OCS / LCS

Read them here to find out how to enable VGA-quality webcam conferencing, troubleshoot presence status problems and a few other good nuggets of information.

For better presence support in Office 2007, you will want to request, download and install KB 936864.

Although not required, an Outlook 2007 update rollup is also available at KB 939184.

One interesting aspect of Outlook rollup update is the fact that it looks as if Exchange 2007 SP1 is going to support 'advertising' the autodiscovery features with DNS SRV records, much like LCS/OCS have done in the past and present for autodiscovery.

One registry setting that seems to be particularly helpful when migrating clients from LCS 2005 to OCS 2007, is this one mentioned in the release notes:

ISSUE: If a user’s e-mail address, as entered into an Outlook e-mail, cannot be resolved to a SIP address in the Outlook Address Book or through Office Communicator, then presence cannot be retrieved for that user.

RESOLUTION: Set the SetOnlineStatusLevel registry key to allow Outlook to make a call to Microsoft Exchange to help resolve the SIP address for users. Setting this key can help particularly when the user’s Exchange address (x400/X500) is in the e-mail.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Outlook\IM] "SetOnlineStatusLevel"=dword:00000003

As I sit here in a massive traffic jam on I-69 a few miles from Shaftsburg, Michigan (not kidding), I figured I would fire up my GPS, laptop, and EVDO connection to kill time.

Whether or not it has been obvious on this blog, the past year or so I have focused on 3 big areas of Microsoft - Vista, Exchange 2007, and LCS 2005 / OCS 2007. Ever since I saw the first 'mock-ups' of the new OCS version and had seen some of the beta bits of Exchange 2007 together with OCS 2007, I knew that these technologies were the ones I wanted to concentrate on. The Exchange 2007 team jumped on the 64-bit bandwagon early, and for good reason, if you have ever fought with the Exchange 2000/2003 store.exe limitations, you know why.

Internally at work we have been getting familiar with the new technology for the past year, and a good portion of us have even taken the certification tests for Exchange 2007 while the tests were in beta. We already have a lot of smart folks in this area!

The VOIP market has typically been dominated by Cisco and other companies, but once you have seen the amount of integration with Outlook and other aspects of the MS product line that you get with OCS 2007, you'll see why I have been gung ho for this technology. You can easily integrate it with your existing Cisco infrastructure, if you know what you are doing.

Read more about everything that RTM'd today here.

The "short list" of products that RTM'd are:
Office Communicator 2007
Office Communications Server 2007
Office Live Meeting Console 2007
Communicator Web Access 2007
Microsoft RoundTable 2007
Catalina (USB Handset) Hardware
Tanjay (Office Phone Edition) Hardware
Office Communications Server 2007 Speech Server

You can see screen shots and more feature points of the suite here.

Update: This is why you shouldn't type and drive, even though I was sitting on the highway, parked at the time. I corrected numerous typos and added a little more info that has come out since then.