The next meeting of the UCVUG will take place on Monday April 19th, 2010.

I would like to pass on details of the next UCVUG meeting.  Please support this great community by registering for the event and participating.

April 2010 Meeting Details

The Microsoft Unified Communications Virtual User Group (UCVUG) will be hosting its next quarterly meeting on April 19th, 2010 at 12:00 PM Eastern Time (-5 GMT). This event will be broadcast online via Microsoft Live Meeting. Please register if  you plan to attend so that we can get a count of how many attendees to plan for.

Agenda

• UCVUG Welcome – Dustin Hannifin
• Exchange 2010 UM and OCS 2007 R2 Integration – Alex Lewis
• Prize Drawing and Closing – This month we will be giving away copies of Windows 7

Speaker Bio

Alex Lewis is a senior Unified Communications consultant at Convergent Computing and author of many books in the “Unleashed” series. He has contributed to Exchange Server 2003 Unleashed, Exchange Server 2007 Unleashed and Exchange Server 2010 unleashed and is currently writing “Microsoft Communications Server W14 Unleashed”. You can follow Alex on Twitter and read more about his UC implementation experiences on his blog, Windows into Silicon Valley.

Registration

If you plan to attend this event, please register via the registration link here:

http://ucvugapril2010.eventbrite.com/

-John Lamb, Modality Systems

Gurdeep Singh Pall Delivers the Goods During Microsoft  Keynote at VoiceCon 2010 Orlando

Gurdeep is is the Corporate VP of the Unified Communications R&D group at Microsoft.  I had the distinct pleasure of working with Gurdeep when I was at Microsoft.  He’s not only an incredibly technical and passionate leader, but a great speaker as well.  I always make a point of taking extensive notes whenever he presents, because of the wealth of information and key talking points that he delivers.

Here are my notes from his VoiceCon Orlando keynote presentation.

On-Demand Presentation Recording:

You can watch the keynote here:  http://tv.voicecon.com/

• Register and go to Live TV. 
• In the video window, click Menu, and navigate to on-demand presentations for VoiceCon (March 2010, Orlando)

Statistics Presented in the Introduction Video:

• 1 in 6 US households don’t have fixed line phones
• US mobile phone users send 1.7x more texts than phone calls on average (I expect this is much higher in UK/Europe)
• The statistic rises to 10x among teenagers
• 70% of mobile phone calls originate from cars
• 4 million “millennials” enter the workforce each year
• The most popular online destination for the millennial demographic is social networks
• 300 million people use Windows Live Messenger to make voice calls
• In December 2009, AT&T asked the FCC to eliminate the regulatory requirement to provide landlines to households
• “The next generation is here”

Introduction:

“The only thing that is constant is change”

Computer and phone have been separate, and over the last decades, computers kept getting faster and faster, but phones have  the same

The average information worker only spends 40% of time at their desk.  (So most communications systems are designed for 40% of use?  What about the other 60%?)

Microsoft Has Just “One” Idea: 

If we had to design communications system, starting anew, without being tethered to the past, how would you go about designing that system? 

How do you take software to create a communications system like that?

Microsoft had a luxury:  They could be disruptive because there was no legacy business to protect.

OCS Today:

70% of "fortune X”( ? – didn’t catch the number) companies have OCS today

Microsoft and entire industry led the transformation from mainframes to PC’s.  The ethos was: don’t buy hardware, software and services and software from a single vendor, build an ecosystem

“Mainframe era economics plagues the PBX industry.”

New Wave 14 features Demo:

Jamie Stark did a great job showing new features of “Communications Server Wave 14”.  I was happy to see that they skipped past the typical “Presence is dialtone” explanation and embedded presence in Outlook.  This is a very powerful message, but one that this particular audience has all seen before.

Demo highlights:

• Location awareness
• E911 services – powered by the location awareness (Location is carried in the SIP channel and sent to a public service providers in the cloud.)
• “Visual Voice Mail” type voice mail UI – directly accessible in Office Communicator
• Click to convert to Voice Mail to text via Exchange UM  (cool feature: each transcribed word is a hyperlink that will jump to the right place in the audio playback.)
• Contact Card & Skill Search  This is an interface directly into the SharePoint index of skillsets and information
• Call Admission Control

Case Studies

This section was followed by a great demo from Clarity Consulting around a hosted Call Centre solution they built on OCS 2007 R2.   

There was also a customer presentation from AT Kearney, a business consulting company with 3500 employees and 47 offices.

• Replaced legacy PBX with OCS R2, extended for mobile users
• Improved employee work/life balance and lowered TCO
• 300k IM / day
• 450 – 500 video calls / day
• Anecdote: OCS federation with clients like Best Buy enables secure & compliant communication (both data and voice) at no extra cost.

Gartner Magic Quadrants:

For four years in a row, Microsoft has been a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant for UC, and Microsoft is also a leader in the following MQ’s: 

• Enterprise Content Management
• Social Software
• Information Access Technology

Gurdeep’s Predictions

In next 3 years

• 50% of voice calls will be more than voice
• 75% of apps will be communications enabled

Quote: "The success of UC will be like salt in food.  It’s always there, an important ingredient, but you never see it."  (referring to the fact that it will be embedded into applications by default).

My Takeaways

I think the big takeaway is that Microsoft is leading in Enterprise Collaboration.  Voice is becoming an increasingly a smaller part of collaboration, and while still critically important, must fit seamlessly into the bigger picture of real-time (synchronous) and non-real-time (asynchronous) collaboration.  This, along with seamless mobility, are the most critical factors to consider when developing a UC strategy within an organization.

-John Lamb, Modality Systems 

Last year, I deployed a new set of Exchange Server 2007 servers (Client Access and Hub Transport on one server, Mailbox Server on another) into an Exchange Server 2003 environment for a customer as part of the build phase of the messaging migration component of a large infrastructure upgrade project. I went about testing mailbox access, mail routing etc and found that I had some weird behaviour occurring.

I couldn’t log on using OWA to mailboxes I created on the new Mailbox Server or mailboxes I migrated from the Exchange 2003 server because I was getting a "you do not have permission to access this mailbox" error (below).

I checked the mailbox permissions on the mailboxes and everything looked fine (NT AUTHORITY\SELF was specified).

I could however log onto mailboxes on the Exchange 2003 using the Exchange 2007 OWA, meaning OWA itself looked ok. No mail was traversing between the two environments nor was it getting to external recipients from Exchange 2007 mailboxes.

In addition to that, I was getting these warnings on the Mailbox Server:

Log Name: Application

Source: MSExchangeMailSubmission

Date: 24/06/2009 2:29:44 PM

Event ID: 1009

Task Category: MSExchangeMailSubmission

Level: Warning

Keywords: Classic

User: N/A

Computer: MBX.domain.local

Description:

The Microsoft Exchange Mail Submission Service is currently unable to contact any Hub Transport servers in the local Active Directory site. The servers may be too busy to accept new connections at this time.

And these on the Client Access/Hub Transport Server:

Log Name: Application

Source: MSExchangeTransport

Date: 24/06/2009 5:51:41 AM

Event ID: 1035

Task Category: SmtpReceive

Level: Warning

Keywords: Classic

User: N/A

Computer: CASHT.domain.local

Description:

Inbound authentication failed with error LogonDenied for Receive connector Default CASHT. The authentication mechanism is Gssapi. The source IP address of the client who tried to authenticate to Microsoft Exchange is [ipaddressofex2003machine].

And:

Log Name: Application

Source: MSExchangeSA

Date: 18/06/2009 8:37:22 AM

Event ID: 9186

Task Category: General

Level: Warning

Keywords: Classic

User: N/A

Computer: CASHT.domain.local

Description:

Microsoft Exchange System Attendant has detected that the local computer is not a member of group ‘/dc=local/dc=domain/ou=Microsoft Exchange Security Groups/cn=Exchange Servers’. System Attendant is going to add the local computer into the group.

The current members of the group are ‘CN=Exchange Install Domain Servers,CN=Microsoft Exchange System Objects,DC=domain,DC=local; CN=CASHT,OU=Servers,OU=IT,OU=Company,DC=domain,DC=local; CN=MBX,OU=Servers,OU=IT,OU=Company,DC=domain,DC=local; ‘.

Because this was a new install of Exchange Server 2007, I thought something was up with the install so redeployed the virtual machines from template and installed from scratch and reconfigured everything but alas, no dice. I’d never seen these kind of issues on other deployments so found it really weird.

I google’d everything I could to find a solution but nothing came up. I ran the Exchange BPA and Troubleshooting agents, ran Test-MAPIConnectivity and Test-OWAConnectivity but to no avail.

Quite perplexed, it was here that I called Microsoft Product Support Services to check out the problem with me.

We increased event logging levels on OWA, Information Store, Mail Submission on the relevant servers but still didn’t see anything compelling to determine the problem. I also tried removing the OWA virtual directory and recreating it but this didn’t help.

Finally, we checked the Local Security Policy on the Mailbox Server under

Computer Configuration -> Windows Settings -> Security Settings -> Local Policies – User Rights Assignment and looked at the Access this computer from the network policy setting. It was here that I found that the Default Domain Policy was enforcing DOMAIN\Domain Users rather than not being defined at all as it should be.

Once I removed this setting and did a gpupdate /force on the two Exchange 2007 servers, everything lit up and worked as it should. I could log into an Exchange Server 2007 mailbox using OWA, mail started flowing between the two environments and to external recipients and all the warnings in the Application logs on both servers cleared up.

This is definitely not something you’ll come across regularly in your Exchange travels as it was a unique pre-existing issue with the customer environment, but worth checking out if you’re experiencing behaviour and warnings like this after you install Exchange Server 2007 into an Exchange Server 2003 environment.

A corporate version of the successful iDialog client is now available

Corporate Licensing

iDialogPro is the corporate version of the iDialog client (based on iDialog version 1.2), now available with volume licensing and controlled distribution to your users.  

How It Works

iDialogPro is available as a free (no cost) application in the Apple iTunes store.   This enables your users to download and install iDialogPro as they would any other iPhone or iPod Touch application.   Upon launching the application, the user will be asked to provide an authorization code in order to unlock and use the application beyond the initial trial period.   The code is tied to your company‘s OCS domain and is therefore automatically secure from unauthorized distribution outside of your company.   This enables the code to be distributed freely to your users, for example, via email.

What do I need?

In order to use iDialogPro, you will need the following:

• An Apple iPhone or iPod Touch device with a network connection (WiFi, 3G, EDGE, GPRS, etc)
• iDialogPro installed on the device.
• A Microsoft OCS 2007 or 2007 R2 server system that is properly configured
• An OCS Communicator Web Access (CWA) Server, preferably accessible via the Internet

Trial Capability

If you would like to try iDialogPro, download and install the application from the Apple iTunes store.  When you launch the application for the first time, use the activation code “CanIConnect”.   This code will enable use of the product for 3 days. 

If you have any questions or would like more information about licensing iDialogPro for your organization, please contact us: idialog@modalitysystems.com

-John

John Lamb, Modality Systems

Skype is getting serious about business voice

I posted recently on Skype hiring Jonathan Rosenberg.  Today, Skype announced that David Gurle has joined the team as GM and VP of Skype for Business.

Mr. Gurle was instrumental in laying the foundation for LCS/OCS at Microsoft, and more recently turned Thomson Reuters into a major collaboration player within the financial services market.

I don’t like making predictions, but is this the start of a 3 horse race in Enterprise UC?  Or will Skype simply fill an important gap in the small and mid-market businesses where the major Enterprise UC players require too much investment and heavy-lifting?

If Skype starts with adoption at smaller companies and and grows up-market through continuous innovation, they will be well-positioned for success. 

-John

John Lamb, Modality Systems

Jonathan Rosenberg Joins Skype

I was warming up to write a blog post on Cisco’s UC announcement today (Cisco Unified Communications system 8.0), but the video on their web site nearly put me to sleep.   Based on the look of the new Cisco phones, they didn’t get the memo about the importance of user experience.

Instead, the big news today comes from Skype:  They hired Jonathan Rosenberg, a key author of the SIP protocol:

http://gigaom.com/2009/11/09/skype-names-sip-guru-as-chief-technology-strategist/

Rosenberg is well-regarded in SIP circles and his hiring means that Skype is making a stronger push into the enterprise… When I last spoke to Skype CEO Josh Silverman, he was pretty clear about his desire to turn Skype into a major enterprise voice and collaboration player.

The recent legal tussling over Skype’s core technology has finally been put to rest and now they have Rosenberg.  Given that he was instrumental in the development of SIP, founded DynamicSoft (which was acquired by Cisco) and was then key to Cisco’s voice strategy over the last 5 years, this could be a very interesting twist for Enterprise UC.

-John

John Lamb, Modality Systems. 

iDialog v1.1.1 release

The first update to iDialog is now available.  The update is a free download if you have already purchased iDialog v1.0.

This update includes the following features and fixes:

Features:

• Support for Enterprise certificates. If your OCS CWA is configured with an internal certificate, the user is warned about the untrusted certificate and can choose to “accept” the certificate in order to proceed.  This is the same behavior that is available in all major web browsers today.  This will greatly improve the out of box experience for users at companies that have used an internal CA to issue their CWA certificate (or certain Public CA’s that have proved to be problematic for the iPhone platform).
• Support for OCS CWA 2007 and 2007 R2 servers that are published behind an ISA Server using Single-Sign On (SSO) authentication.   If you have deployed CWA using ISA SSO, the connection will now be seamless.
• Support for Distribution Groups (This feature is available only if your company has deployed OCS 2007 R2).
• Robust connection status information and error messages

Fixes:

• Improved speed and responsiveness.
• Support for passwords with certain special characters.
• Fix for intermittent app crashes when signed in to multiple OCS endpoints.

   

  As always, feel free to email us at idialog@modalitysystems.com if you have any comments, suggestions or inquiries.

-John

Pictorial Representations of Presence Status

Wortell, a Microsoft Certified Gold Partner in The Netherlands, has developed very cool and clever use of OCS on their company’s web site.

Link: http://www.wortell.nl/nl-nl/OurPeople/Pages/onze-mensen.aspx

The company profile page contains pictures of Wortell employees.  Each person’s picture changes based on the person’s OCS presence.   If you hover over a picture, you see the person’s name and their presence icon.

This is a great example of OCS as a platform technology and the power of contextual presence. 

I think this example is so impressive because it’s a very creative idea that was very well executed with high-quality photography and a clean and simple layout.  Nice job!

-John Lamb, Modality Systems   

International Product Release Announcement

  iDialog is now available in all Apple iTunes stores worldwide as of today.

We’ve had exceptional results from the initial release of iDialog (to English-speaking countries) two weeks ago.  The feedback has been extremely positive and we’d like to thank everyone who has purchased the app so far.

Before you purchase iDialog:

• Ensure that your company is running OCS Communicator Web Access (CWA) and the URL is accessible from the Internet.   The URL should look similar to this: https://im.mycompany.com
• iDialog will not connect via an OCS Edge Server.   If your servername looks like “sip.mycompany.com:443”, this is probably not a CWA URL and iDialog will not connect.
• iDialog does not support 2-factor authentication or Single Sign-On (SSO) solutions.  We understand that this is an important scenario to cover and are investigating possible solutions.

For more information on supported platforms and answers to other frequently asked questions, please see the iDialog FAQ.  

As always, feel free to email us at idialog@modalitysystems.com if you have any inquiries.

-John

Modality Systems launches iDialog

If it’s been a little quiet over here on the blog, it’s because we’ve been heads down on a number of exciting projects.

    We’re very happy to announce the first one today:  iDialog.

iDialog is an OCS 2007 and OCS 2007 R2 compatible client for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. 

At Modality, we’re big users of OCS, but we also use iPhones.  Initially, we just wanted to build this for ourselves, so we could have the best of both worlds. It became clear that the applicability was much broader given the success of the iPhone as a business tool. 

Search the GAL	Participate in IM conversations	Forward incoming OCS Voice Calls

iDialog supports the following features:

• Display OCS contact list and presence information
• Set presence information, including custom note and location data
• Search corporate Global Address List (GAL)
• Send and receive Instant Messages (IM)
• Add multiple participants to an IM conversation
• Manage and participate in multiple IM conversations simultaneously
• Control incoming OCS Voice calls (forward/redirect an incoming OCS call to another device, such as an iPhone, voice mailbox, or another phone number)
• Call a phone number listed on a contact card (This feature is not available on iPod Touch devices)
  Send an email to an address listed on a contact card

It’s available as of today in the iTunes App Store in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia and NZ.  We’ll be announcing our plans for localised versions soon.  

For more information:

• iDialog Website
• iDialog Product Overview (PDF File)
• iDialog FAQ (PDF File)

Inquiries: idialog@modalitysystems.com

Enjoy!

-John