Office Comm's Server

brainchylde · 30 Jul 2009 at 18:34

Just wondering is anyone using this in their organisation? Any thoughts on it?

More importantly - has anyone implemented it in their organisation? We're actively considering it at the moment.

Ev0 · 30 Jul 2009 at 18:43

Not yet, but soon...

oddjob62 · 30 Jul 2009 at 19:58

Got it at our place, needed for our phone system (avaya). I installed it and am the main support for it, but i wouldn't say i know much about it

. Happy to attempt any questions.

J.B · 31 Jul 2009 at 22:48

We had one outsourced and hosted by MS which work very well.

Now we are bringing it in house. I've installed it on one of our servers and had a quick play but failed misserably getting anything to work!

oddjob62 · 31 Jul 2009 at 23:01

J.B said:
Now we are bringing it in house. I've installed it on one of our servers and had a quick play but failed misserably getting anything to work!

I recall it being rediculously complex for something that i would expect to be pretty simple.

Stelly · 1 Aug 2009 at 20:06

oddjob62 said:
I recall it being rediculously complex for something that i would expect to be pretty simple.

I have heard that, there have been mumbles from my boss that he wants to install it, I'm not that happy about doing it, but I think its my next project task!

Stelly

MarkA · 1 Aug 2009 at 22:43

I found it difficult to install. It was very complex to set up having to manually set up DNS and self certs to get it working. A little over complicated, although we only needed IM capabilities.

brainchylde · 2 Aug 2009 at 11:13

Well.. I think I'm gonna leave it a few months. Pretty busy at the moment. We've just completed the migration to exchange 07 and pretty pleased with that. I think it'll definitely be something we're going to use. From what I've seen, it looks like a great product.

Chew · 3 Aug 2009 at 15:16

It is or can be a pain to setup

we have had several bugs

1) stopped being able to use outlook out of office assistant
2) Cannot synchronise with address book (red ! on the icon in system tray)

Can be a real pain in the ass

But all the messaging side works

oddjob62 · 3 Aug 2009 at 15:39

We've got the messaging side working, it integrates with our phone system (can call people from within the messenger client, and presence works nicely in outlook/sharepoint/etc).

Next my boss wants to try the inbuilt voice functionality for our remote offices.

MacRS4 · 17 Aug 2009 at 10:37

Chew said:
It is or can be a pain to setup

we have had several bugs

1) stopped being able to use outlook out of office assistant
2) Cannot synchronise with address book (red ! on the icon in system tray)

Can be a real pain in the ass

But all the messaging side works

I know OCS 2007 pretty well - it's probably the main thing I work on now. I was involved with the original airlift for all the betas out in Seattle.

Happy to answer any questions you may have +++

2 above is quite common - AddressBook is distributed via IIS (HTTPS) on your front-end servers. Most people do the OCS bit but then forget to do the IIS bit (I.e. assign relevant certificates etc.) also there's a couple of other bits that could cause this.

Overall it can be quite a complex product, depending on what functionality you want. Simple Instant Messaging and Presence - well that's easy really.

Add in external access via an edge and it gets complex - there's all kinds of certificate dependencies, never mind firewall and NAT issues for media.

Same with telephony. Integration to stuff like Avaya or Cisco for remote call control (I.e. Communicator controls your phone) is relatively simple, start doing Enterprise Voice (I.e. Softphone) then it gets more complex.

Loads of stuff about OCS over at my blog here: http://www.markc.me.uk/MarkC/Blog/Blog.html

It is a complex product I guess, but it doesn't have to be.

I'd say it's one of the few MS products you can't just throw the DVD in and get on with it - I.e. you have to put a bit of planning into what you're doing, and understand what you're trying to achieve - and what bits of technology do which bits.

MacRS4 · 17 Aug 2009 at 10:39

oddjob62 said:
Next my boss wants to try the inbuilt voice functionality for our remote offices.

What phone system do you have? The nirvana is to have both Remote Call Control (what you have) while in the office and then Enterprise Voice (I.e. softphone) for when you're out. This is only possible with IP-PBXs that support dual-forking, an there ain't many unfortunately.

If you want to make branch offices TOTALLY OCS for telephony, that's relatively straightforward.... I say relatively..... If you still want to go via your existing PBX then you'll need some form of mediation.

Anyways, happy to answer any questions.