OCS exam scheduled

royal

Just curious as to how many of you have been working with OCS? I'm currently at a client designing OCS for a 7,000 user organization. It's a pretty interesting product. I deployed OCS Remote Call Control Voice technology with one of our Cisco Voice Engineers and integrated it into Cisco Unified Presence Server. I was also fortunate enough to go to Orlando where the majority of the Product Team and some of the MCS guys were there. We set up Enterprise Voice and used Communicator as a Soft Phone.

Overall, I'm really impressed with OCS. The OCS development team did a great job. Not to mention getting certificates set up is great through built-in wizards. The DNS/Certificate Concepts are really difficult to understand though.

Also, I am scheduled to take my exam on June 19th.

So, what are your experiences with the product?

HeroPsycho

I'm about to deploy the product for a small environment of 25 high end network (commodities training). They're just using it for IM at first. Otherwise, no experience with the product, but so far it seems very solid.

blargoe

Interesting addition to the Exchange forum...

I've been supporting it for about a year in some form or fashion. The users that have access to it love it. We'll have about 500 users when we "officially" roll it out. Less than half have it right now, and for political reasons I haven't been able to enable everyone yet.

We have one IM server + one Edge server servicing our users in the US and UK and one IM + one Edge server for China. This gives us internal IM and remote access. We're not doing the voice integration yet.

We also just got Public IM connectivity enabled, I've played with it for a week or so. I'm going to allow only access to MSN contacts since there are some vendors in China that use MSN to talk to our employees. I'm not wild about turning on Public IM, since it seems to be begging to be abused by employees for personal IM, but I got approval to restrict it and only allow access to employees by request of a supervisor. Getting Public IM activated through the Microsoft Licensing program has been a HUGE pain in the butt for us, be forewarned.

I haven't installed Communicator Web Access for general use, but I did install it in the lab and I though it was great. There hasn't been a great enough need for it in my company yet so I haven't bothered.

We're going to use our existing Symantec Enterprise Vault installation for IM archiving using an addon called IM Manager which handles archiving and security. I haven't installed it yet so I can't really give feedback there.

One of my tasks in working with our facility in China is to help the business units communicate and collaborate more effectively and save money. OCS and Live Meeting integration is going to save us lots of money there.

One thing that I have found with the Communicator client is that it doesn't get updated by WSUS/Microsoft Update, while the server product does. There have been 4 or 5 patches since the initial release of the product that you should install.

I'll post some more particulars of my implementation when I have more time.

blargoe.

royal

So much for the 19th. I have an ISA project that week while I wait for my client to do procurement for the OCS stuff.

So I just finished today's OCS workshop. The project will include:
2 Front End Servers behind an F5 Hardware Load Balancer
2 Edge Servers behind an F5 Hardware Load Balancer
64-bit SQL Cluster Back-End which is already built

1 Standard Server in India with no external access.

Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing

I am also redoing their ISA Standard and an Enterprise Array.

Can't wait to get started on config and blog about it.

blargoe

That sounds cool. I wish I had that big of an environment to work with.

royal

blargoe, question.

The server in China is its own Standard edition server, right? If so, the location that contains the Access Edge, are you using a dedicated Director server?

I've seen so many conflicts where the Planning Guide states that a Director is completely optional. The resource kit states a Director is required where you have multiple pools so it can route a user to the correct pool. The latter doesn't make much sense as a Director is simply a Front End/Standard server that has most of the services disabled and just performs redirection. So on your Access Edge, if you have multiple pools/standard edition servers, is your next-hop from the Edge Servers a Standard/FE Server or is it a dedicated Director Server?

blargoe

At both sites, I'm not using a dedicated Director, the next hop is just a standard server. I think the requirement only comes into play when you have one edge that is the edge for multiple pools, because, I think, it can only have one "next hop" going back in. You might could get around that by making one of the pools the next hop and doing some additional routing configuration on that pool. I haven't had anything that complex to work with so I wouldn't be an authority on that.

We also don't have a "reverse proxy" at this time, though I'm trying to get it approved for next year. I found a workaround for that "requirement" that involved manually editing WMI to change the Internal and External Web Farm FQDN to a new alias (I think I called it imweb), generating a cert, putting it in DNS, installing the Web Components on an IIS server, and opening that up on the Internet. Works fine.

It seems like MS is REALLY trying to force ISA server down everyone's throat. I see no technical reason for the requirement for OCS other than it is good practice. They would lead you to think it will not work remotely without the reverse proxy. Either way, I'm pushing management to let me implement ISA next year.

blargoe

Also, I didn't create any additional subnets for the Edge server like the documentation says. I just put it on our perimeter network. I am using two network interfaces, because it is required, but they're both connected to the same perimeter network.

royal

Good deal. Thanks a ton for that info.