Wireless

For those who don't know what the PreCallDiagnostic Tool is, make sure to check out the description here:
The PreCallDiagTool is an application that reports expected audio quality as it relates to the network effect. The tool should be installed on any desktop or laptop PC that suffers from inconsistent network connection quality. The PreCallDiagTool can provide a quick check of the current network conditions and also preserve a history of quality data to let users profile their network performance over time or other conditions. The tool is particularly useful for home/mobile users and users using WIFI access points.


The diagnostic application first shipped with the OCS 2007 R2 Resource Kit.

On a good note, this was a welcome addition to my arsenal of debugging voice quality and network quality of end user machines.
On a bad note, it was 64-bit only and a good majority of the Office Communication deploys are to 32-bit operating systems.

Thankfully, they've released a 32-bit version of this application but the documentation on the syntax and use of the tool is particularly sparse.

For the 32-bit version of this application:
When extracted, the application install files are copied to %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2\PCDResKit\PreCallDiagTool\

For the 64-bit version of this application:
When extracted, the application install files are copied to %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2\ResKit\PreCallDiagTool\

To install the application, you need to run PCDSetup.exe with elevated rights.
After installation, the application resides in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft\PreCallDiagTool\
If you happen to install the 32-bit version on a 64-bit OS, replace %ProgramFiles% with %ProgramFiles(x86)%.

If you want to configure the application during first-run use, you will want to execute the program with elevated rights because the program will store the XML configuration file in the same directory as the executable. Anytime you want to use the in-program configuration options to change the setup, you will need to run this program elevated, unfortunately.

Typically, I've gotten used to just editing the XML file (PreCallDiag.xml) using Notepad.

Hopefully I am just being dense in the configuration of this tool, but I cannot seem to figure out how to specify a username or password within the PreCallDiag.xml file. This is when you would want to specify UseDefaultCredentials to false. You would want to do this for computers that are not joined to the domain or that have a different log in username than the current user. Does anyone know how?

Looking through the executable for configuration keywords, I did spot two undocumented XML keys, namely ServerUri and ServerPort.

I believe the proper syntax, if you want to set the key UseSipAutomaticConfiguration to false, is the following:

add key="ServerUri" value="youredgeserveravname.contoso.com"
add key="ServerPort" value="443"


Anyway, the program seems to be a bit finicky but when you have it running, the screenshot ends up looking like this:


You also end up with a debugging text file called precalldiaglog.txt and a much more interesting file called precalldiagMetricsLog.txt which includes the data collected while the program was running.