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To celebrate the 25th anniversary of MS Press, Microsoft will give away free e-books every month. This month they give away two OCS 2007 R2 e-books.

Get the OCS 2007 e-book here: Free e-books: All OCS all the time!
All 2009 free MS Press e-books

We are living in a time where virtualization is a hot topic. Many organizations have some or maybe all there servers running in a virtualized environment. So it not strange I receive a lot of questions about running OCS on a hypervisor (ESX/Hyper-V/Xen). Microsoft has finally published a whitepaper which will answer the most common questions about running OCS 2007 R2 in a virtualized environment. As expected, all the server roles that deal with real-time data (audio/video) are not supported in a virtualized environment. It will work perfectly for demo or test purposes but will absolutely not be supported in a production environment. Virtualize audio/video server roles can cause jitters, echo’s and delays.

Download the whitepaper here

Microsoft Press has anounched a new Unified Communications title: “Programming for Unified Communications. This book provides hands-on guidance when planning to integrate OCS 2007 with your enterpirse applications.

Click here for more information.

Rick Varvel has posted a very detailed and helpfull OCS Remote Access configuration guide. This guide will help you to configure your firewall ports, dns records and certificates.

Download the guide

For more information see Rick’s blog

Microsoft has change the name of Exchange 14 to Exchange 2010. The first beta of Exchange 2010 is avaible now. Exchange 2010 is the first beta release of the WAVE14  products like MS Office 2010 and MOSS 2010.

Download: Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Beta
More about Microsoft® Exchange Server 2010 visit http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/2010

Overview

Microsoft Exchange® Server 2010 Beta helps IT Professionals achieve new levels of reliability with greater flexibility, enhanced user experiences, and increased protection for business communications.

• Flexible and reliable – Exchange Server 2010 gives you the flexibility to tailor your deployment based on your company’s unique needs and a simplified way to keep e-mail continuously available for your users.
• Anywhere access – Exchange Server 2010 helps your users get more done by giving them the freedom to securely access all their communications – e-mail, voice mail, instant messaging, and more – from virtually any platform, Web browser, or device.
• Protection and compliance – Exchange Server 2010 delivers integrated information loss prevention, and compliance tools aimed at helping you simplify the process of protecting your company’s communications and meeting regulatory requirements.

This software is intended for evaluation purposes only. You must accept the license terms before you are authorized to use this software. There is no product support for this trial software. You are welcome to participate in the forums to share your trial experiences with others and to ask for advice.

System Requirements

• Supported Operating Systems: Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista 64-bit Editions Service Pack 1

• Operating System for Installing Management Tools: The 64-bit editions of Microsoft® Windows Vista® SP1 or later, or Windows Server® 2008.
• PC – x64 architecture-based computer with Intel processor that supports Intel 64 architecture (formerly known as Intel EM64T) or AMD processor that supports the AMD64 platform

Additional requirements to run Exchange Server 2010 Beta

• Memory – Minimum of 4 gigabytes (GB) of RAM per server plus 5 megabytes (MB) of RAM recommended for each mailbox
• Disk space
  • At least 1.2 GB on the drive used for installation
  • An additional 500 MB of available disk space for each Unified Messaging (UM) language pack that you plan to install
  • 200 MB of available disk space on the system drive
• Drive – DVD-ROM drive, local or network accessible
• File format – Disk partitions formatted as NTFS file systems
• Monitor – Screen resolution 800 x 600 pixels or higher

Exchange Server 2010 Beta Prerequisites
If these required prerequisites are not already installed, the Exchange Server 2010 Beta setup process will prompt and provide links to the installation locations; Internet access will be required if the prerequisites are not already installed or available on a local network.

• Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5
• Windows PowerShell v2
• Windows Remote Management

Actual requirements will vary based on system configuration and specific features installed. For more detailed system requirements, please refer to the Exchange Server 2010 Technical Documentation Library.

For a list of Windows Server 2008 requirements, visit http://technet.microsoft.com/windowsserver/2008.

To provide remote access to an OCS infrastructure you will need to implement an OCS Edge server in your DMZ network. Implementing an OCS Edge server can become a very complicated task. Microsoft released a new OCS Edge planning tool, to help you implementing an OCS 2007 R2 edge server.

Downland: Edge Planning Tool for Office Communications Server 2007 R2

Troubleshooting connection problems with Office Communicator can be a hard thing to do.
Debugging tracelogs, eventlogs or using the snooper tool from the resourcekit are possible ways the detect connection problems.

The Office Communicator 2007 R2 version has a very useful new function to help you find possible problems. When you holding the CTRL key and right click the Communicator icon you will notice a extra option “Configuration Information”. When selecting this option a dialog box opens with connection information.
 

Source: http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2009/04/08/400.aspx

Microsoft released a OCS 2007 R2 Management Pack for Operations Manager 2007.

The Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Management Pack monitors Standard and Enterprise Edition of Office Communications Server 2007 R2. This release also incorporates the Quality of Experience (QoE) MP which was previously a separate Management Pack. Monitored types are event log entries, performance counters, as well as stateful monitoring of QoE. Note that this version of the Management Pack only monitors Office Communications Server 2007 R2, and cannot be used to monitor Office Communications Server 2007.

Download: Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Management Pack for System Center Operations Manager 2007 SP1

Savision B.V., the leader in Microsoft® System Center Operations Manager visualization, today announced the availability of a free version of Live Maps for Microsoft Operations Manager 2007. Microsoft Operations Manager administrators everywhere can now benefit from the extraordinary visualization capabilities of Live Maps v3. The free version is fully functional and allows IT organizations to create three maps of any type. (continue at source)

The free version of Live Maps may be downloaded at www.savision.com/free.

To manage your SCCM 2007 environment you will mainly use the MMC snap-in. When you like to manage it remotely from your workstation, you have the ability to install the management console on your workstation by using the setup files. After you have installed you MMC snap-in you will need the appropriate permissions in the SCCM environment. When everything is in place you can start the MMC from your workstation. When started you can expect the following error message:

The ConfigMgr console could not connect to the ConfigMgr site database Verify that this computer has network connectivity to the SMS Provider computer and that your user account has Remote Activation permissions on both the ConfigMgr site server and SMS Provider computers. For more information, see “How to Configure DCOM Permissions for Configuration Manager Console”

Usually this message appears when your user account has no Remote Activation DCOM permissions. Your account should be a member of the local “SMS Admins” group on your SCCM site server. Giving the “SMS Admins” group Remote Activation permissions will solve the problem.

Use the following procedure on your SCCM Site Server and your SMS Provider server (if installed on a different server):

Grant Remote Activation permissions to the SMS Admins group

• 1. From the Start menu, click Run and type Dcomcnfg.exe.
• 2. In Component Services, click Console root, expand Component Services, expand Computers, and then click My Computer. On the Action menu, click Properties.
• 3. In the My Computer Properties dialog box, on the COM Security tab, in the Launch and Activation Permissions section, click Edit Limits.
• 4. In the Launch Permissions dialog box, click Add.
• 5. In the Select User, Computers, or Groups dialog box, in the Enter the object names to select (examples): box, type SMS Admins and click OK.
• 6. In the Permissions for SMS Admins section, select the check box to allow Remote Activation.
• 7. Click OK twice, and then close Computer Management.

Reference: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb633148.aspx