Just a quick post this one as I’m at work… but I thought it would be worth mentioning that a new version of the iDialog Office Communication Server client for the iPhone is out on the app store.
There’s no news yet as to what has changed in the 1.2 version, but I’m sure there’ll be an update to the Modality Systems blog soon with an update.
(Via Tony Cocks and Justin Morris)
Following on from this weeks release of an XMPP connector for Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (how do Microsoft come up with those catchy names eh?), the OCS team have posted some detailed information on the configuration needed to enable communications between OCS, Jabber and Gmail users.
Information on configuring the gateway for Jabber can be found here.
Info on the setup for connectivity to Google Gmail is here.
(Topology images from the OCS Team Blog)
Earlier today Microsoft made some interesting announcements around their Office Communications Server (OCS) product.
OCS and its predecessor Live Communication Server have always had the ability to communicate with some of the public instant messaging networks through MS’s Public IM Connectivity (PIC) service. This provided federation between your internal LCS or OCS system and the public Live Messenger, Yahoo and AOL networks. In exchange for a per user, per month subscription of course.
Half the good news in today’s announcing is that from October 1st a PIC license will no longer be required for federation with AOL. Combined with a similar announcement about Live Messenger back in June this means that only federation between a companies internal IM and Yahoo requires additional PIC licenses. Though I’m guessing with MS’s moves towards Yahoo this may not last long either. The good news is that the cost of the PIC licenses has been reduced accordingly.
Alongside this news MS has also announced a new XMPP gateway for OCS 2007 R2. This gateway will allow internal OCS users to add contacts from XMPP based IM systems, share presence with those contacts and hold 1-to-1 IM conversations.
So what’s XMPP? Well its the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol. This is the protocol that is used by both Google Talk and Cisco’s Jabber, both of which have been tested by MS. In theory this now means that OCS can communicate with pretty much all the other major IM networks and systems (IBM provide a gateway between Sametime and OCS).
The XMPP gateway is fully supported by MS and a component of Office Communication Server 2007 R2 and is free to download. There’s a video on Channel9 that talks more about the gateway and the resulting architecture (embedded below). You can download the gateway from here:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=141529
A few months ago I wrote a few articles about mobile clients for Office Communications Server, and particularly the options available for iPhone users.
It’s been a while coming, but it seems like there’s now a proper OCS client available in the App Store from Modalty Systems.
iDialog provides presence information on both your personal contacts, and across contacts within the corporate address list (which you can search from the client). You can then either launch an OCS Instant Messaging conversation, or use the iPhone to call any of the numbers listed in the contact info.
IM conversations can be multi-party, and the client can support many simultaneous conversations. They are displayed in the familiar threaded text message format from the iPhone.
In addition to IM, the client can make use of VoIP call control to manage voice calls to their OCS VoIP end-point. Incoming VoIP calls to can be forwarded on to either their listed mobile number (presumably the iPhone), voice mail or any other number. It isn’t however a VoIP endpoint in its own right however. Presumably it would not have made it through onto the app store if it had.
From a backend perspective it relies on OCS 2007 or 2007 R2, and make use of the Communicator Web Access server role. Unlike the solution from Web Messenger it doesn’t rely on separate, additional, server infrastructure.
The app is priced at £5.99, which is pricy for both individuals and corporate deployments. However the web site does mention that corporate licensing options are also available that would – I assume – reduce the per seat licensing.
A few months ago I spent a day at Google talking about their products for enterprise customers. Whilst their products at the time were impressive, there were a few key things that I thought were missing, in fact I posted some thoughts here about what I would do if I were them. It seems I wasn’t too far off the mark (woohoo).
As they have posted on their blog today, Google have released a host of new features aimed at luring large companies away from the likes of Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes.
Over the last few weeks and months there has been support for Blackberrys, Outlook and Offline access. Now today they have announced support for email delegation and mail retention, both features that companies would look for in an email solution. Oh and they’ve taken off the ‘beta’ labels!
So what questions remain? Well there are a few obvious ones like does delegation work with the Outlook integration? Delegation is one of things that most people won’t use, but those that do will be the PA’s of important people who will make lots of noise if it doesn’t work. So you want to make any move of email system as easy as possible, Outlook support would be a big help.
The other gap I can see is in the Unified Communications area. Microsoft have a very good suite of products in the area with Exchange and Office Communications Server, and IBM have a pretty good solution in SameTime. Google Talk – from what I have seen – isn’t nearly as convincing. They have the makings of a wider service, but nothing solid as yet.
The good news for Google is that MS’s Online services don’t currently do a great deal in the Unified Comms space, if you want that you need to go with an on premise solution.
I think I’ve written before that personally I think Microsoft moving Exchange online might be Googles biggest opportunity. By going online MS are validating the cloud messaging model in a big way, and companies looking to move to Exchange 2010 will have to ask themselves whether to go the traditional server route or go online. With Google now supporting Outlook as a client, Google is a legitimate alternative to an online Exchange product.
It’ll be interesting to see what MS do to fight off Google. With Exchange 2010 online and web based versions of Office they have the makings of a great product. But the pricing will have to be very good, Googles $50 a year per user is hard to ignore.
I’ve been doing a bit of work recently to figure out what would be needed to move from current Live Communications Server (LCS) setup to Office Communications Server (OCS). Part of this has been to think about what clients are available for the various platforms people might be using.
I thought it might be useful to post up a quick summary of what I’ve found.
Windows is obviously the primary platform that OCS is designed to work with. To that end it has the most feature rich clients.
Office Communicator 2007 R2
Office Communicator 2007 is the main client for OCS. It is the most feature rich client available and includes support for the full range of OCS’s capabilities:
Instant Messaging
Presence
Enhanced Presence
Assess Levels
PIC Connectivity
File Transfer
1:1 Voice and Video
Multiparty Voice and Video
Live Meeting sessions
Call Management Features
Remote Call Control
VoIP
Office Integration
Calendar Free/Busy
Conversation History
Office Communicator 2005
Office Communicator 2005 is the original client for LCS. Whilst most people will move to MOC 2007, if you’re migrating from LCS during the rollout it might be necessary to have some people using the older client.
Whist MOC 2005 will work with OCS and OCS R2, there are some limitations. If you enable Enhanced Presence for the MOC 2005 users in OCS then they won’t be able to connect – as I understand it this is also something that can’t be undone once the user has also logged into MOC 2007. Also if you’re running OCS R2 you’ll also need to install the December 2008 hotfix package.
Once you have it working, you have access to most of OCS functionality, but updated features like enhanced presence aren’t available.
Messenger for Mac 7.0.2
If you’re a Mac user, MS provide a pretty decent OCS client in the form of Messenger for Mac. As well as supporting Live Messenger, this support various flavours of LCS and OCS, with the recent 7.0.2 version and later supporting OCS 2007 R2.
Messenger for Mac supports the majority of OCS and Office Communicator features, including things that were missing from previous versions such as audio and video conferencing, Enhanced Presence, GAL search, and support for federated users. In fact the only major items not available are support for LiveMeeting sessions, VoIP support and Access Levels for presence.
One thing to note, is that once a user has been enabled for enhanced presence and has logged in using Messenger for Mac 7, they won’t then be able to use version 6 or earlier.
Macs can also use the Web Client described below.
Messenger for Mac can be found here:
and the product team have provided some good documentation for it here:
Messenger for Mac Deployment Guide
Office Communicator Web Access
Communicator Web Access provides a web based interface into OCS for remote workers. It provides the core functionality of IM and Presence, but OCS R2 extends that functionality significantly.
With R2, web users can use Desktop Sharing sessions. If you are on a Windows computer then you can launch, view and control sessions, if you’re on a Mac or Linux based box then you’ll only be able to view and take control of a session.
What’s more, if you have telephony configured within your OCS environment, web users can also initiate, receive and control audio conferences. By providing a the number of a telephone they can use, OCS dials in that phone and connects it to a conference hosted on the A/V Conferencing server. If an incoming call is received whilst a users is connected to the web client they can use it to redirect the call to an alternative phone.
Another interesting new feature is the ability to provide a Web Client to people who aren’t part of your organisation so that they can join conferences/conversations. There’s an ‘invite using email’ function that will send them a specific URL that will launch a web client session and join them into the converation.
There are a few other additions with R2 such as the ability to use distribution groups for messages, and support for customising the logon pages with company logos etc.
Communicator Mobile (CoMo)
For Windows Mobile MS is provided a pretty decent communicator client, and then improved it further with the R2 release.
CoMo supports all the usual IM and presence functionality, including communication with PIC contacts and distribution groups. It provides access to the corporate address book, and lets the user initial phone calls to numbers held within it.
The R2 version has a number of improvements to the client, as well as some improvements in interaction with an R2 backend.
On the client side there are a few usability improvements like access to recent contacts and expanding distribution lists. The R2 version is also a lot more efficient in terms of network usage which contributes to vastly improved battery life over the previous version.
One big advance is the on the voice integration with OCS. When using the CoMo client to make calls, the client uses the OCS infrastructure to make calls, potentially saving call costs. It also allows for single number reach, with calls to an OCS desk phone will ring the mobile and will be answerable on the mobile.
When working with an R2 backend presence is also a lot smarter for people using more than one client – for example people with a CoMo phone and OC on their computer. OCS will determine the most recent activity and use the presence from that device.
CoMo can be downloaded from a Windows Mobile device here.
For while now I’ve been keeping an eye out for an OCS client for the Apple iPhone. As yet I’ve not managed to find an equivalent to Windows Mobiles CoMo, but does appear to be a solution out there if you really have to have one.
WebMessenger seems to provide an iPhone version of their client, though it does looks like you need to install their WebMessenger Server Platform alongside OCS/LCS in order to use it. So ultimately it’s not that useful.
It looks like the client supports IM, Presence and contact lists, but the information on the website doesn’t go into any detail.
Update: Since originally writing this post, Modality Systems have released a full iPhone client for OCS. I’ve written some more on this client here.
Blackberry Client for OCS
If you use Blackberry’s in your organisation RIM has provided a client for OCS. It provides presence and IM capabilities, though does not support any audio or video conferencing. It does however integrate into the other Blackberry applications, so you can set your presence from the Home screen, and will show the presence of contract directly from the phones address book. The client also used the phones spellchecker in IM messages and allows links and phone numbers in messages to be clicked and followed/dialled.
There is also an application that supports the older Live Communications Server.
The application is available here.
Office Communicator Mobile for Java
To provide OCS to a wider range of mobile devices the OCS team have now released a Java version of the CoMo client which supports the Nokia S40 and S60 and the Motorola RAZR V3 (though others may work).
The client provides much of the same functionality as the Windows Mobile client, including IM, Presence address book access and single number reach.
Further details can be found here and here, and you can download it onto you phone from getcomo.com.
I’m on an Office Communication Server (OCS) course this week so I was just doing a bit of digging around to see what clients are available.
For Windows there are the usual Office Communicator and Live Meeting clients that will be used by the vast majority of users. There’s also Messenger for Mac which provides access on Apple clients, and supports all the IM and conferencing functionality. For Windows Mobile phones the Communicator Mobile client does presence, IM and integration with the telephoney side of OCS.
Until today I hadn’t really looked into what other clients were out there. One interesting one I found is called WebMessenger and provides an LCS and OCS client for Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symian, Palm and apparently the iPhone. It sounds great at first glace, but it seems like it requries additional backend components (I could be wrong, I’ve not gone into any detail). Not really ideal, quite what they’re doing over and above the standard OCS edge roles I’m not sure. But, if you need an iPhone or Blackberry client it might be worth a look.
With MS’s recent moves to make their products a little more platform independent, hopefully they’ll port Communicator Mobile to the iPhone at some point. Whether Apple and the networks will want them to enable all the VoIP telephoney features I don’t know, but just contacts, presence and IM would be useful.
Update: Since this post another OCS client for iPhone has been released, I’ve written an updated article about it here: iDialog Office Communications Server Client for iPhone
I’ve just been reading over on Johann Kruse’s blog that Messenger for Mac 7 has been released. I guess for most people the big news for most people will be the usual Live Messenger support, but if you’re an Enterprise IT guy like me its the Office Communication Server (OCS)support that’s interesting.
One of the challenges I’ve got at work at the moment is how best to integrate Macs into our (mostly) Windows environment. Before we tackle the big problems we’re focusing on providing access to our basic services – email, file and IM.
At the the moment we’re using Live Communication Server rather than OCS, but hopefully we’ll be moving to OCS over the next year or so. One of the big drivers for that migration is OCS’s multi-party audio and video conferencing. Having a Mac client that supports this is a huge bonus.
Maybe it’s time I got myself a Mac of my own.
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