Just 2 days left -- on with Thursday! (You can see my day 3 notes here.)
09:57: The RTAudio codec suite is pretty cool. Finally found out why there's all those new devices (like USB headsets) that are marked as Microsoft UC-compatible. Regular low-end devices are used to dealing with the G711 codecs which sample at 8KHz; many of them can't support sampling at the 16KHz rate that the RTAudio wideband codec variants (there are 6) support. The updated equipment specifically is tested to give the full fidelity when using the wideband RTAudio variants. (source http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=05625AF1-3444-4E67-9557-3FD5AF9AE8D1&displaylang=en and http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5D79B584-79C9-42A8-90C4-4AB3F03D19C4&displaylang=en)
10:12: Ooh! Microsoft has a freely downloadable Deployment Validation Tool for OCS.
12:31: Going back to the reverse proxy issue I talked about in 15:44 on Day 3, you can get detailed guidance on configuring ISA Server 2006. (source http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb663639.aspx)
12:35: Yes, Virginia, the A/V Edge server external IP address must be a publicly routable address. It can't be behind NAT (not even 1:1 NAT, also known as Static NAT, bi-directional NAT mapping, or any of a number of othre terms). Is this just another stupid “Microsoft doesn't get security” stunt of years gone by? Nope -- this requirement is there because you absolutely have to have a publicly routable address somewhere in the equation in order to allow NAT traversal for all the other clients. OCS's A/V Edge NAT traversal functionality is based on the STUN standard, which was developed under IETF guidance through a multi-vendor working group including Microsoft and Cisco. (source http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3489, especially the last paragraph of section 6, http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-ICE, and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb870364.aspx)
16:05: Had a nice series of crunchy labs. Yum! Before that, though, a couple of key Exchange Unified Messaging/OCS interoperability points. You should have one Exchange UM SIP URI dial plan for each OCS location profile -- they have a 1:1 correspondence. You may also have additional Exchange UM TEL URI dial plans if you're in PBX co-existence mode; those dial plans are for the PBXs, not for OCS. (source http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb803653.aspx)
Continue on to my Day 5 notes.