Phoning Pretty

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 - A First Look

You name it and OCS can do it. I know that might be reaching a bit, but I've been looking into the new features that R2 will bring to the table, and it is really quite impressive. I've been working with OCS 2007 for about a year now, and while I've been impressed, there are some cases where I've had to say, "well, OCS really isn't a product for that arrangement," or, "it's still early in the product life-cycle, it'll get better." Now, most of those phrases are going to go away and will be replaced with comments like, "yes, OCS can do that, and that, too."

• Consolidated Edge Server -- This is a big deal. In the old release, you had to plan for a number of boxes to provide services to external users. Even if you had all of the services hosted on the same box, you had to have a couple of externally accessible IP addresses to assign to those roles, and some of the roles did not play nice with one another.
• Improved Archiving (IM separate from Voice records)
  • Better integration with 3rd party tools -- I don't think people are quite as touchy as right after Enron and all the other corporate fallout, but better integration with existing archiving and compliance tools was needed before a lot of health care and legal companies would ever consider a tool like OCS.
• Support for SCOM -- This is a BIG deal for larger companies that have a great deal invested in System Center. When you have a central tool for monitoring the health of your infrastructure, you like everything that makes up that infrastructure to play nice with it.
• Support for Virtualization in some roles -- While this is nothing new (we've virtualized all the roles before with only minor snags), having that virtualization be officially supported and given the golden stamp really makes this an attractive solution for companies that want to consolidate devices (Read: people who want to get rid of PBXs and move to a consolidated communications platform. Now you can do it with an even SMALLER footprint!)
• The core experience is still MMC based with added functionality for new features -- This is something of a two-edged sword. It's nice that things won't be changing too much when it comes to how OCS is managed, but it really lacks a lot of the things that other Microsoft is moving towards. Where's the PowerShell? The interface reminds me a lot more of Exchange 2003 than Exchange 2007 (meaning that it is not intuitive or organized logically). With my complaints out of the way, I'll toss a little bone and point out that at least they've updated Certificate Management (Hey Exchange 2007... C'mon, make it at least a LITTLE bit easier to do certificates right!!!).
• Huge reporting (performance and usage) improvements -- I was watching a video where some of the reporting was being demonstrated and I have to say that I was quite impressed. With the tools available, it will be a lot easier to justify your OCS implementation (and upgrades) when you can show just how much people are using the tools you are providing.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but this is a quick start of the things to come with the new release. I garnished these points from watching a video here. There are a bunch more OCS 2007 R2 videos, and I can't wait until it hits RTM so I can install and play with it!

posted @ Thursday, December 11, 2008 6:36 PM | Feedback (2) | Filed Under [ OCS Platform Team ]