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Apparently my photo generated PowerPoint decks are not that great (day job safe…for now anyways)

For those interested, the real slides and videos are now online.

Today’s session focussed on the extendibility within the wave 14 communications platform was presented by David Ollason (Principal Lead Program Manager at Microsoft). David explained these development opportunities and gave examples; tools in scope were WPF and Silverlight (no surprises here).

As with yesterday’s session my trusty BlackBerry was used to take pictures in low light conditions, you may have noticed that I have taken the liberty of playing about with contrast/brightness settings (it kinda helped, a bit!) I also had a better seat today so a reduced camera angle J

Firstly we were informed that everything we were about to see was (as with yesterday) running on pre-alpha w14 code, the mention of 2010 was also heard – logically it has always been suggested that w14 is likely to become Office Communications Server 2010.

We were next introduced to a web/Silverlight application that directly interrogated OC 2010 information (see picture).

Followed by a WPF application (see picture).

Hopefully you can follow the theme of the presentation by following the slides presented below.

Silverlight example

WPF example

That’s it for today…

Brett Johnson has posted a “how-to” guide on enabling Communicator presence within Exchange 2010 OWA, interestingly a local installation of the client is not required (comms is carried by OCS web services).

Source: here

Today I attended a session run by Chris Mayo (UC Technical Evangelist at Microsoft). The session’s topic, development platform futures with Microsoft’s unified communications platform, namely Office Communications Server.

The interesting little nugget that I picked up on was that everything discussed or demonstrated was running on pre-alpha wave 14 code and…(wait for it) there was no NDA this time!

You may recall a week back I attended a Microsoft Messaging and Mobility / Unified Communications User Group, at this session Yancey Smith mentioned Chris would be running his overview on OCS W14.

Below are a number of key slides presented, including a few sneak peeks of the Communicator 14 UI. (excuse the quality, these were taken at an angle with my BlackBerry Bold 9700)

Some very interesting integration already performed (in alpha) by the product group included:

· A service desk IM bot that could be used to route a call to a relevant (and available) support analyst based on presence/availability and skill i.e. Wintel or Exchange expert.

· A virtual executive assistant that can be commanded by IM/ voice (or DTMF tones) to find available meeting rooms at a specific location.

W14 MOC

More W14 MOC

The Helpdesk bot demo

In case you were not already aware this was not ready for prduction use!

A Microsoft timeline including W14

That’s all folks!

Yesterday (during Stephen Elop’s TechED keynote) I upgraded my release candidate of Exchange 2010 to RTM, thankfully this went without a hitch. However, like the rest of the community it appears that the “pre-pidded” copy of Exchange released to TechNet and MSDN installs as an evaluation copy.

My initial thoughts were that this was an “upgrade” glitch, then I found posts on the TechNet Forums and EHLO referring to the same issue during a clean installation. Recent feedback from an Exchange team member clarifies (update: hrmm, not entirely) the situation:

Taken from EHLO:

Exchange said:

Source: here

The OCS 2007 R2 cumulative update installer has been already mentioned on a couple of UC community sites, however an official mention has been made over at the OCS team blog.

Source: here