OCS

OCS, why are you breaking my heart?

Tim Robichaux — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 09:38:04 GMT

Well, after a bit of time spent on Microsoft's campus, I have 8 Tanjay devices with the latest and greatest firmware. I used a Tanjay device (a Polycom CX700 IP Phone) for a number of months, and while I didn't have a ton of voice communications with it, I loved the ones I had. There are a few complaints that I have about the device, but they deal more with the form-factor than functionality. What I wanted to note was something more tangible (pun intended) than complaints. What I wanted to mention is a reminder that the Tanjay devices are Enterprise Voice extensions. They are devices that are supposed to sit on your desk and replace that silly little phone you have there with a Office Communicator client that provides the rich client experience that OCS 2007 is supposed to provide.

What does this mean to the average Joe User? Well, to give a real-life example, I was just talking about how I have 8 devices with hot-off-the-press firmware and a desire to get them up and running. Even before my co-worker and I went to Microsoft to get the update, we were having a debate about why his devices were not able to connect earlier today. After banging the issues about for a while, he was convinced that it was a certificate issue. I was a little bit more skeptical, simply for the fact that it didn't "feel" right. I was willing to come back to the office later, with the upgraded devices and look into it.

After trying to log in with the fresh devices, I was willing to admit that something was wrong. After poking around, I found that in some cases, autoenrollment of domain users and devices was disabled, and so I enabled it using GPO. Thinking hard about it, what this does is tells a device that is logging in with a domain account that it's okay to request a certificate from the domain CA and where that CA is. Sadly (at least for Devin), this didn't correct the issue. I sat and thought about it while I worked on something else, and when I finished with that, I decided to start back at square one and walk through setting up a Tanjay device for the first time. A quick web search and I ran across the problem (I didn't really "run across it.." It was more of a "the answer slapped me in the face and called me stupid"). Reading this post on a blog, I noticed that you have to enable the user for Enterprise Voice. Right now, we switched all of our users to Remote Call Control so we could use the connection with our Mitel 3300 ICP phone PBX.

Long story short, now our users have a choice between a Tanjay device and RCC. This is actually kind of a tough one for me, since I really like how RCC keeps track of my phone communications. I've been having trouble with some phone companies, and having the automatic tracking of who I call when is really helpful. I'll just have to see how things play out once I build our new OCS environment.

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 - A First Look

Tim Robichaux — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 02:36:25 GMT

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!

A new e-mail idea...

Tim Robichaux — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 22:36:46 GMT

Last night a co-worker and I were having a discussion about some of the things that we'd really like our e-mail clients to be able to do. One of the things that I was lamenting was the fact that there is no really easy way to have Microsoft Outlook tag e-mail so that you could build views that were built around tags rather than folders. This got us thinking and I think that I came up with a nifty way to do some e-mail-fu using metadata in a file system for some neat things.

The first idea that I had was that if you just were able to keep each e-mail item as a separate file, you could then use the built-in metadata features of some file systems to tag each item. If you did it this way, you could have a really light-weight e-mail client that would just build a view based on what tags you gave the e-mail. It would also be really simple to have the system (either server-side or client-side) tag e-mail as it came in. Then once it is looked at, it would get tagged as something else.

For example, one of the things that we talked about, was the idea that you could give your client the logic to thread and tag e-mail based on things like:

If it is a reply to someone in particular, it gets tagged for one view
If it is a reply in a thread, it gets tagged for that conversation
If it contains keywords that you have designated as important, a special tag gets added
On and on, in the same vein

The real beauty of this system is that all three cases could be applied to one e-mail that came in and all you would have to do is select a view or type of view to quickly sort through all your incoming and existing e-mail, based on those tags.

Another really cool idea that was brought up (I think he brought it up, but I can't remember at this point), is that you would be able to do some visualization that is not possible in a standard e-mail client. You could create views and viewers that would group your e-mail and messages and all that jazz as a tagged cloud. Then it would be really easy to analyze and comprehend things about your e-mail that it's not always easy to find. I know, personally, that I have a better time understanding complex relationships if I can draw them out or put them into a visual paradigm.

Another area that I think that this would make for some really neat features is in security, backups and speed. Instead of keeping all your data in databases, all of your information is in files. This way, you wouldn't need to have a client that was able to read or access a proprietary data format to access all those messages. Most of the file systems in use today support strong encryption and file-level security, so the integrity of the data is less at risk as well.

I think that this is a fun mental exercise and I would really like to see some changes to the way we look at messages, but I also know that this would require a lot of work and know-how that most people wouldn't want to sink into such a fringe concept. I think that with the changes we've seen in how messaging is approached (as in, the unification of multiple messaging formats and the convergence of information access devices like computers and cell phones), we'll see a lot more expansion into areas that are different in concept than we're used to. I would like to believe that changing the way we look at information was a quick process, but I know that there are many people who think that, "this is the way it's always been done and it's the way it'll always BE done."

This is getting to be a long post, so I'll wrap this up by saying that I really like the way that messaging of all types seems to be converging. I love the way that I can have a central place for all my communications. I like the fact, most of all, that I'm at a place where I can have these kind of discussions and really feel like I've come away with an idea that really fits who I am.