Service Manager released but available June 1st

Service Manager was officially released at MMS. The down side is that it will only be availanle for general consumption on 1st June. However in the meantime you can download a 180 eval version from here.

We are hoping to make training available as soon as possible. I am waiting for a reply and will post training date here as soon as they become available.

Rob

OCS Stress tool

The OCS Stress Tool or as its more correctly known the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Capacity Planning Tool has been out for a while but its worth a reminder that it exists.

You can test your OCS environment using the OCS Capacity Planning and Stress tool. The tool emphasises use only in a lab environment so be careful.

The documentation included in the download gives comprehensive instructions on its use.

You can download the tool from here.

But its not a supported download.

OCS 2007 R2 interop with Server 2008 R2

OCS 2007 R2 has not been supported on Windows server 2008 R2 for some time now.
But Microsoft have released two Knowledge base articles that show some progress to having OCS 2007 R2 running on the 2008 R 2 platform.
When Windows Server 2008 R2 was released many people wanted to migrate to the latest version of the OS. But the problem was that Office Communications Server 2007 R2, OCS 2007 or LCS 2005 did not work correctly after  upgrading to Windows Server 2008 R2 in a domain environment.

Microsoft have released Knowledge Base Article 982020 detailing a resolution to this problem.

Additionally there were problems on using the os as host servers for OCS 2007 R2 in a member server role.
Knowledge base article 982021 describes how to implement OCS R2  using Windows Server 2008 R2 and details the security changes, hotfixes and fixes in a step by step format, very useful.

Official MS Team Blogs

I was reading Thomas's blog and he had this really cool link to a list of all the Official MS team blogs.
Thanks Thomas

Service Manager Forums

The Service manager forums can be found here

OCS wave 14

Well I sat on the webcast on Tuesday and am still not much the wiser. Summarised below are some of the scant details that were revealed.
 
The key points were:

• There is a new communicator client,
• The client has some interesting Sharepoint integration but the details were not disclosed. I think it requires SPS 2010 but not sure.
• You can run Silverlight apps inside the client and get full access to
• everything.
• Voice now includes Branch office survivability (using local appliances)

• Enhanced E911 support for North America.
• RCC and Dual Forking are going away. They still work but it looks like being deprecated.
• An interesting part is around SIP Trunk, OCS and IP PBX being able to share presence.
• Lots of new phones - "Wave 14 is optimised for the IP telephone".

No details about the beta were forthcomming.

There is also the announcements made at VoiceCon of course and they can be found here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20100324/tc_pcworld/microsofttoupdatecommunicationsserver