Unified Comm

Check to see if there is one coming to a city near you. The closest one to me is in Detroit on November 13th but I doubt I'll be able to make it. My home/work life is beyond crazy these days.

Free stuff? Sure.

When you attend the event, you will receive a complimentary Microsoft Unified Communications Starter Kit*, which includes Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, Microsoft Office Communicator 2007, Exchange Server 2007 SP1 Evaluation, and Office Live Meeting 2007 60-Day Trial.

It is worth checking out. It is very cool technology and I don't say that about many things.

I suspect that this will be one of the last updates for Exchange 2007 before SP1 ships.
It looks like only two issues were fixed, but they are noteworthy if you are experiencing these issues. This download replaces all previous update rollups. Originally spotted by Elan.

You can sum it up as:
PDANet (any version) plus Motorola Q plus Vista SP1 beta = failure after 10 seconds.

Very interesting problem that I have been fighting for a week or two.

I suspect there is something in SP1 (maybe related to SSTP or NAP?) that the PPP servers at Verizon do not like. I've even changed around all the normal PDANet PPP settings to not use LCP extensions and other settings but this always remains the same:

I can get a connection and browse with PDANet 1.80 and Vista SP1 for about 10 seconds and then the connection drops and disconnects rather harshly.

Rollback to RTM Vista and it works fine.

I've even disabled the SSTP IP Helper in Device Manager, no go.

For now when I am on the road and without a net connection, I've been booting up an XP SP3 virtual machine in VMWare using the USB-passthru and connecting that way. I use a loopback adapter on Vista that makes the host machine a client of the XP VM's ICS. It is a very esoteric setup I will admit, but I at least can get some network connectivity to my Vista host machine this way.

XP SP3 should be noted - it makes me think the SSTP/NAP stuff might not be the overall issue causing the connection failures.

Has anyone else seen this or have a work around?

The best part of using custom presence states is the fact that your message will display on phones just like the normal presence states of "Busy", "Be Right Back", etc.

Not sure what I am talking about? Sometimes a picture helps, so check this out:

Those bottom 4 ‘states’ were added by me.

How to make your own
Download this and unzip into C:\Program Files\Microsoft Communicator, assuming you used OC 2007 defaults.

Once extracted, edit C:\Program Files\Microsoft Communicator\OCSPresence.xml with Notepad or XMLNotepad and change the descriptions to your liking.
Import the registry file C:\Program Files\Microsoft Communicator\OCSPresence.reg and restart Communicator.

Universal limitations
You can only define up to 4 custom entries.
Maximum length of the custom presence description is 64 characters.
XML customState availability can be set to “online”, “busy” and “do-not-disturb”.

My implementation's limitations
You must extract the files into C:\Program Files\Microsoft Communicator\ unless you want to change the .REG file to use a different location (can be file://, http://, https://)

You will want to change the “GRR” entry unless you are from Grand Rapids, Michigan.

If you want the custom states set for everyone on the computer system instead of the current user, you need to change the .REG file from HKCU to HKLM. (Mostly only useful for TS servers)

Update: Looks like I'm not the only one that has been playing around with custom states - check out this post here.

Update: There is now a VERY cool utility to do the hard work for you. Thanks to the author for leaving a comment about it on this post. You can check out the program here.

Just a quick note - passed another TS exam while it was in beta, this time for Office Communications Server 2007.

Best advice for taking the exam: install the server and some demo clients and go over the setup documentation, a lot.

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 VoIP Test Set enables you to simulate a SIP endpoint to test connectivity.

Emulation options include the following:

Client emulation - To emulate a Microsoft Office Communicator client, you specify a SIP-enabled user account to register with Office Communications Server. This can be useful for troubleshooting problems with incoming or outgoing Enterprise Voice calls.

Server emulation - You can use VoIP Test Set to emulate a Mediation Server or a gateway. To emulate a server, you specify the IP address, port number, and other settings of the server to be emulated. This can be useful for emulating components during the setup of the Office Communications Server 2007 infrastructure to verify the functionality of components that have already been deployed.

Download it here.

A common issue in VoIP deployments is that administrators find out about problems with audio quality only after a user reports a problem. The Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Deployment Validation Tool simulates audio traffic so that you can proactively identify and resolve audio issues.

Download it from here.

This hotfix package fixes the following issues:
1. Error message in Communicator 2007: "An error occurred while trying to start the conference" or "This message was not delivered to all participants"
2. The text alignment in an e-mail message may be incorrect in Communicator 2007
3. The Russian language name is spelled incorrectly in the list of available languages in Communicator 2007
4. The telephone number in a Communicator 2007 pop-up window for an incoming call has an incorrect text direction when the language is set to Arabic or to Hebrew
5. A new policy is available to specify the Contacts store that Communicator 2007 uses
6. Unrecognizable characters appear in the date field of the display on a Unified Communications device that is used with Communicator 2007
7. The transport option is not automatically set to TLS when you click "Manual configuration" in "Advanced Connection Settings" in Communicator 2007
8. Menu items are truncated in the Hebrew version of Communicator 2007
9. Communicator 2007 crashes when the SipCompression registry entry is set to PING mode and the Transport registry entry is set to TLS
10. You may be prompted to restart the computer when you try to start Communicator 2007
11. Communicator 2007 crashes when you start it by using the presence control
12. After the computer resumes from hibernation or from standby, Communicator 2007 may consume 100% of CPU usage - I have experienced this one quite a bit!
13. Communicator 2007 presence icons do not change in Outlook 2007 after you disconnect a computer from the network
14. Presence status does not change from "In a Meeting" to "Available" in Communicator 2007
15. Certain icons may be mirrored incorrectly in the call conversation window in the Arabic version or in the Hebrew version of Communicator 2007

Read more about it here.

Download it here.

A simple, but noteworthy cut and paste from here.

Details:
We just released a .NET Framework 2.0 CLR update that we recommend be applied to every Exchange 2007 server. It is more urgent to install this update on Client Access servers with multiple protocols, but we recommend installing the update on all Exchange 2007 servers.

We are also integrating this update in .NET Framework 2.0 SP1, but I don’t have any ETA for that release.

More information about this update can be found in the Microsoft Knowledge Base.

You can download this hotfix from here. We recommend that you make a full backup of the server before installing this update, and once again after successful installation of this update.