Pro-Exchange

You want to do some custom DEV or OCS or Exchange?

GotUC.com has launched a Development Sandbox for you to use for FREE!
This is what they have to say:

Today GotUC.net is proud to offer an opportunity for developers to start developing UC enabled applications, without having to overcome the hurdles of setting up Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Beta.

If you join the GotUC.net Community and you promise to behave well, and know we have the right to revoke your account at any time, GotUC.net will offer you two user accounts in the GotUC.net domain: one personal account, and one account you can use to enable bot scenarios.

The domain accounts are enabled for most UC capabilities Presence, IM, email and Exchange Web Services, and even some limited calling capabilities to the PSTN or to other Community users via Communicator.

What do you need to do? Simply, just -

Join the GotUC Community
Once you have joined our community you will see a new “Developer Sandbox” menu tab
Click the tab and you will be taken to the registration site. Once there just click the Register button then fill in the form.

I can hear you asking “Sounds great Marshall but what are the limitations?”

Well, I ‘m glad you asked. The limitations are really very simple also –

Please use your real name – this will be how you show up when you connect to GotUC.Net using Office Communicator. We want to present a positive image for those organizations that we federate with.
We expect you to behave reasonably and to not abuse the system. Other members are using the system too and we don’t want anyone crashing the system for everybody.
No applications that would be considered illegal or not appropriate for the intended purpose of this site. We don’t want someone using the system for Trojans or spam.

Note: we reserve the right to cancel without warning any accounts that break the rules.

We will have tutorials and videos coming shortly on how to create UC applications and debug them using our sandbox. If you have suggestions for new functionality or things that you would like to see then just let us know.

Sign up here:
http://gotuc.net/blogs/gotuc/archive/2009/05/13/sign-up-for-the-uc-developer-sandbox.aspx

Virtualization support for OCS 2007 R2

Finally Microsoft Posted the official Whitpaper on OCS 2007 R2 & Virtualization.
Before you jump in the air be aware that virtualization is limited to some workloads only ... (IM/Presense/Groupchat)

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 can be deployed onto Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, or onto any virtualization solution that is a certified partner through the Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) certified partners for the following workloads:

Presence
IM (including conferencing, remote access, federation, and Public IM Connectivity)
Group Chat

This whitepaper:

Identifies which server roles are supported in a virtualized environment
Provides guidance for scaling users and workloads in a virtualized environment

This document describes the results of a series of configurations that were run in a Hyper-V environment to validate that Office Communications Server on Hyper-V provides stable performance and scalability for production use.

You will also see information in the doc explaining why other workloads are hard to Virtualize:

Enterprise Voice, Remote Call Control (RCC), Response Group Service, dial-In conferencing, audio/video conferencing, Web conferencing, and Communicator Web Access desktop sharing workloads are not supported in a virtualized Office Communications Server 2007 R2 deployment. This occurs because of several factors, including packet loss, delay, jitter, and clock skew. These factors impact the quality and performance of real-time media when virtualized. However, these factors do not impact other workloads such as instant messaging and presence because these workloads are less susceptible to delay and can use the natural retry mechanisms in the SIP protocol and the underlying TCP transport.

Download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=0a45d921-3b48-44e4-b42b-19704a2b81b0

Unable to connect to Exchange 2010 using Outlook 2007?

Having installed Exchange 2010, and using Outlook Web Access for some time, I was surprised to get an error message when launching Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Sp1, and trying to connect to a mailbox on Exchange 2010.

Let's see. When launching Outlook 2007, I gave the needed information to connect to Exchange 2010:

And after clicking Next, everything seemed to be going like expected...

but then the following error showed up:

Community Day 2009

The date is set,
Location is reserved,
Speakers are booked,
And sessions are published;
COMMUNITY DAY 2009 IS WAITING FOR YOUR REGISTRATION!

Here's the overview

Community Day is back again, are you ready for our Third Edition of Microsoft Community Day?

Eleven Microsoft User Groups combine their efforts to organize this unique networking and knowledge sharing
event. A unique opportunity to learn about Microsoft’s latest developments and technologies like Exchange
2010, Silverlight 3, Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server 2008, Windows 2008R2, Powershell V2, Forefront
Identity Manager 2010, XNA 3.1. and OCS R2.

Microsoft Community Day will take place on Thursday 25th June 2009 in Utopolis, Mechelen, where we will
bring together 300 IT Pro’s and developers.

The Microsoft Community Day 2009 is supported by BESUG, BIWUG, IT-Talks, MVUG, Pro-Exchange, SCUG, SQLUG, VBIB, Visug, WinSec, XNA-BUG“

Register now for free for this all day event!

To register, here's the link:
http://www.communityday.be/CD/

-Ilse

Chopstick: Exchange 2010 Preview

Preparing a demo environment for our next Pro-Exchange event next week, I recorded another chopstick, and Arlindo has published the video yesterday.

So if you want to have a high-level look at the first public beta of Exchange 2010, check it out, and click here.

Remember that this screencast is based upon the first beta and some of the features shown might be subject to change!!

-Ilse

Live Meeting 2007 Add-in: Live Meeting Lotus Notes Add-In Pack

With this Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007 Add-In, you can use IBM Lotus Notes to perform Live Meeting tasks, such as scheduling meetings.

By using the Live Meeting Lotus Notes Add-In Pack, you can:

Schedule a Live Meeting from Lotus Notes.
Identify individual meeting participants as attendees or presenters.
Send separate invitations for attendees and for presenters.
Specify default meeting options and override those defaults for specific meetings.

Please click here to review the latest Release Notes.

Download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=849cee54-e83b-4f0d-82d9-540b9cbfba87

DPM v3 �First Look� � TechNet Webcast on May 5

The DPM Team posted this information!

On Tuesday, May 5th at 11 AM Pacific – we will be giving folks your “First Look” at DPM v3.

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032412466

This webcast will cover the big features and directions for the next generation of DPM, so you won’t want to miss it.

Exclusive : New Windows 2008 Versions

Thanks to Timmy for pointing this out...
Windows 2008 23-bit and 46-bit versions. Not very real but funny :)

See for yourself while its still hot:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=35FC4205-792B-4306-8E4B-0DE9CCE72172&displaylang=en

Finally, Managing Exchange Certificates using the GUI :-)

Certificates and Exchange have always been a challenging topic. In Exchange 2007, it was a real endeavor to get the right certificates up and running, by using the Exchange Management Shell cmdlets Get-ExchangeCertificate, New-ExchangeCertificate, Import-ExchangeCerticate, Enable-ExchangeCertificate and so on. Not to mention the problems you could have if names were not as they were supposed to be...

In Exchange 2010, Microsoft has made an effort to include in the Exchange Management Console a very nice Exchange Certificate management interface, that allows you as an administrator to create a Certificate Requets using the GUI, import an Exchange Certifcicate, and enable an Exchange Certificate for any service of choice.

Let's have a look.

When you open the Exchange Management Console, and drill down to Server Configuration, select a server in the middle pane, and you will see in the bottom pane the list of Exchange Certificates available in the certificate store of that server.

Office 2007 Service Pack 2 Released

I didn't see this until today but it appears SP 2 has been released of Office 2007.

Download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b444bf18-79ea-46c6-8a81-9db49b4ab6e5&displaylang=en

More Information: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/953195

Sincerely,
Tonino Bruno