Webcam's, Headset's, and Handset's Optimized for Microsoft Office Communicator

Choosing the right end user devices for your OCS roll-out is important and not easy considering all the choices in the market.

If you are going through this process, the following Microsoft TechNet resource is a good start: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ocs/bb970310.aspx. It lists all the webcam’s, headset’s, handset’s, speakerphones and desktop phones that have the Optimized for Microsoft [...]

Office Communicator 2007 and Outlook 2007 Integration Errors

Further to my previous posting on Office Communicator 2007 and Outlook 2007 Integration Errors, after recently trouble-shooting this problem, I have provided a check-list of all the situations I am aware of that can cause this error, and what to do about it.

Communicator integrates with Outlook (on the client machine) to retrieve availability data for Enhanced [...]

Official Support for OCS 2007 R2 Virtualization

In case you missed it, the Microsoft OCS Team recently announced official support for running some of the OCS 2007 R2 server roles on a virtual machine.  In a nutshell, virtualization is supported for the OCS 2007 R2 server roles that do NOT provide real-time media functionality (e.g. Voice and Video). This boils down to [...]

Mobile Options for OCS and Communicator

With mobile device usage (including phones) becoming the de-facto communication device, extending the reach of Office Communications Server 2007 to information users on their mobile devices is powerful.

Below I summarize the available options for many popular devices.

 

Blackberry

If you are running a Blackberry Device with software v4.1 or higher, and BES Server v4.1 with Service Pack [...]

Flavors of Hosted OCS

Offering software as a service (aka SaaS, “in the cloud”, or “Software+Services” as Microsoft calls it) has started to gain real traction, and the benefits and potential issues are well documented (i.e. lower initial and on-going costs, and a pay-as-you-go subscription based cost model).

In the last few years, several options have been made available for [...]