Controlling the msRTCSIP-OptionFlags attribute for OCS

December 22, 2007 by · 1 Comment 

When configuring OCS user settings in bulk there are a limited numbers of options one can change when using the Office Communications Server 2007 Management Console. A range of user accounts can be selected and some options can be enabled/disabled like: Enhanced Presence, Federation, External access, PIC, and archival behavior. You can also set EV […]

OCS Edge Server Configuration Topologies

November 28, 2007 by · Leave a Comment 

Although deploying Office Communications Server 2007 for use internally is quite straight-forward, things begin to get complicated when adding in the components used for external client connectivity.  The most misunderstood portions of deployment seem to be the correct configuration of the reverse proxy, and the networking configuration of the Edge Server itself. OCS Edge Server […]

Enabling Custom Phone Number Normalization with the Address Book Service

November 17, 2007 by · 1 Comment 

The current Office Communications Server 2007 documentation doesn’t go into very much detail regarding the configuration and behavior of Phone Normalization in the Address Book Service.  I won’t be going into any details regarding customization of normalization rules and how they operate, as the purpose of this blog entry is just to understand how to […]

OCS Edge Server Requires Separate Internal and External Interfaces

November 9, 2007 by · Leave a Comment 

I recently ran into a deployment problem for a customer where we attempted to use just two network interfaces for a single Edge Server configuration. If you follow the deployment documentation for the Office Communications Server 2007 Edge server, you’ll see that they require the Edge server to have up to four separate network interface […]

DNS Lookups with OCS Automatic Configuration

November 7, 2007 by · 3 Comments 

Between the OCS 2007 Deployment documentation, official Resource Kit, and blog/forum posts I’ve seen some discrepancies regarding the exact names (and order) of lookups performed by an Office Communicator 2.0 client when attempting to connect to an Office Communications Server when utilizing Automatic Configuration.  Specifically I’ve seen reference to the automatic fall-back of looking for […]

Renaming an OCS Standard Server

October 27, 2007 by · Leave a Comment 

…is not a good idea.  In a production deployment a second server should be built using the desired server name, and then all OCS users moved over to it.  Or a temporary staging server can be stood up in order to rebuild the original server.  Either way, simply renaming an Office Communications Standard Server 2007 […]

ISA 3-Leg Perimeter Network with Private IP Subnet

October 21, 2007 by · 1 Comment 

In a future blog entry I plan to walk through many of the steps needed to setup a virtualized test environment running on a single, uni-homed host.  Throughout the process I’ve used a combination of online articles and blogs with input from colleagues to try and find the simplest hardware configuration which would allow me […]