Aaron Tiensivu's Blog

There is an interesting gotcha that can affect users when you are in the middle of an OCS 2007 R1 migration to OCS 2007 R2. If you migrate users to R2 and they attempt to log into Communicator with a pre-December 2008 release of the client, there is a chance they will have the program crash. This is also true for the original RTM release of the Communicator Mobile client. Thankfully, there is also an update available that you or your users can install before migrating.

Download links

Communicator R1 update
Communicator Mobile update

I wrote previously about the other updates related to the December 2008 Communicator release here.

If you are unsure of what versions of the Office Communicator client your end users are using, you can pull up a database report inside the R1 or R2 administrator console and view this data. Thanks go out to Andrew Hitchcock for showing me and reminding me that this was possible in both OCS 2007 versions.

In the example below, there are a few users still running the OCS R1 RTM Communicator release (v2.0.6362.0), a few are running the update from April 30, 2008 (v2.0.6362.64), and the rest of running the OCS R2 RTM client (v3.5.6907.0).



Another tip for migrating: You should also do a Microsoft Update on all your R1 servers before migrating users over to R2, because they will then download the other server-specific inter-op updates so that the R1 and R2 servers will be able to co-exist properly.

Don't leave home with them. Many OEMs are still shipping the older 10.x and 11.x revisions of this software, and are known to have bluescreen issues and other bugs that should be avoided.

You can easily install these drivers into Windows 7 by using the compatibility mode setting of "Vista" on the installation executables, or by simply pointing Device Manager to the directory you extract the archive to.

The amount of wireless chipsets supported by this driver pack is rather astounding:
Intel(R) WiMAX/WiFi Link 5350, Intel(R) WiMAX/WiFi Link 5150, Intel(R) WiFi Link 5300, Intel(R) WiFi Link 5100, Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN, Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AG_, Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection, Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2915ABG Network Connection, Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection

You can read the release notes for this version here and download the binaries here.

There are also Intel Wired Drivers - version 13.5 - available from here.

Even though you might be leery of trying a beta Cisco VPN client, you are technically running a beta OS, so what have you got to lose?

This version seems to fix the infamous NDIS.SYS bluescreen-on-post-VPNinstall-reboot. You can see the various workarounds documented for the earlier version of the client here.

Update: False alarm - v5.0.05.0280 still has the blue screen issue but JoshP's instructions works around the problem.