Understanding Active Directory Naming Formats
August 20, 2012 by Jeff Schertz · 27 Comments
This basic article is intended to provide a background in different Active Directory user name and domain name formats and how they are used by applications for basic and integrated authentication process within Windows Server. The guidance provided throughout is targeted towards working with Microsoft Lync, Exchange, and third-party solutions or applications which support direct […]
HDX SIP Registration with Server 2008 R2
January 5, 2011 by Jeff Schertz · 13 Comments
As OCS 2007 R2 has officially supported running on a Windows Server 2008 R2 system for nearly a year now there are a growing number of deployments on this version. Additionally most Lync Server 2010 installations will be on Server 2008 R2 as well. There is an important behavioral change introduced in Server 2008 R2 […]
Exchange 2010 SP1 UM Unsupported with OCS 2007
October 22, 2010 by Jeff Schertz · 2 Comments
Now before anyone has a heart-attack due to the title pay special attention to the fact that ‘R2’ is strategically left out. The full UM integration is still fine for Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Lync Server 2010, only the original (aka R1) release of OCS is impacted. This statement is confirmed by the […]
Understanding the Strong Host Model – Revisited
September 5, 2010 by Jeff Schertz · Leave a Comment
A few months ago a technical writer on the Microsoft Communications Server team contacted me about updating own of my older blog articles for the purposes of publishing it on TechNet. After some re-writes and a healthy portion of editing a much more polished version was posted up in the following locations in mid-August: NextHop […]
OCS R2 XMPP Gateway Deployment for Gmail
May 17, 2010 by Jeff Schertz · 3 Comments
The purpose of this article is to serve as a lessons-learned addendum to the current primary resource for configuring OCS and GMail federation: the Communication Server team’s official blog post on the subject. Following the detailed steps in that article should get you to a working end-state, but if a specific deployment differs from the […]
OCS Support for Windows Server 2008 R2
March 31, 2010 by Jeff Schertz · Leave a Comment
As promised, Microsoft has released supportability statements for various Communications Server versions when used with Server 2008 R2 hosts and domains. Yesterday two TechNet articles were released to address both scenarios. Server 2008 R2 Domains Previously no version of Communications Server was supported when deployed in an Active Directory environment using either forest/domain functional levels […]
OCS Protocol Documents
March 16, 2010 by Jeff Schertz · Leave a Comment
I typically don’t repost links to existing documentation, but occasionally I run across items that are not too well known and I feel this is a prime example. Just when I though I had all of the OCS-related documentation stashed away in a folder I ran into an entire section on TechNet that contains some […]
OCS TechNet Forum Reorganization
November 10, 2009 by Jeff Schertz · Leave a Comment
This week Microsoft has begun the process to migrate all the current discussion forums for Unified Communications-related topics into a single category. As with any migration there is both an upside and a downside to these changes. Most importantly, going forward it will be much easier for users to locate the correct forum in which […]
OCS Communicator Web Access Listening Port
September 24, 2009 by Jeff Schertz · 1 Comment
During the deployment of an OCS Communicator Web Access Server there is a setting that is not covered in much detail in the documentation: the Communication Server Listening Port. No default or suggested value is given, as shown by this screenshot of the virtual server creation wizard: This port is used by the Communicator Web […]
More on OCS Edge Server Certificates
September 22, 2009 by Jeff Schertz · Leave a Comment
There are a pair of related Office Communications Server 2007 topics I wanted to expand on from previous blog articles that I’m still seeing come up quite often in both day-to-day projects and in the Microsoft discussion forums. One of them is centered around adding and supporting additional SIP domains. And because the two most […]