Unified Comm

It looks like this only occurs on heavily loaded servers but it is worth noting that there is a patch from McAfee for it already.
You can read the MS KB article on it here and read the McAfee article on it here.

The fix has been rolled into VSE 8.5i Patch 3.

When implemented correctly, the SNP is a win for performance and scalability. The SNP used to be an out-of-band download for Windows 2003 SP1 and then was integrated into Windows 2003 SP2. Unfortunately, most problems, especially related to Exchange servers, with SP2 have been due to buggy networking drivers.

In the past, the NDIS drivers were tied to one CPU. The SNP opens up processing to multiple CPUs. I suspect, but have no proof, that most of the problems we have seen with SNP has been due to older driver code not being very SMP safe. It reminds me of the nightmares I had with the SoundBlaster Live on multi-CPU machines under Windows 2000 and XP.

Anyway, as noted here, the Broadcom cards, which typically were the worst offenders, have updated drivers that finally have decent SNP support. You no longer have to 'cripple' your networking stack to keep your server stable.

A snippet from that updated post:
Previously I did not mention what network cards were affected, but the majority of the cases that we have seen have dealt with Broadcom cards or network cards that have a Broadcom chipset in them.

Broadcom has provided an update to their drivers and can be downloaded from here that helps resolves the issues with these offloading feature problems. To determine if you have the correct update, you need to check the version numbers to ensure they are 3.7.19 or later. Anything lower than that does not have the fixes in them. ExBPA is being updated with a new rule to detect if the Scalable Networking pack features are enabled on the server.

NOTE: Before updating directly from Broadcom's site, I would recommend checking with your Server manufacturer first before applying the update directly from Broadcom as this may affect your ability to apply updates directly from each vendor in the future using their integrated update utilities.

Currently there are only a handful of manufacturers that have updated the drivers on their sites, but over time, you will see the updates available for downloading.

I have personally dealt with cases that having the Scalable Networking features enabled with the latest drivers have not caused any connectivity issues to/from Exchange servers, so you can now take advantage of these features that may help increase overall network performance on your servers.

I know what you are thinking. Phone systems have had call forwarding forever. Ah yes, this is true but typically it has been a strange combination of button pushes on a phone that would look like a Fatality move in Mortal Kombat.

That all changes with OCS 2007 as you can see below:


Point and click goodness, and not complicated. It just makes sense.
We need more technology like this. It is stuff like this that makes me excited for 2008.

Fixes new to this release

Error message when you try to change an IM conversation into a multiparty conference in Communicator 2007: "Your attempt to start a conference was unsuccessful."

Communicator 2005 client computers may send many DNS queries for the name of the Live Communications Server 2005 pool

Error message when you send an instant message to a distribution group that contains more than 100 members in Communicator 2007: " is too large to display"

Communicator 2007 does not release cached person objects after you search for contacts

The notification sound does not play in Communicator 2007 when you change the notification sound to a .wav file that resides in the Media folder

The translation of the word "free" is incorrect in the Polish version of Communicator 2007

You cannot type a special character in the password box in Communicator 2007

You can read about the changes here. You can grab the update here.

Lots of people aren't aware of this little "trick" and it is very handy when debugging a temperamental RPC over HTTP connection. Normally, the "Connection Status" dialog box only shows up if you launch Outlook with "/rpcdiag".

If you hold down [Ctrl], and then right click on the Outlook tray icon, with Outlook 2007, "Connection Status" and "Test E-mail AutoConfiguration" appear. E-mail AutoConfiguration testing is handy for Exchange 2007 setups.

Just passing this along as an FYI because whenever I show it to people, 9 times out of 10, they have never seen those options before.