Core OS

The Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Management Pack monitors all editions of Office Communications Server 2007 R2.

The Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Management Pack monitors Standard and Enterprise Edition of Office Communications Server 2007 R2. This release also incorporates the Quality of Experience (QoE) MP which was previously a separate Management Pack. Monitored types are event log entries, performance counters, as well as stateful monitoring of QoE. Note that this version of the Management Pack only monitors Office Communications Server 2007 R2, and cannot be used to monitor Office Communications Server 2007.

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 monitored objects are:
Enterprise Edition, Standard Edition, A/V Authentication service, Application Sharing Server, A/V Conferencing Server, Conference Announcement Service, Conference Attendant Service, Web Components, Archiving Server, Communicator Web Access, Mediation Server, Monitoring Server, CDR Server, SIP Proxy Server, A/V Conferencing Edge service, Access Edge service, Web Conferencing Edge service, Monitoring Server, QoE of A/V Conferencing Server, QoE of Mediation Server, and QoE of network locations.

Feature Bullet Summary:
Alerts indicating service impacting events, Alerts indicating configuration, and other non-service impacting issues, State monitoring of Office Communications Server services, and Product knowledge: Cause and resolution of identified problems.

You can download it here.

Start evaluating Office Communications Server today. Office Communications Server 2007 R2 delivers streamlined communications for your users so they can find and communicate with the right person, right now, from the applications they use most (like Office Outlook).

Once installed, the OCS trial lasts for 60 days.

It is a multipart download that is rather large overall, but includes just about every piece imaginable of the OCS suite, pre-installed:

Windows 2008 Domain controller:
DC.part1.exe, DC.part2.rar, DC.part3.rar

Exchange Unified Messaging:
ExchangeUM.part01.exe, ExchangeUM.part02.rar, ExchangeUM.part03.rar

Office Communications Server Communicator Web Access:
OCS-CWA.exe

Office Communications Server Mediation Server:
OCS-Mediation.exe

Office Communications Server Standard Edition:
OCS-STD.part01.exe,OCS-STD.part02.rar

Office Communications Server VHD deployment guide:
OCSVHDTDDeploymentGuide.zip

Windows 2008 Enterprise Edition:
Win2k8EE_64.part01.exe.Win2k8EE_64.part02.rar,Win2k8EE_64.part03.rar.Win2k8EE_64.part04.rar

You can download it from here.

OEMs have a habit of not letting AMD/ATI release updated drivers specifically for the mobility chipsets, which is particularly unfortunate when you want to be cutting edge with the latest operating system releases. On a good note, the Mobility Modder has been updated to support the Radeon Catalyst 9.2 and 9.3 releases here.

There is also an ongoing discussion on the forums related to Windows 7 support for Catalyst 9.3 of the Mobility Modder. From what I gather so far, is that the tool patches the .MSIs correctly but adds the .INF entries for the previously unsupported chipsets improperly.

Assuming you extracted the ATI drivers to the default location (%HOMEDRIVE%\ATI\SUPPORT\*):

For W7 x64: Run Mobility Modder (the beta mentioned above, not the one from the Download page) on the uncompressed drivers. Search for [ATI.Mfg.NTamd64.6.0] inside %HOMEDRIVE%\SUPPORT\[ATI version]\Driver\Packages\Drivers\Display\LH6A_INF\C7_77072.inf and %HOMEDRIVE%\SUPPORT\[ATI version]\Driver\Packages\Drivers\Display\LH6A_INF\CH_76829.inf, and change all instances to [ATI.Mfg.NTamd64.6.1].

For W7 x86: Run Mobility Modder (the beta mentioned above, not the one from the Download page) on the uncompressed drivers. Search for [ATI.Mfg.NTx86.6.0] inside %HOMEDRIVE%\SUPPORT\[ATI version]\Driver\Packages\Drivers\Display\LH_INF\CL_76828.inf and %HOMEDRIVE%\SUPPORT\[ATI version]\Driver\Packages\Drivers\Display\LH_INF\CW_77071.inf, and change all instances to [ATI.Mfg.NTx86.6.1].

If you are confused by the .INF editing, I've saved my x64 .inf and x86 .inf files. Extract them into the directories mentioned above and allow the originals to be overwritten.

Rerun the ATI setup program and it should offer to upgrade your graphics driver as long as it is one of the supported chipsets. If that doesn't work, you can always try to manually upgrade the driver from inside Device Manager and manually browse to the directory where the .INF files are stored.

Keep in mind - all of this is completely "unsupported" by ATI/AMD and myself, so if you break something, you get to hold both pieces.

I'm mostly posting this to gain feedback whether or not this issue is limited to newer builds of Windows 7 and/or specific to Thinkpads. The behavior is that the internal Bluetooth disappears on post build 7000 of Windows 7, as if you've switched off Bluetooth with the hardware switch.

The workaround I've used and recommended to others so far is to download TPFanControl (and donate), and toggle the Bluetooth hardware directly from inside the TPFanControl GUI.

This is how it looks on my system:


Once toggled, W7 should detect new hardware and your Bluetooth should be detected. It is as if the BIOS/hardware settings are getting mistakenly turned off at some point.

If you perform an upgrade (instead of a clean install) to Windows 7 build 7057, and find yourself facing the error code of 8e5e0645, it can be fixed pretty easily.
Exit out of WLM and delete the %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Contacts folder. Simple enough, correct? Unfortunately, I found this out after uninstalling and reinstalling all the Live applications and deleting any WLM related directory in my profile. Little by little, it ended up getting narrowed down to that directory by itself.

For some reason, I've also noticed that Desktop.ini files seem to be sprinkled across the drive when I previously "banned" them from the local drive. A quick cd /D C:\ && del /s desktop.ini fixed that problem. Only do this if you don't care about desktop.ini files, post-upgrade.

Update: Looks like someone beat me to it, and had the same issue and blogged about it too, with regards to WLM. Ditto on the desktop.ini issue. Must be common.

As always, I recommend clean installs, but sometimes I try out the upgrade process to see what breaks.

Thankfully, there is a relatively simple workaround for Outlook 2007 and an additional registry setting needed for Outlook 2003 SP2.

Step 1 (Exchange 2000/2003 only): Add a SIP proxy address in Exchange Server for the user account that specifies the user's SIP URI.

Step 2 (Outlook 2003 SP2 only):

By default, Outlook 2003 SP2 does not search for the user's SIP address to get the presence information.

1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then press ENTER.
2. Locate the following registry subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Common\PersonaMenu
3. Click Edit, point to New, and then click DWORD value.
4. Type QueryServiceForStatus, and then click OK.
5. Double-click QueryServiceForStatus, type 2, and then click OK.
6. Click Edit, point to New, and then click DWORD value.
7. Type EnableDynamicPresence, and then click OK.
8. Double-click EnableDynamicPresence, type 1, and then click OK.
9. Exit Registry Editor.

After you create these registry keys, Outlook 2003 SP2 shows presence information.

You can read more about it here.

Last month, while I was at the Exchange 14 airlift, Mark R. and friends held another Springboard virtual roundtable. This time, the focus was on Windows 7. You can see an archived version of the video here and you can also check out the questions and answers that they couldn't get to during the show here.

If you watch the video here, you see a lot of Microsoft MVPs at the 2009 MVP Summit. I'm in the crowd somewhere in there and Elan, I know, is shown at some point in this video.

I've seen many topics on forums and Microsoft PSS tickets, but I'm curious if anyone out there has 100% successfully setup OCS 2007 R2 Edge server with PIC to AOL.

I put emphasis on 100% successful because the current behavior I see typically is like this:
Sometimes people on AOL will receive IMs from users behind the OCS 2007 R2 Edge.
Sometimes people behind the OCS 2007 R2 Edge will receive IMs from AOL users.
The behavior seems very inconsistent.

If you use an OCS 2007 R1 Edge, AOL connectivity seems to "just work".

I suspect this is a bug in the codepath for AOL PIC in the R2 Edge server, but I have no proof. So, I'm asking, has anyone setup OCS 2007 R2 Edge with PIC to AOL and it works 100% of the time? If so, I want to pick your brain to see where our setups might be different.

I was out of town for most of February (3 out of 4 weeks in Seattle, WA or Redmond, WA) with little down time to work on my outside-of-work projects.

On a somewhat related note, I'm now an official Microsoft Springboard Technical Expert Panel (STEP) member. Over 200 people applied, so I'm honored to be one of the chosen. It greatly increases my chances of presenting at TechEd this year too.

I have switched Microsoft MVP groups, due to a creation of a brand new MVP group. I had been originally a "Windows Shell/User" MVP way back when, which was later renamed to "Windows Desktop Experience". Historically, I tend to be all over the map with the product groups and products I focus on. This has resulted in nominations/secondary competencies of Forefront and Office Communications Server.

With that said, I was invited to join the Windows Systems and Performance group, which is focused on my favorite aspect of Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 - Performance! I'll have some good articles on XPerf coming up pretty soon. We're a much smaller group (around 8 of us) compared to the Desktop Experience group.

My primary job focus is more unified communications (Exchange and Office Communications Server) related lately, so you will most likely see more content in those areas in the upcoming months, to go along with the STEP, Windows Systems and Performance and Windows 7 content.

In the past, ATI would be the one behind NVidia with official device driver support, but lately things seem to be reversed a little bit.
With that note, you can download GeForce 181 drivers for W7 for x86 and x64.