I'm a UC Blog

No I am not going completely cuckoo, those who live in the UK and are showing signs of grey hair (or going bald in my case) will remember the slogan “Follow the bear”, which was paired with the iconic Hofmeister bear advert. Whilst I am no bear, I strongly encourage those that interested in more up-to-date UC related information to get on the Twitter bandwagon (if you haven’t already of course).

I’d be lying if I said I got this minimalistic text based messaging platform when I first signed up a couple of years back, but now it seems to have become the norm for near real-time feeds for all sorts of information. Personally speaking i’m not one to tell you how “Adam burnt his toast this morning”, but I regularly Tweet-out things of UC interest, along with others that utilise the #UCOMS hash tag.

So what are you waiting for, follow me here!

I just came across this Sesame Street-esque UC parody video, created by @shawkeith from Network World – check it out, highly amusing!

Seeing as Exchange 2010 SP1 has hit the streets I thought it would be a good time to remind folks of shiny new/improved service pack UC functionality, including CS ‘14′ support!

Taken from Microsoft TechNet:

The Unified Messaging server role has been improved and has added new features in Exchange 2010 SP1. To use some of these features, you must correctly deploy Microsoft Office Communications Server “14″ in your environment. The following is an overview of all the new features in Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging:

• UM reporting   The reports for Call Statistics and User Call Logs found in the Exchange Management Console are displayed in the Exchange Control Panel.
• UM management in the Exchange Control Panel   You can use the ECP to manage UM components in a cross-premises environment.
• Cross-Forest UM-enabled mailbox migration   In Exchange 2010 SP1, you can use the New-MoveRequestcmdlet with the Mailbox Replication Service (MRS) to move a UM-enabled mailbox within a local forest and multiple forests in an enterprise. 
• Outlook Voice Access improvements   Outlook Voice Access users can log on to their Exchange 2010 mailbox and choose the order to listen to unread voice mail messages, from the oldest message first or the newest message first.
• Caller Name Display support   Exchange 2010 SP1 includes support for enhanced caller ID resolution for displaying names for voice mails from unresolved numbers using Caller Name Display (CND).
• Test-ExchangeUMCallFlow cmdlet   With this Exchange 2010 SP1 cmdlet, you can test UM connectivity and call flow.
• New UM Dial Plan wizard   An additional page has been added to the New UM Dial Plan wizard that allows you to add a UM server to the dial plan.
• Office Communications Server “14″ Support   Migrating SIP URI dial plans and Message Waiting Indicator (MWI) notifications in a cross-premises environment has been added.
• Secondary UM dial plan support   You can add a secondary UM dial plan for a UM-enabled user.
• UM language packs added   New UM language packs are now available in Exchange 2010 SP1. In addition, the Spanish (Spain) (es-ES) UM language pack available for Exchange 2010 SP1 now includes Voice Mail Preview, a feature that wasn’t available in the Exchange 2010 RTM release of that language pack.
• Call answering rules improvements   There are three updates to Call Answering Rules for UM-enabled users in SP1.
• Unified Communications Managed API/speech platform improvements   Beginning with Exchange 2010 SP1, the UM server relies on Unified Communications Managed API v. 2.0 (UCMA) for its underlying SIP signaling and speech processing.
• UM auto attendant update   In Exchange 2010 SP1, a UM auto attendant will play only the holiday greeting on a holiday.

For more information and details about each of these features, see New Unified Messaging Functionality and Voice Mail Features in Exchange 2010 SP1.

In the off chance it has passed you by the MS Exchange Team has released to web the final SP1 bits, here. This major update delivers a host of new functionality, specifically around archiving, Outlook Web App, mobility and the management UI – more on this here.

For the full announcement head over to the Microsoft Exchange Team blog here.

I know this is a little off topic, but chances are that if you read this blog you wouldn’t be against a cross-blog Windows 8 poll that *may* get picked up by the man at Microsoft who say’s yes! (or no as the case may be).

The man behind this poll is Michael Pietroforte at 4sysops (a fellow Microsoft MVP) and the list of sites participating is growing by the day/hour/minute!

Sites participating to date include: (via a little cloud magic all polls are integrated, so ensure you only vote once)

Demonic Talking Skull – I’M A UC BLOG – markwilson.it – msigeek – Standalone Sysadmin – Techinch – Teching It Easy: with Windows – The Experience Blog – The things that are better left unspoken – The Windows Club – WindowsObserver – WindowsPro – Within Windows – 7tutorials – 4sysops

For a full description of all vote options, refer to Michael’s post here

Whilst this report has already done the rounds, seen on many telephony vendor sites and blogs, I thought I would also make reference to the report published late last month (July 28th) and include a little narrative too!

So what is Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant”? Gartner’s description:

“depict markets in the middle phases of their life cycle by using a two-dimensional matrix that evaluates vendors based on their completeness of vision and ability to execute. The Magic Quadrant has 15 weighted criteria that plot vendors based on their relative strengths in the market. This model is well suited for high-growth and consolidating markets where market and vendor differentiations are distinct.”

In English they provide an illustration of how the top vendors have performed against their weights, a market overview and a review of vendor strengths and weaknesses. This illustration may not come as a surprise to those who are UC-savvy, however it does act as a good independent view and something to back up your business case/include within your slide decks.

So what can be made from the newly created matrix of UC suppliers, no surprises really Microsoft, Cisco and Avaya come out top on their ability to execute and completeness of vision (see below)

When digging deeper into detailed analysis a common theme of strengths/weaknesses can be indentified:

• Integration with standard set of enterprise technology
• Functionality, including voice, IM and conferencing
• Price

I highly recomend a look into the full report, including high level pros/cons for suppliers referenced above, available on Gartner’s site here.

I was asked by the lovely Karen Auby at Plantronics, whether or not I’d be interested in joining their blogging team, of course I immediately jumped at the chance!

As a consequence, my first post, and hopefully not last, entitled “Critical elements for widespread VoIP adoption in the UK: usability and accessibility“, went live this morning.

Article link: here

Next Hop is a Microsoft TechNet portal dedicated to Unified Communications, specifically Office Communications Server. Articles are written by the Microsoft product groups, experienced field engineers and MVPs.

Check out my second article, entitled “Strategic Considerations for Switching from a Legacy PBX to Communications Server“

Thanks - Dr. Rez and Susan Bradley

Next Hop Homepage – here

Yesterday I attended a UK UC User Group day at Microsoft Campus Reading, it was a hot day in and around London (my trusty Smart Car told me it was 30 degrees during my un-pleasurable M25 snail’s pace journey) so spending the day in *MS-Air-con was all good! *MS-Air-con is not a new Microsoft product….yet! 

The agenda was as follows:

Unfortunately I had to duck out after the Voice deployment presentation as I had an appointment with my physio, my neck has been killing me (the joys of having twin 3yr old boys – but that is another story…) 

To set the premise, I will try to avoid re-capping CS14 information and delve into specific new features, with more information or explanation, I’ll keep things short and punchy too – to avoid anyone in the UK nodding off (heat + techno-babble is never good!) 

So first up was a welcome from our facilitator Russ Kirk, he runs the UK UC User Group(this is a link to his blog as the MUCUGUK appears to be under development) and in the last year it has definitely picked up pace, so great work Russ, it was a well run event! Russ ran a quick show of hands and it turned out that three quarters of the attendees were resellers or integrators, the rest customers (I sit more within this camp). 

Next up was a look at “What’s new in Communicator ‘14′ experience and back-end”, run by Leigh Smith from the Microsoft UK team. 

• Contact card – functionality already sampled in Outlook 2010 with Communicator 2007 R2, but enhanced further with ‘14′
• Contact pictures – sourced from either a web URL (open/un-authenticated/federated) or Active Directory – this can be disabled by the user or granular controls can be set by the administrator
• Skill search, is as we know grabbed from AD, interestingly Leigh mentioned that this is labelled as “keyword” on the MS internal dog food build
• Communicator ‘14′ interrogates a web based GAL service, therefore negating the need for cached updates – in the past this was cumbersome and often lead to end users asking the dreaded question “have you done it yet?” We were told that bandwidth requirements for this were minimal (less than presence updates and the cached GAL downloads)
• GAL and local Outlook address book contacts can be merged and updated, but only with Exchange 2010 SP1+
• Communicator ‘14′ has a “Twitter-like” feed for team updated (basically updates from your added buddies)
• Conversation history can be pulled out of Exchange Web Services (EWS)
• Exchange integration is primarily established by EWS, alternatively MAPI can be used, with less functionality – see the first of my very bad slide pictures below

• “Backstage”, a Communicator feature, creates integration between Office 2010 apps with capability to co-author files
• BPOS (Microsoft hosted services or Business Productivity Online Standard Suite…those MS marketing folks eh?) will facilitate all the above

This was finished off with a demo (see pictures below) 

Oh one last thing, in case you didn’t already know Communicator ‘14′ is a unified client so a separately installed Live Meeting client is no longer required (unless you are connecting to a Live Meeting server of course). 

Next up was a presentation from the product group’s Francois Doremieux, titled “Communications Server ‘14′: Investments” 

• The first thing that was mentioned was the probability of a public beta within the next few months – good news for those that are not on the Metro (even us poor MVPs are running an old build these days…)
• Microsoft now states that from ’14’s release the customer is in a position where they can choose to “drop their exsiting PBX” – I have to admit, this statement is, for the most part, correct
• Big changes to the management console, in case you didn’t already know MMC RIP…behold PowerShell, RBAC and a Silverlight web based management console
• RCC is still included, but has not and will not evolve beyond what we know today. Currently their are 1 million+ enterprise voice phones in the wild and the focus is not on remote call control – I still think that RCC is a sweet spot for many enterprises, especially as a vehicle to assist in jumping ship from the traditional telephony to Microsoft UC
• Major enhancements to Response Group (in case you didn’t know it already this is the Microsoft’s ACD/Contact Centre queuing system introduced in R2)
• All roles are supported Virtually – no caveats yet…but expect a post-RTM user limits will come into play at some stage

Next Francois talked about high availability, huge refinements here (a must for any soft solution that makes a bold claim about dropping the PBX)

• The registrar and user services are co-located within the same physical front end server, bringing the capability of multiple registrars. These can be deployed in different locations allowing branch based resilience. This is achieved by the client sending a heartbeat out for registrar awareness, upon failure an automated fail-over is expected. This is comparable to traditional PBX fail-over and in some cases a more preferable approach. Re-negotion with registrar will take a matter of seconds
• All traffic (apart from HTTP – HLB is required here) can be handled by DNS load balancing.
• Branch options (see slides below)

 

• Survivable branch appliance (SBA) is a purpose built appliance optimised for branch resilience with consolidation of all roles. Where a fail-over occurs the a message is displayed within Communicator and your personalised contact list becomes unavailable, however search is still functional (offline cache is advisable in this scenario). A full available/un-available list is detailed in the slide below

• The unavailable features can be mitigated with locally deployed server roles
• A local AD controller is not required for branch office client authentication in a fail-over situation – certificates are used to allow/deny access
• Data Centre voice resilience (see slides below)

• In a data centre fail-over scenario (where you switch to your primary pool) you would lose your personalised contact list (this would re-establish upon fall back)
• Standard Edition pairs can be created delivering a lower cost fail-over than with R1/2, great for small deployments (without the need for hardware load balancers) – this I like!
• Whilst standard edition servers can be deployed for branch fail-over, SBAs could offer a more economical and manageable solution – this is yet to be seen

The last session, that I attended, was also run by Francois – “Communications Server ‘14′: Voice Investments”

Key takeways included:

• Exchange UM as of ‘14′ can be hosted within the Cloud
• The front end server now includes the mediation role – this was a limitation that disallowed the capability of routing calls via an alternate (or local) gateway. An improved design that leverages lower TCO and localised resilience (see points below)
• Other mediation benefits include:
  • Server rationalisation (therefore  lower TCO)
  • Less hops, peer-to-peer is available where in-branch mediation exists, therefore lower WAN bandwidth utilisation by avoiding potential hair-pinning
  • Improved voice quality
• Mediation in R1 and R2 handled both signalling and transcoding – the transcoding role in ‘14’ has been offloaded to the end point device therefore lower server-side CPU utilisation
• Media bypass – to allow interoperability with 3^rd party IP-PBX’ and SIP providers (see slide below)

• Private line – the same as regular lines, but with a twist (inbound calls only, different ring and overrides delegation, call-forwarding, DnD and other routing options) – basically private calls will always go through
• Malicious call trace – a mechanism to tag a call at CDR level for handling/blocking by admin at a later date
• Enhanced 911 – addressing emergency call location requirement (within 100ft mandate!) This location infrastructure is handled by the Location Information Server (LIS) a Windows service that runs on the front end server. This contains a location based IP address database that can modified by the end user and administrator. As private addressing is used in most cases, other information such as switch/switch port are used to correctly identify location based information.
• Analogue device management – the ability to connect FXS aware devices and manage them (specific cases for this could be facsimile devices)
• Caller ID presentation controls – per user/group controls to suppress or alter CID information, can be modified by end-user or administrator
• Voice routing enhancements – centrally manage number formatting prior to routing via PBX/PSTN (useful when a standard one size fits all approach to number presentation does not work)
• Voice policy controls – giving the administrator central control over which features are available for users. i.e. forwarding, delegation, call transfer, parking, team call, delegation etc.

With that ends another great User Group meeting, not of course without paying a visit to the Bing ice cream van – it was a hot day after all!

During a keynote from a rather sweaty Bob Muglia at Tech-Ed North America, Gurdeep Singh Pall took to the stage and announced additional functionality available within Communications Server ‘14′.

This was without doubt the most interesting disclosure to date, which also included a product demonstration. (for those with Silverlight I have embedded the video below – forward to 00:46:30)

Subsequently last week, Microsoft partners were issued with CS ‘14′ preview information. This information (in PowerPoint form) was, for the most part, a regurgitation of existing information presented at VoiceCon, but one particular slide was of interest (see below). It was a comparison of traditional telephony functionality available to end-users in past, present and future.

Communications Server ‘14′ is expected to be available in the second half of this year….