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)
If you have one of the Microsoft webcams or headsets you’ll no doubt be aware that the the Call Button (by default) opens up Windows Live Messenger. If you’re in a businesses that uses Office Communications Server however that’s probably not much use, you’ll actually want it to open up Office Communicator instead.
The other day I stumbled across this article on the MS site that provides an administrative template (adm) that will allow a company using Active Directory to configure the Call Button to trigger Office Communicator. It’s a little thing I know, but it makes for a nicer user experience if you have MS hardware.
Anyways… essentially you need to save the following code into a .adm file, import this into a Group Policy and use that policy to configure your computers/users (more information on AD and Group Policy can be found here). Obviously don’t mess around with AD or Group Policy unless you know what you are doing, and test everything before applying settings to end users!
CLASS MACHINE CATEGORY !!MSHW POLICY !!EnableMOCIntegration KEYNAME "Software\Policies\Microsoft\Hardware" EXPLAIN !!EnableMOCIntegrationExplain VALUENAME "EnableMOCIntegration" VALUEON NUMERIC 1 VALUEOFF NUMERIC 0 END POLICY END CATEGORY [strings] MSHW="Microsoft Hardware" EnableMOCIntegration="EnableMOCIntegration" EnableMOCIntegrationExplain="Enables MOC Integration" ; Online Help Strings ADM_TITLE="Group Policy settings for Microsoft Hardware" COMPUTER="Computer Configuration" COMPUTER_EXPLAIN="Contains computer settings only." SUPPORTEDON="Requirements:"
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:
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.
