Good morning! Back for day 2. (You can see my day 1 notes here.)
09:13: Talking about dialing requirements. Just heard the best explanation of E.164 I've heard -- very simply, it's a format for writing phone numbers that makes them globally unique. A lot of the configuration energy for OCS and PBX systems is focused around translating dialed numbers (and fragments of numbers) into E.164 so that the call can be routed appropriately. Exchange 2007 RTM didn't support E.164 dial plans, but SP1 does. (source http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb803637.aspx and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb676323.aspx)
09:38: In the UC roadshow sessions we did last fall, we were telling people that the RTAudio-WB codec used on average 45Kbps bandwidth per channel. This is true (can use lower or higher, but that's a good average), but that doesn't take into account the various network overhead components. Turns out, you should use 57Kbps as your average planning number for each one-way channel -- 57Kbps send and 57Kbps receive for each endpoint While this may seem like a lot, remember, that most conversations have only one user speaking at a time for the majority of the time. However, be sure to plan for this if you have different upstream/downstream capabilities! (source http://forums.microsoft.com/unifiedcommunications/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2697675&SiteID=57 -- not an “official“ guide, but the calculations are there and check out; the official planning guide still has the numbers that don't account for overhead, and the overhead can change based on network conditions)
10:54: E.164 is an ITU standard for normalizing phone number, as I mentioned before. However, RFC 3966 defines the tel: URI scheme, which is basically a superset of E.164. E.164 applies only to public numbers; RFC 3966 applies to private numbers as well. Anytime you see a tel: prefix on a number in OCS, you're dealing with RFC 3966. (source http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3966.txt, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_scheme)
11:06: OCS 2007 normalization rules use .NET regular expressions, which can be pretty confusing to grasp. However, the OCS 2007 Resource Kit can help -- it includes the Enterprise Voice Route Helper, which includes a normalization tool that helps you build your regular expressions. (source http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b9bf4f71-fb0b-4de9-962f-c56b70a8aecd&displaylang=en)
11:20: PSTN breakout is a cool process -- use VoIP across your network, then break out the call to the PSTN at your location closest to the destination so you reduce or eliminate long-distance costs. OCS allows this pretty easily. However, you may not always be allowed to -- in India, for example, you must be registered as an ISP in order to switch calls back onto the PSTN from VoIP; point to point Communicator calls are just fine. (source http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=24E72DAC-2B26-4F43-BBA2-60488F2ACA8D&displaylang=en and http://www.ilocus.com/2008/01/bsnls_voip_will_kill_the_grey.html)
11:44: Lectures are done for the day -- on to death by labs! We've got a series of really crunchy voice interop labs to work our way through. Woohoo!!!
Continue on to my day 3 notes.