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Posted by eileenb on April 21, 2009
Last week at Interact2009, I grabbed some time with Ian Hameroff (@hameroff) to talk about the features of Exchange 2010 that we’ve announced.
We snuck into the filming room where they were filming the Windows 7 videos during a coffee break and captured some of the key features of Exchange – straight from the product team…
Thanks Ian for missing lunch to do this – and well done for getting it all filmed in one take too 
and the URL for you to click is: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010
Posted in Exchange, collaboration, messaging | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on March 23, 2009
Yes, that’s right. Invitation only to Interact 09. on April 14th. That’s unusual enough. Usually we open the event up to everyone in the hope that we can inspire you to see some new products and learn about the products you already have installed.
But Interact is an exclusive event, open to invited guests only. This gives you a much better ratio of audience to MS staff. At Interact 08 we found that the conversations flowed much more readily, with enough MS staff on hand to make sure your question got answered – sometimes by the person that actually wrote the component! We’re streaming a live keynote over from Redmond (which will be at the end of the day on the UK to allow for time differences), and we’ll have someone over from Redmond (both on the OCS and Exchange sides) to answer your roadmap questions.
Interact09 is an event focused entirely on Communications – OCS, OC and Exchange so it’s not the sort of event that anyone would want to come to. if you’ve been around a while you may remember the old MEC – well its different – but similar in theme. Lots of insider information, lots of “extra” knowledge, lots of ideas.
So what if you really needed to go but haven’t received your personal invitation from us? What if your company is just planning your UM infrastructure and you haven’t told your Microsoft account manager yet? What if you don’t have a Microsoft account manager but really really need to get to this event. What if you talk about UC all the time to anyone who will listen?
Well you can persuade me. I’ve had clearance from corp to accept requests from people who really want to come along to this event and are not already on our invite list. I can send you an invitation code – but you need to mail me and convince me first
How could you convince me to invite you?
Perhaps you could tell me about your active unified communications blogging habit. Or you might tell me about the local community activities you support – speaking engagements and user group meetings. Or perhaps you’ve got a tremendous amount of UC expertise.
If that’s you – and you want an invite. mail me (email address can be found here) and I’ll allocate the few remaining invitations based on your mail.
and I hope to see you there…
Posted in Exchange, collaboration, messaging | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on March 17, 2009
We’re planning a Virtual conference in May this year as we’re not going out on the road this summer with the TechNet roadshow. Alex, who writes the TechNet Newsletter, has created an online poll so you can vote for the sessions that you’d really like us to deliver.
We’ll be creating the Virtual Conference based on your answers to this Poll so please can you vote for the sessions that you’d most like us to deliver and we’ll schedule the day round your responses.
George has the information about all of the sessions on her blog if you’d like to see what the sessions are all about before you vote.
I’ll share more information about the sessions when we have a decent number of votes to make a good choice of sessions…
Posted in Exchange, Office, collaboration, messaging | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on March 11, 2009
Brett has some amazing resources about OCS in one neat list over on his blog which deserve a wider audience – especially if you’re planning a deployment of OCS in the near future. OCSR2, with the ability to embed rich content and HTML directly into messages like screenshots and ink , this release is certainly worth evaluating
And if you don’t want to try the on premise solution – why don’t you try Office Communicator Online to use with Office Online. the online Services team blog has the information you need
Posted in collaboration, messaging | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on March 9, 2009
With all of the announcements for Exchange online (and SharePoint online), I thought I’d do a little digging and find out where our documents are which talk about it in a general way (an earlier post has some links to techy documents )Here are the features that a subscriber would get with for Exchange Online – Standard
Exchange Online subscribers benefit from a set of features that are common to all Microsoft Online Services offerings:
Secure access: 28-bit Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption. Anyone who intercepts a communication sees only encrypted text.
Business continuity: Geographically dispersed Microsoft data centres which act as backups for each other
Intrusion monitoring: Systems are monitored for unusual or suspicious activity, notifying the customer if necessary.
Security audits: compliance policies, antivirus signatures, configuration and security updates.
High availability: 99.9 percent scheduled uptime.
Support: Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the service administrator.
Administration Centre: For managing all Microsoft Online Services. You can add and delete users, add contacts and distribution lists, and create and configure SharePoint Online sites.
My Company Portal: Access services such as e-mail, create a SharePoint site etc.
Sign In application: Sign in once and access all services without being prompted repeatedly for their password.
Virus filtering: Automatically removes viruses and spam. Also scans for viruses in intracompany e-mail and in all documents that reside in SharePoint Online sites.
Directory Synchronization tool: Keep your on-premises Active Directory and the Microsoft Online Services directory in sync.
A similar white paper is available for Sharepoint online here:
Posted in Exchange, collaboration, messaging | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on February 27, 2009
Whilst I’m on the subject of OCS, voice and presence, I noticed that Ewan has updated his document on how to create custom presence states in OCS. his “Fine and Dandy” state makes me smile whenever I see it.
Anyway, to get the XML on how to do this (and the registry key that you need) read his blog here.
So with custom presence, and the ability to change your custom location (see above). You could get really descriptive about where you are, and how you’re feeling in that location…
Thanks to Ewan for the registry key. now or a bit of playing with OC…
Posted in collaboration, messaging | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on February 27, 2009
If you’re seriously thinking about OCS R2 after the launch the other week, then Brett and Julian are running a webcast of the voice capabilities of OCS on march 11th. here is the abstract for the Webcast:
In this 60 minute session Brett Johnson and Julian Datta Shepherd will provide an overview of OCS 2007 R2 covering the new features and functionality which will enhance business productivity and reduce costs. This session will focus in on the voice capabilities available with OCS 2007 R2. The webcast is aimed at ITPros that have some experience with Office Communications Server and VoIP.
Posted in collaboration, messaging | 1 Comment »
Posted by eileenb on February 3, 2009
So for the OCS R2 launch today which is starting in a moment, I thought I’d share the links for the OCS R2 Evaluation download– with the links of course:
Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Attendant
Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Group Chat Client
Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Group Chat Server
Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Group Chat Administration Tool
Office Communicator Phone Edition
UCMA 2.0 SDK – 64 bit
Speech Language Packs (12 languages)
Brett has had fun playing with OCS R2 on a conf call today and has some great screen shots on his blog. Here’s my favourite feature that i use all the time:
One button click to create all this. One click to join the Live meeting. That’s truly Unified….
Posted in General musings, collaboration, messaging | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on January 13, 2009
Whilst I’m on the subject of Masters (see yesterdays post), I thought I’d talk about the OCS Master qualification that has also started.
The first public class will be offered at a 50% discount and the next one after that will be offered at a 30% discount. It’s hard work though. having been on internal training courses (10 hour days) I can honestly say that you’re really pushed hard. That’s why you need to have passed the pre-requisite exams too
You’ll get long days of detailed instruction (most days are 8am to 7pm in class), individual and group activities, over 20 hands on activities and a substantial lab environment to enable to you to really drill into scenarios and components that you would either never have the time, infrastructure or teaching support to do otherwise.
Here is a quick overview of how the three weeks of training are made up.
In week one we first drill into the dependencies of OCS. If you don’t understand the protocols, services and infrastructures upon which your solution depends then you can have little hope of being a credible consultant when deployments run into technical difficulties and require a depth of understanding that enables a root cause to be quickly established and rectified or how to understand how infrastructure dependencies impact design decisions. We move onto IM and presence looking in detail at how the heart of OCS works from both a server and a client perspective. Building on this we then drill into conferencing from both detailed technical and architectural perspectives.
Week two is mainly about voice and all that entails. Some of the most exciting sessions here let you explore real world complex voice designs and really get into what it takes to get design and deploy these. We also look at video and video interoperability with other vendors and then what it takes to design and deploy edge infrastructures.
Bringing it all together in week three we look at broader architecture and operational issues such as high availability, disaster recovery, monitoring and capacity planning.
More info over on the office communications team blog
and when you pass the Masters course, let me know and I’ll advertise your skills for you
Posted in General musings, collaboration, messaging | Comments Off
Posted by eileenb on January 6, 2009
So you’ve decided to migrate your on premise Exchange solution to online but you’re not sure where to start.
I found these documents whilst browsing around our internal sites and thought they may be useful if you’re thinking about moving to Online Services. There’s a download that allows you to configure Outlook, IE and Live Meeting and you can then use this application to logon to the hosted applications that you’ve subscribed to on Microsoft Online, The other document details how you can migrate your Exchange (on premise) mailboxes, all of your POP3 and IMAP4 mailboxes to Exchange Online (description on what you get with Exchange Standard is here).
Useful reference material…
Posted in Exchange, General musings, messaging | Comments Off
