Archive for June, 2009

TechEd 2009 EMEA Berlin - Registration Open

TechEd 2009 EMEA BerlinSay hello to Berlin, Germany for the annual Microsoft TechEd 2009 event in the EMEA region. From 9 to 13 Nov 2009, both IT Pros and developers will once again come together, this time round at Messe Berlin. You can look forward to the best event in the industry with great technical content plus opportunities to network with your peers, and make old and new contacts.

Click here for more information and registration.

Technorati tags: Community/User Group, Events

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Update: Swiss IT Pro User Group Event 7.7.09 - Virtualization What’s New (Microsoft & VMware)

Switzerland/ Schweiz/ Suisse Additional seats have been allocated for our hot Swiss IT Pro User Group event this coming Tue 7 July 2009 in Zurich. Speakers from Microsoft and VMware will deliver technical presentations on Hyper-V v2.0 and vSphere 4.0 respectively in German. Take this opportunity to meet and speak with the experts, socialize and network with your IT Pro peers and the core swissitpro.ch team.

If you are unable to personally attend, this free event will also broadcast live over Live Meeting. To receive the meeting details, simply register your first and last name with an email to info {a+} swissitpro (d0+) ch using the subject “swissitpro.ch: 7.7.09 Event Registration”. For more information, surf right over here.

Technorati tags: Community/User Group, Events

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Free e-Learning: Exchange Server 2010

Check out “Collection 6899: Exploring Features of Exchange Server 2010″, a free 2-hour Microsoft electronic learning that comprises of “Clinic 6900: Introduction to Exchange Server 2010″ and “Clinic 6901: Exchange Server 2010 in an Enterprise”.

The curriculum gives an overview of Exchange Server 2010’s new features and enhancements over its predecessor (Exchange Server 2007) with topics like management tools, Unified Messaging and high availability features.

Learn more and sign up for this limited time offer here.

Technorati tags: Training, Exchange Server

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OCS: Free Microsoft Press e-Book

To celebrate Microsoft Press’ 25th anniversary, the month of June offers two free e-books around Unified Communications. This special is only available for a week (from Tue 16.6.09) so click on the link to sign-up and download the entire e-book today!

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Resource Kit (ISBN: 9780735626355)
By Rui Maximo, Rick Kingslan, Rajesh Ramanathan, Nirav Kamdar with the Microsoft Office Communications Server Team

Programming for Unified Communications with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (ISBN: 9780735626232)
By Rui Maximo, Kurt De Ding, Vishwa Ranjan, Chris Mayo, Oscar Newkerk and the Microsoft OCS team.

Technorati tags: LCS/OCS, OCS 2007 R2, Community/User Group

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Speaker at MCT Virtual Summit 2009

MCT Virtual Summit 2009This is a last minute invitation that confirms my participation as a volunteer speaker to deliver a Train-the-Trainer (TTT) session at the annual Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) Summit 2009. This year’s summit from 18 to 20 Jun 2009 will be delivered live “virtually” round-the-clock (webcast) with several cool and exciting topics from international speakers in multiple languages. It covers both the developer and IT Pro tracks, including sessions on soft-skills and peeks into new products like Exchange Server 2010, Windows 7 and Office 14, to name a few.

My session on “TTT 6419 Configuring, Managing and Maintaining Windows Server 2008 Servers” is scheduled on Thu 18 Jun 2009 at 1800 hrs (GMT) focusing on tips and tricks, trainer hints and notes from the field. I shall be delivering it for the very first time in Chinese Mandarin :-) It will certainly be tough and I am kinda nervous actually as it will be a challenge to find equivalent terms and expressions “to make it all flow” so please bear with me. Due to the severe lack of time to prepare, I am building the slide decks and demo (time permits) in English.

You can find out more about the event and registration is open for the event here. I look forward to welcome you to MCT Virtual Summit 2009.

Technorati tags: Event, TrainingInfo, Community/User Group, Windows Server 2008

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Update: OCS and MOC 2007 R2 (June 2009)

The June 2009 cumulative updates for Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (KB972041) and Office Communicator 2007 R2 (KB972042)* have been released.

For users running Evaluation Editions of the OCS server back-end and desktop OC client, the respective update packages fixes the current license expiration date from 13 June 2009 to 180 days at the initial installation. Alternatively, you can download updated trials of OCS (x64 only) and OC.

More importantly, KB972041 now removes the dependency on Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ). Previously, this component must already be installed on OCS 2007 R2 Enterprise Edition Distributed Front-End or Standard Edition in order to successfully deploy the update packages.

On the OCS Edge Server, this will also update the RTC Media Relay driver. Binaries for the latter will not roll back if the update is uninstalled and the Office Communications Server Monitoring Agent (RTCQmsAgent) must be manually restarted. This new update supercedes KB967831 in Apr 2009.

* update #3 for MOC R2 and replaces KB971083 (May 2009)

Keywords: patch, hotfix, update, rollup package, moc, ocs, r2

Technorati tags: LCS/OCS, OCS 2007 R2

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Swiss IT Pro User Group Event 7 Jul 09 - Virtualization What’s New (Microsoft & VMware)

Switzerland/ Schweiz/ Suisse Speakers from virtualization powerhouse VMware and Microsoft are our special guests at next month’s Swiss IT Pro User Group event. This will take place at the same place and time (from 1745 hrs CET+1) on Tue 7 Jul 2009 in Zurich. Exciting topics on the latest vSphere v4.0 and Hyper-V v2.0 features and technical discussions await you.

Come join your peers, friends, colleagues and take the chance to network with the core team of swissitpro.ch volunteers and techies from Microsoft and VMware. Surf over here for details and remember to register early to avoid disappointment!

Technorati tags: Community/User Group, Events

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Field Notes: Deploying Office Communicator 2007 R2

Every new OCS 2007 R2 installation is often accompanied by a number of common issues that most administrators will likely face with deploying Office Communicator Client 2007 R2 (MOC). Let us walk through the steps you might take to configure them correctly in your environment.

  1. create domain users and mailbox-enabled the accounts in Exchange*
  2. enable the accounts for OCS with the SMTP email address (ideal)*
  3. login to the Windows machine and configure Outlook (Autodiscover or manual) before starting MOC for the first time. If the Outlook profile has not yet been created, “Outlook Integration Error” will show up as Notification alerts in MOC (red exclamation or bang sign):
    “There was a problem connecting to Microsoft Office Outlook. Your Outlook profile is not configured correctly. Contact your system administrator with this information.”
    Make sure that Outlook is running then exit and restart MOC if necessary. For Office 2007 users, apply the patch described in KB936864. Not fixing this error will cause Reverse Number Lookup (RNL) for voice calls to fail, inability to search for Outlook contacts in MOC, presence integration issues, etc.This update is also required when MOC indicates “Outlook Update Is Needed (Click for download information)”:
    “Communicator is not compatible with your existing version of Microsoft Office Outlook. Some Outlook integration features may not work as expected. Do you want to get instructions for downloading the correct version now?” [Yes] [No]
  4. start MOC and “Exchange Connection Error” now appears in place of “Outlook Integration Error”. Click to display details reveals the message:
    “Communicator is in the process of connecting to the Exchange server. This process may take a few minutes. Some features will not be available until the connection is complete.”
    Depending on network conditions, this notification should automatically disappear after some time and no further action is required.
  5. If you see the notification “Cannot Synchronize Address Book”, the details will read:
    “Cannot synchronize with the corporate address book. This may be because the proxy server setting in your web browser does not allow access to the address book. If the problem persists, contact your system administrator.”
    This must be resolved in order to perform tasks such as fast search (local GAL), click to call number menu display, contact card query details, etc. See the options for possible resolution below.

Suggested Checks and Fixes: Cannot Synchronize Address Book

  • use the “Automatically detect settings” instead of specifying settings for a proxy server in IE
  • for IE7 under Advanced / Security, uncheck the option “Check for server certificate revocation” and restart the browser (manually or via Group Policy)
  • ascertain that the URL listed on the certificate points to the Certificate Revocation List (CRL) Distribution Point that is reachable on the inside and/or outside network
  • if OCS is deployed with digital certificates issued from an internal CA, add the .crl URL to the Trusted sites or Local Intranet zone on the Security tab in IE then exit and restart MOC e.g. http://*.swissitpro.ch. This enables the intranet URL for Address Book (AB) download to be recognized as safe and valid.
  • deploy certificates from trusted public Certificate Authority (CA) permits both domain and guest (non-domain) accounts to connect to internal OCS pools

* give AD ample time to replicate in the forest/domain

See also:
- Common Errors: How do I get rid of the red BANG
- Address Book Server: File and Database Generation
- Microsoft Office Communicator is not syncing GAL changes on a daily basis (galcontacts.db). Communicator client is 3.5.6907.37 or newer (Update Dec 2009)
- Office Communicator client shows “Outlook Integration Error” (Forefront TMG / ISA Server Product Team Blog)
- Address Book Server: Address Book File Download Service

Technorati tags: LCS/OCS, OCS 2007 R2, Exchange Server

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Uninstall Office Communications Server 2007 R2

Although not very common except perhaps in test or lab environments, there are legitimate reasons to uninstall a fully functional installation of OCS 2007 R2 from a production environment and start again from scratch.

Essentially, you have to carry out two steps to accomplish this, namely deactivate and uninstall OCS server roles. Make sure that you use the default domain Administrator account or elevated account privilege (”Run as Administrator”) to perform all the tasks if R2 is installed on Windows Server 2008. This account must be a member of the local Administrators group as well as RTCUniversalServerAdmins. Apparently other user accounts lack certain rights to uninstall a number of OCS components even if they are members of the Domain Admins security group. Expect errors similar to the following if the said account or elevated account is not used:

Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Web Components Server
Error 0×80070005 (Access is denied) binding to IIS metabase path IIS://localhost/W3SVC/1. Make sure the website exits.

Whether R2 servers are setup in a consolidated Enterprise topology or installed using the Standard Edition (standalone pool), I recommend that you perform deactivation of the registered OCS components in the following sequence. You can use the OCS 2007 R2 MMC snap-in by drilling down to the Enterprise pool (or Standard Edition Servers), select then right mouse click on the server and pick the Deactivate option:

  • Application Host*
  • Application Sharing Server
  • A/V Conferencing Server
  • Web Conferencing Server
  • Web Components Server
  • Front End Server

At the end of each deactivation, it is a good idea to view the log and confirm that success is shown under Execution Result column.

Next, uninstall the registered OCS components using Add/Remove Programs or Programs and Features from the Control Panel following the sequence listed:

  • Application Host
  • Application Sharing Server
  • Audio/Video Conferencing Server
  • Conferencing Announcement Service
  • Conferencing Attendant
  • Outside Voice Control
  • Response Group Service
  • Web Conferencing Server
  • Enterprise Edition Server (Front-End)
  • Managed API 2.0 Core Redist 64-bit
  • Managed API 2.0 Speech Redist x64
  • Managed API 2.0 Windows Workflow Activities Redist
  • Server Speech Language Pack (en-us)
  • Web Components Server
  • Core Components

Otherwise, expect to find error messages such as:

Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Core Components
Other applications may still be using Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Core Components. Uninstalling may cause these applications to no longer work.

Finish off the uninstall process with a reboot of the server when prompted.

It is not necessary to reverse the changes made by the Prep Forest and Prep Domain processes if you intend to install OCS 2007 R2 in the environment again. Otherwise, you must use the LCSCmd.exe command to complete the process as follows:

x:\setup\amd64\lcscmd.exe /domain:swissitpro.ch /action:domainunprep

x:\setup\amd64\lcscmd.exe /forest:swissitpro.ch /action:forestunprep

Verify that you see “Action completed successfully” at the end of each unprep step and review the log file for details.

Since changes to the Active Directory Schema are permanent, there is no further action to take (to “unprep”AD schema). Ensure that AD replication is given sufficient time to complete before you attempt to rebuild or install R2 into the same environment.

* do not check the Force deactivation of Application Host unless fail

Reference:
- Office Communications Server Deployment Guide
- Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Trial Download
- Removing Servers and Server Roles, Removing Enterprise Pools, and Decommissioning Servers and Pools
- Decommissioning Standard Edition Servers and Enterprise Pools

Technorati tags: LCS/OCS, OCS 2007 R2

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