Unified Comm

I haven't run into this one personally but I noticed it linked off of LCSKid's site, pointing to an escalation engineer blog entry here.

Long story short, AOL changed their certificate signer, and you'll need to grab/import the updated authority from https://pki-info.aol.com/AOL/.

It looks like a work-in-progress as he upgrades/installs OCS R2 with the various issues and things-not-mentioned-in-the-documentation type situations. If you are prepping for an upgrade or an install, it might be worth a look over at his site to avoid any already known pitfalls.

With that said, at some point soon, I need to upgrade my home desktop to be x64 capable and join in on the fun.

This brings the build version up to 2.0.6362.111.

The issues fixed that are brand new to this build are:
Office Communicator 2007 cannot display Chinese characters in URLs when the EnableURL registry value is enabled
You cannot prevent Office Communicator 2007 from controlling the call forwarding settings

For those curious, the Communicator 2007 R2 RTM build number is 3.5.6907.0. I am also guessing that there are some undocumented (for now) inter-op fixes with OCS 2007 R2 servers. Previously, you needed the October 2008 update to inter-op with OCS 2007 R2, but I believe this update will become the new standard.

Read more about it here and download the .MSP (.MSI transform) from here.

Worth a read – it is an issue with Server 2008 clustering:

The issue appears at this time to be related to how Windows 2008 clusters handle file share / file server resources.

The Fix

Install KB 955733 - Incorrect status codes that are returned in failover clusters may cause operations to fail on a Windows Server 2008-based computer. This ensures that the cluster returns the correct status codes where necessary.

In case you have unsolved issues with Outlook, check the list of issues fixed here to see if they might finally be resolved now.

I’m hearing good things about Outlook 2007 SP2 in regards to performance, and this seems to be a step in the right direction (even though it isn’t SP2 yet).

It brings your Outlook build to:
12.0.6335.5000 SP1 MSO (12.0.6333.5000)

Outlook update from October was:
12.0.6331.5000 SP1 MSO (12.0.6320.5000)

Super fun fact for the curious:
The MSO build/revision number is related to the Office shared DLL called MSO.DLL. It is used by practically all the Office suite. Most of the fixes in this release seem to be related to the shared DLL.

Noteworthy fixes (to me):
When the sender of an e-mail message has Send As permissions to another mailbox, the From field of the printed e-mail message incorrectly contains "on behalf of" text.

The same profile is listed two times in the Choose Profile dialog box of Outlook 2007 when you create a new profile that contains some extended characters in the name. This issue occurs if the Outlook Mobile Service Add-in is enabled.

Outlook 2007 may crash if an application on the Microsoft Exchange server responds to port 80 requests for availability information from Outlook.

Interesting things discovered over the past week:

OCS Communicator 2007 R2 seems to work fine when talking to OCS 2007 R1 backend.
OCS Communicator 2007 R2 mobile seems to work fine when talking to OCS 2007 R1 backend.

Caveat: Custom presence with XML files seem to be still supported but broken in this release, as it was broken in the RC client. This is typically how I set my status to “Working from home” or “Working from client site”. I’m hoping I can figure out a workaround.

More info about all the fun stuff in OCS R2 will be posted as soon as we verify NDA status - the floodgates will open but I want to make sure we're in the clear.

To break a little bit of my blogging slump, I want to make sure people take advantage of a giveaway, and take notice of the great technical resources over at Elan Shudnow's blog site. He is giving away two not-for-resale copies of Office Communications Server 2007 Standard, and the contest is ending on December 6th (technically 23:59 on December 5th).

In somewhat related news, I haven't forgotten about the Windows 7 / VMWare networking workarounds. I don't have a 100% working (all-the-time) solution but will probably end up posting my 90% working solution soon. In current form, after an hour or two, the guest loses external network access. This can be fixed by redoing the networking sharing, but it is a bit of a pain.