "bounce" the email by way of a special kind of email called a Non-Delivery Report (NDR). This is then sent back to spoofed sender with the spam message as an attachment. Because the NDR is coming from a real mail server and a valid address it will snake past most spam filtering software and real time blacklist checks, thereby delivering the content as an attachment to the target.

There is a fairly simple way to mitigate the risk of this kind of attack. It is free to protect your own namespace and it only takes minutes. If you are running Exchange 2003 SP2 or later you can do even more to prevent your mail server being used as the bounce server. The answer is called SenderID and it is part of the Intelligent Message Filter installed with Exchange 2003 SP2.

From the Microsoft SenderID website:

The Sender ID framework, developed jointly by Microsoft and industry partners, addresses a key part of the spam problem: the difficulty of verifying a sender's identity.

To put it simply an email server that supports the SenderID framework queries a special DNS record to validate that the computer submitting an email is allowed to send for that domain.

The Microsoft site also includes this overview:

A sender or user sends an e-mail message from an e-mail client or Web interface. No interaction or changes to the sender's client or Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) are required.

The recipient's inbound e-mail server receives the e-mail message. The server uses SIDF and calls the Purported Responsible Domain's (PRA) DNS for the SPF record.

The receiving MTA determines whether the outbound e-mail server's IP address matches the IP addresses that are authorized to send e-mail for the domain.

For most domains and IPs, sender reputation data is applied to the SIDF verdict check.

Based on the SPF record syntax, the pass or fail verdict, the reputation data, and the content filtering score, the receiving MTA delivers the e-mail message to the inbox, a junk or bulk folder, or a quarantine folder. If an e-mail fails, the receiving network may block, delete, or junk the e-mail.

So as you can possibly figure out at this point there are two things you can do in your organisation that would help.

Create a Sender Policy Framework (SPF) DNS record that specifies your permitted mail servers. This will help protect your namespace as any server that supports SenderID will check this record.
Enable SenderID checking on your inbound mail server.

In order to create the SPF record, Microsoft provide an online wizard to help you generate the text that you need to put into a TXT record in DNS to make your own SPF.

To find out more about configuring SenderID on Exchange 2003 SP2 or later - refer to the Microsoft Exchange Server Intelligent Message Filter v2 Operations Guide.

Communicator 2007 Phone Edition update

2008-04-19T11:44:00.001+10:00

There is a new update for the Communicator 2007 Phone Edition devices (aka Tanjay).

This update addresses a number of issues. Here's a list of the fixes.

A call to a mobile number does not go through correctly for an Outlook contact who has an invalid instant messaging (IM) address.
If the IM address is not understood, callback uses the e-mail address to index the contact.

A call to an Outlook contact from the voice mail screen does not go through correctly.
Calls to the highlighted contact on the voice mail screen were made to the IM address. Calls now use the same method as the contact list. Calls to Outlook contacts from the voice mail screen are made to telephone numbers and not to IM addresses.

User credentials are lost if the network connection is lost after the user signs in to Microsoft Office Communicator.
The condition that causes this issue has been fixed.

The voice mail count may be incorrect for users who have long contact lists.
The sequence of retrieving the voice mail count from Exchange has been adjusted.

Calls to Outlook contacts do not go through correctly if the contact does not have a work telephone number listed.
The preference order for IM and e-mail has been changed to work telephone number, home number, and mobile number.

Office Communicator 2007 does not retrieve a mobile number for an Outlook contact that is also a global address list (GAL) contact.
The contact indexing mechanism on the telephone now processes x400/500 e-mail addresses.

Off-hook dialing fails when the location profile is unavailable.
The condition that causes this issue has been fixed.

Kerberos fails when an Active Directory server that has multiple network adapters installed has only one network adapter connected to the network
Make sure that all provisioned Active Directory network adapters are connected to the network.

Communicator Phone Edition stops responding when you try to end an unestablished call.
The condition that causes this issue has been fixed.

Communicator Phone Edition stops responding when it is in an on-hook state.
The condition that causes the unintended watchdog activation has been fixed.

The date of items that are in the call log view is one day earlier than the actual date of the call log item.
The leap year condition that causes this issue has been fixed.

The update also includes all the fixes from the previous update.

Download the package from Microsoft.

Interact08 Keynote

2008-04-10T08:37:00.001+10:00

It's day 2 now at Interact08 and it's my first opportunity to post my thoughts on the keynote delivered yesterday by Gurdeep Sing Pall - Microsoft's Corporate Vice President, Unified Communications Group.

Gurdeep talked about the acceleration in technology adoption rates, pointing out that it took 100 years from the time that the telephone was invented to get 1 billion people using it, but it has taken just 10 years or less to get the same number of people using technologies like email, instant messaging and mobile phones.

He then talked about Microsoft's view of what UC is and emphasised that identity and presence are at the core of Unified Communications.

Gurdeep also used Maslow's Hierarchy of needs - which is a model used to describe a theory of human motivation.

In brief Maslow's theory states that unless a persons most basic needs are being taken care of they are not going to be in a position to give any thought to creative or abstract concepts.

He drew a parallel to IT Managers in that if an organisation's most basic needs are not in a good state they are not going to be in a position for proactive re-architecture. If the phones don't have dial tone they are not going to be in a position to communications enable business processes.

There followed a great demo of the real value of UC. what was great about it was that it was not run from Office Communicator or from Outlook. It was a demo of a Point of Sale application that had been "Communications enabled" and it was run from a Tablet PC.

The demo scenario was a customer asking a staff member if they had a particular product. From their tablet pc the employee can check stock in other nearby stores. He could then see who in the other store was online and available to take a call.

The call was then initiated from within the PoS app using the tablet's speakers & microphone. On the receiving end the incoming call had a subject indicated that the call was a stock enquiry for a particular product and the app automatically displayed info that was contextually relevant - their stock level for that product. This means that at the time the call is answered the person already knows what it is about and has the information required to help at hand. A very compelling demo.