Integrating IM applications with Office 2007

You’ve been playing with OCS 2007 and you love it.  You love it so much you’ve piloted it in a few places.  you now really want to deploy it.  So how do you upgrade the evaluation version to the full released version?  This document details the steps you need to take to upgrade.

And what about integrating presence from your IM applications to Office?  And what about putting the call functionality into your own in house application.  We’ve got the walkthrough here too.  Download this document for the information on how to do it.

Next, call me or mail me and demo just how great your application is – I’d really love to hear your story on how you did it, any problems you faced with the integration, and any tips for Microsoft?  I may even come over and film you (in a Channel 9 style video) so that others who are trying to do the same thing with OCS or Exchange etc. can follow your example…

Being blocked by Hotmail

Fenia was desperate.  She works for a Microsoft partner and they’d been blocked by hotmail spam filters.

“We cannot send any emails out to any of our clients that have hotmail accounts. I have been trying to 2 days to find a phone number to call – I even called Microsoft Partnership helpline but I didn’t get anywhere!  We are losing money as there are newsletters that need to be sent and of course keep getting rejecting.

I even opened 2 tickets at postmaster.msn.com.

I don’t want to take up your time at all, but maybe Microsoft should have a procedure for legitimate companies, especially Microsoft Certified Partners to avoid this long wait to get whitelisted.  I think it is quite ironic to be blocked by our partner only as we are not blacklisted anywhere else ”

Interesting question  and it dealt with a problem that other companies may also have.  So I decided to do a little digging around. 

Any company having issues with email being sent to Hotmail customer inboxes should review our Postmaster website.  Here your technical team should review our deliverability guidelines and also follow some troubleshooting tips on how to help resolve sender issues. If these tips are not helpful in resolving the issue then the sender can log the escalation with our support teams here.

The escalation team will provide as much information as possible without explicitly providing mail senders with a way to get around our spam filters. The vast majority of email that gets blocked is based on reputation data for IP’s within a senders range. We assign a score based on what we know about that sender based on end user feedback and other reputation data.

The postmaster website highlights several free programs that the sender can enrol in to help improve their email deliverability:

• Smart Network Data Services (SNDS) is a free service that provides senders and ISPs with data about e-mail activity from their IP space that is sent to MSN Hotmail or Windows Live Mail.

• The Junk Mail Reporting Program (JMRP) returns complaint data back to the sender so that they can scrub recipients out who marks their mail as junk in HM.

• The sender should also publish SenderID.

The other alternative is the Sender Score Certified program, which is managed by a third party and involves the payment of a bond. If accepted into the program, they will no longer be subject to our filters so long as they meet the criteria used by Return Path.

All of these services have helped other email senders improve their deliverability to Hotmail.

 

So now you know.  It’s certainly a useful set of links for you in case you ever find yourself being blocked from sending mails to Hotmail accounts…

Selling early copies of Halo 3…

James and I were walking to dinner last night in Newcastle when we saw this…

Didn’t Argos release Halo 3 early?

James has his own opinions…