Ah, the summer is here… Actually, summer come in Milledgeville after the last day of winter. This is now we do it here – by flipping the switch of the heat pump from Hot to Cold. I was trimming the lawn while ago when remembered what good friend of mine told me when I come in USA – “When you don’t have to cut your grass and assemble your furniture by yourself – means you are rich and successful” and I ran back to write this down. Anyway, while I am on the computer…
Today is the first day of the “summer work schedule”. Some colleagues in the EDU sector know what I am talking about – half days on Fridays. Nice outside, quiet… kind of invitation to relax and think about past, present and future. I was flipping through my calendar and found that last year on this day we completed our OCS EV deployment and issued an order for disconnection of our PSTN lines. Was I scared? No. Was I under stress – big time. I knew that the timeline is too short and the lack of training will stress the folks even more and yet, if you ask me will I do it again, the answer is - Yes! As I shared in earlier posts, I take my job and role in the college with pride and determination because in my opinion the role of IT today went long way compared to 10-15 years ago. The time of the “computer gigs” is long gone. IT professionals run the operations today, like it or not. What would happen if one department in the college is closed today? Ohm, they will have twice as much to do tomorrow. Now, what would happen if IT is not operational? You got the point.
While SEO is the brain of the operations with his/her oversight of the present and vision for the future, IT is the heart. The stories of soldiers lost limbs in combat a year ago and swimming, running, hiking and claiming today never stop to amaze me. How they manage to do that? With brain and heart -the two key components. In this regard, I don’t understand how some colleagues can lay low and get by with “why should I do it if I don’t have to”…
We jumped in the unknown exactly one year ago. We worked hard to overcome the problems and took the challenge to learn and develop. This morning one of the biggest opponents of the UC in the college stopped me in the corridor and told me “I am sure my husband called, but I did not received missed call notification. Not a big deal, just… hope everything is all right with the system”. Got it? The people finally took ownership over the system!
I can now die one happy sysadmin.
Friday, June 4, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Cumulative Update 5 for OCS 2007 R2 is out
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Distinctive ring tone with OCS
I tested the script in lab environment. Further testing might be needed before deployment in production to assure proper service.
Since Snom phone is SIP phone, interoperability with OCS R2 can be achieved only after installing special firmware. What is interesting here – while OCS firmware adds additional components, the standard SIP functions are preserved and in some cases we can take advantage of this fact and add additional functionality to our OCS environment.
A colleague asked me if would be possible to have the phone ring with distinctive tone when a call ordinates from PSTN i.e. external call. In pure OCS environment this is not possible since we don’t have Alert-Info header supplied in INVITE, as defined in RFC-3960. Even if we had it, thou, MOC and Tanjay would not respect it anyway. Snom, on other hand, will. Look under Preferences -> Alert-Info Ringer:
2. Edit the line: “lc:appUri=http://your_FQDN_here/alert” to reflect your environment i.e. if your front end server’s name is ocsfe01.domain.com, the line should read: “lc:appUri=http:// ocsfe01.domain.com/alert”
3. Rename the file to alert.am
4. We will use Front End Scripts node to add our script. Go to Properties
5. In the Front End Scripts window, click Add
6. Populate the fields as shown (of course, replace ocsfe01.domain.com with your FQDN
7. Click OK to save.
8. The script will be added on the bottom of the list. Use UP button to move it above “UserServices”
9. You should see the script listed as enabled and running.
How it works:
The script monitors the USER-AGENT header to detect if the call arrives from the Mediation server: “if ( ! ContainsString( userAgent, "mediation", true )” and if true, adds the needed header: “AddHeader( "Alert-Info", "Alert-Info:;info=alert-external" )” in format which Snom will understand. The phone then is aware of the value – “alert-external” and applies the selected ring tone.
MSPL is very powerful tool and I am sure you can experiment and add other functionalities specific to your environment.
Since Snom phone is SIP phone, interoperability with OCS R2 can be achieved only after installing special firmware. What is interesting here – while OCS firmware adds additional components, the standard SIP functions are preserved and in some cases we can take advantage of this fact and add additional functionality to our OCS environment.
A colleague asked me if would be possible to have the phone ring with distinctive tone when a call ordinates from PSTN i.e. external call. In pure OCS environment this is not possible since we don’t have Alert-Info header supplied in INVITE, as defined in RFC-3960. Even if we had it, thou, MOC and Tanjay would not respect it anyway. Snom, on other hand, will. Look under Preferences -> Alert-Info Ringer:
Here we can set a specific ring tone depending of the value of Alert Info header. In our case (GMC), we set Ringer 9 as default ring tone via provisioning; leaving the default Ringer 1 is sufficient. But how to supply the value and trigger the event? Here comes the power of OCS Frond End scripting and MSPL - by capturing the ordination of the call (via Mediation Server) and inserting Alert-Info header in the INVITE. All we need is to create .am script and configure our front end server to use it. Here are the steps:
1. Since we need web server, I used the frond end’s IIS to host the script. In your wwwroot, create text file. Open it with Notepad and enter the following content:
2. Edit the line: “lc:appUri=http://your_FQDN_here/alert” to reflect your environment i.e. if your front end server’s name is ocsfe01.domain.com, the line should read: “lc:appUri=http:// ocsfe01.domain.com/alert”
3. Rename the file to alert.am
4. We will use Front End Scripts node to add our script. Go to Properties
5. In the Front End Scripts window, click Add
7. Click OK to save.
8. The script will be added on the bottom of the list. Use UP button to move it above “UserServices”
9. You should see the script listed as enabled and running.
How it works:
The script monitors the USER-AGENT header to detect if the call arrives from the Mediation server: “if ( ! ContainsString( userAgent, "mediation", true )” and if true, adds the needed header: “AddHeader( "Alert-Info", "Alert-Info:
MSPL is very powerful tool and I am sure you can experiment and add other functionalities specific to your environment.
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Just random thoughts
Unified Communications is dangerous! Like methamphetamine - once you try it, can’t stop thinking about it. My name is Drago and I am addicted to UC! That’s it. I said it!
When it comes to endpoints, the Great Chinese Wall looks like a sand castle compared to the stubbornness of Microsoft to collaborate with other manufacturers. To some extend I can understand – Telephony is essential part of the Workflow and breaking this element will disrupt or break the Workflow itself. In this regard, having endpoints that perform exactly as expected is important – last thing Microsoft wants is bad name of the platform because of underperforming phones. It is a war out there and the competition will jump on every opportunity to throw mud wherever sticks or not. My gut feeling tells me that Microsoft is (for many people yet to be seen, though) a player in the VoIP market already and despite the big words about interoperability and openness, backstabbing and dirty tricks is (and always will be) part of the corporate voodoo… As we say in my country: “If you don’t want the cat to drink the milk, cover the pan”. And so Microsoft does…
Yes, we have Tanjay, Catalina, Oak – very well crafted in means of design and performance – no arguments here. When I wrote in previous blog that I have a feeling the developers never left the lab and corporate meetings when working on the OCS phone line, I meant - the disconnect between the concept and reality. As IT person, I look for logical reason behind everything. No, your computer did not decide to show pop-ups on its own – you did something that shouldn’t have beforehand! You phone does not ring because you set “Do Not Disturb” as status, not because “This system sucks”. Even if the common sense justifies the logic of presence and call flow, one cannot imagine the frustration of having to deal with perceptions every day, all day! One manager of department insisted the phones must ring even if the person is off for the day. Another, to have every phone ring with different ring tone, so he can determine who is at his desk - from his office. Come on! I am just a Bulgarian, not a magician!
If you read this, I am sure by now you already asking yourself “Ok… that is your point?”
I know our deployment will make a lot of people to roll eyes, and yet it is true – we are using non-certified Snom endpoint. 90% of all phones are Snom300. In 100% OCS EV environment, 11 months already! Not a single PSTN line (except the security systems and the elevators) and I blog about UC, not posting job resume somewhere… because it works. Only with Snom I was able to satisfy some of the weirdest requirements of our Departmental Managers… Everybody that attended a corporate meeting knows the feeling of being a “scapegoat” where all others have “legitimate” reason to off-load their failures and channel it toward “the IT and their VoIP system”. The people hate changes by design (intelligent or not) and the best way to fight this is to have the flexibility to fight back with “OK, you got what you want, now shut up” and believe me, nothing sounds sweeter than when the President say “I don’t want to hear any more The VoIP system does not work. Works for me just fine… live with it”. To get there, however, you need to have the right tools at your disposal…
My point is – Snom went above and beyond to develop firmware that actually works with OCS. It does have its small problems, which we solve on fly when discovered, and I just dream of a perfect world where Microsoft would partner with them in joint effort to offer greater variety, flexibility and price ranges. After all, we do VoIP not only to satisfy our own vision for the feature, but for down to earth reasons as increased productivity, reduced MRC and last, but not least, fast ROI.
In my next post, I will offer a solution as of now one can use Snom phones to ring it with distinctive ring tone depend of where the call ordinates – PSTN -> OCS or within the organizations.
When it comes to endpoints, the Great Chinese Wall looks like a sand castle compared to the stubbornness of Microsoft to collaborate with other manufacturers. To some extend I can understand – Telephony is essential part of the Workflow and breaking this element will disrupt or break the Workflow itself. In this regard, having endpoints that perform exactly as expected is important – last thing Microsoft wants is bad name of the platform because of underperforming phones. It is a war out there and the competition will jump on every opportunity to throw mud wherever sticks or not. My gut feeling tells me that Microsoft is (for many people yet to be seen, though) a player in the VoIP market already and despite the big words about interoperability and openness, backstabbing and dirty tricks is (and always will be) part of the corporate voodoo… As we say in my country: “If you don’t want the cat to drink the milk, cover the pan”. And so Microsoft does…
Yes, we have Tanjay, Catalina, Oak – very well crafted in means of design and performance – no arguments here. When I wrote in previous blog that I have a feeling the developers never left the lab and corporate meetings when working on the OCS phone line, I meant - the disconnect between the concept and reality. As IT person, I look for logical reason behind everything. No, your computer did not decide to show pop-ups on its own – you did something that shouldn’t have beforehand! You phone does not ring because you set “Do Not Disturb” as status, not because “This system sucks”. Even if the common sense justifies the logic of presence and call flow, one cannot imagine the frustration of having to deal with perceptions every day, all day! One manager of department insisted the phones must ring even if the person is off for the day. Another, to have every phone ring with different ring tone, so he can determine who is at his desk - from his office. Come on! I am just a Bulgarian, not a magician!
If you read this, I am sure by now you already asking yourself “Ok… that is your point?”
I know our deployment will make a lot of people to roll eyes, and yet it is true – we are using non-certified Snom endpoint. 90% of all phones are Snom300. In 100% OCS EV environment, 11 months already! Not a single PSTN line (except the security systems and the elevators) and I blog about UC, not posting job resume somewhere… because it works. Only with Snom I was able to satisfy some of the weirdest requirements of our Departmental Managers… Everybody that attended a corporate meeting knows the feeling of being a “scapegoat” where all others have “legitimate” reason to off-load their failures and channel it toward “the IT and their VoIP system”. The people hate changes by design (intelligent or not) and the best way to fight this is to have the flexibility to fight back with “OK, you got what you want, now shut up” and believe me, nothing sounds sweeter than when the President say “I don’t want to hear any more The VoIP system does not work. Works for me just fine… live with it”. To get there, however, you need to have the right tools at your disposal…
My point is – Snom went above and beyond to develop firmware that actually works with OCS. It does have its small problems, which we solve on fly when discovered, and I just dream of a perfect world where Microsoft would partner with them in joint effort to offer greater variety, flexibility and price ranges. After all, we do VoIP not only to satisfy our own vision for the feature, but for down to earth reasons as increased productivity, reduced MRC and last, but not least, fast ROI.
In my next post, I will offer a solution as of now one can use Snom phones to ring it with distinctive ring tone depend of where the call ordinates – PSTN -> OCS or within the organizations.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
UC@GMC - Exchange Unified Messaging
If Enterprise Voice is the most efficient way to achieve savings while increase productivity, Exchange Unified Messaging is the most beautiful part in the entire Unified Communications concept.
Georgia Military College currently employs Exchange 2007 as enterprise email solution. It have been said enough already of the advantages of the Exchange server – no need to repeat it here. There is, however, a role called Unified Messaging, which contributed a great deal to our Enterprise Voice solution. Remember the $3.00 per Voice Mail box with our former provider? Multiply this by the number of phone lines/users and a here where a good chunk of MRC goes in some cases.
With Exchange Unified messaging, a voice mail is no longer the simple registration if the fact someone called, said something and left a call back number. Now we have a visual representation of the call arriving via email. We can play it on our computer, listen it over a phone and once we upgrade to Exchange 2010, read it. That’s right; Exchange will email us a transcript of the voice mail. How about that!
Now, I don’t know about you, but I enjoy every bit of the ultimate visualization of the event. I can click to play the message on my PC speakers, to reply with email, or click to start IM session or… click to initiate a phone call. The common denominator here: “click”. No time wasted.
The other great feature of Unified Messaging role is Auto Attendant - voice recognition feature which can do wanders for your work flow in any area. It is still a running joke around the college what I said during the presentation of the Unified Communication concept – “English is my fourth language and if this system understands me – it is a darn good system!”
Here is one example:
EDU folks knows already how important is the communication between faculty and students in meaning of reachability. In typical scenario, the kid would know the name of the Faculties but not their direct numbers. They would call any number associated with GMC (typically the last number from which someone from GMC called) and the run around begins… frustrating for both sides. We Provisioned Auto Attendant to be a single point of reach for all faculty – one number is distributed in the beginning of the quarter to all students. The AA is “narrowed” to a list with Faculties only, and the caller can simply speak the name and be connected.
Another example is how we handled the K12 part of the school. The teachers do not have office, but rather the classroom is an “office” itself. During the planning phase we determined that having a phone in a classroom is not a good idea since it will disturb the learning process. However, while we were evaluating the current procedures, this is what we discovered:
A parent would call the school secretary and leave a message for a teacher, who in return would check several times throughout the day “Is there something for me?” and then handle it. Another, although insignificant for someone part, would be the missing indirect interaction with the caller, meaning of intonation and sometime anger etc. In our case, we decided to provision out K12 teachers with mailbox without actually participating actively in the call flow i.e. a phone or DID assignment. Now the school secretary forwards those calls immediately to the teacher’s voicemail, which in turn is delivered via email immediately to the user.
The possibilities are endless and UM role could handle wide variety of scenarios – it require good knowledge of the capabilities (and limitations) of it and patience. Patience to listen what your users need, not what “you think they need”.
Georgia Military College currently employs Exchange 2007 as enterprise email solution. It have been said enough already of the advantages of the Exchange server – no need to repeat it here. There is, however, a role called Unified Messaging, which contributed a great deal to our Enterprise Voice solution. Remember the $3.00 per Voice Mail box with our former provider? Multiply this by the number of phone lines/users and a here where a good chunk of MRC goes in some cases.
With Exchange Unified messaging, a voice mail is no longer the simple registration if the fact someone called, said something and left a call back number. Now we have a visual representation of the call arriving via email. We can play it on our computer, listen it over a phone and once we upgrade to Exchange 2010, read it. That’s right; Exchange will email us a transcript of the voice mail. How about that!
Now, I don’t know about you, but I enjoy every bit of the ultimate visualization of the event. I can click to play the message on my PC speakers, to reply with email, or click to start IM session or… click to initiate a phone call. The common denominator here: “click”. No time wasted.
The other great feature of Unified Messaging role is Auto Attendant - voice recognition feature which can do wanders for your work flow in any area. It is still a running joke around the college what I said during the presentation of the Unified Communication concept – “English is my fourth language and if this system understands me – it is a darn good system!”
Here is one example:
EDU folks knows already how important is the communication between faculty and students in meaning of reachability. In typical scenario, the kid would know the name of the Faculties but not their direct numbers. They would call any number associated with GMC (typically the last number from which someone from GMC called) and the run around begins… frustrating for both sides. We Provisioned Auto Attendant to be a single point of reach for all faculty – one number is distributed in the beginning of the quarter to all students. The AA is “narrowed” to a list with Faculties only, and the caller can simply speak the name and be connected.
Another example is how we handled the K12 part of the school. The teachers do not have office, but rather the classroom is an “office” itself. During the planning phase we determined that having a phone in a classroom is not a good idea since it will disturb the learning process. However, while we were evaluating the current procedures, this is what we discovered:
A parent would call the school secretary and leave a message for a teacher, who in return would check several times throughout the day “Is there something for me?” and then handle it. Another, although insignificant for someone part, would be the missing indirect interaction with the caller, meaning of intonation and sometime anger etc. In our case, we decided to provision out K12 teachers with mailbox without actually participating actively in the call flow i.e. a phone or DID assignment. Now the school secretary forwards those calls immediately to the teacher’s voicemail, which in turn is delivered via email immediately to the user.
The possibilities are endless and UM role could handle wide variety of scenarios – it require good knowledge of the capabilities (and limitations) of it and patience. Patience to listen what your users need, not what “you think they need”.
Saturday, January 16, 2010
UC@GMC - The endpoints
Ah, the touchy subject… Let me tell you what I think.
Microsoft have the leverage to learn from the best when comes to VoIP. OCS EV proves every day to be a valuable alternative to the Big Boys (and big money) solutions. I know at least one place where Nortel slashed their yearly maintenance fees 60% in desperate attempt to “distract” the College from moving to Microsoft UM and… yet this same college uses Exchange as email solution, OCS as IM solution, SharePoint as collaboration solution and so on. What would be the logical choice for VoIP in this case?
OCS on its way to mature as complete solution and yet Microsoft repeated one more time a common in the past mistake – looked in the mirror and said “yeah, we are the biggest and we know better” when comes to the endpoints. It is so typical in the IT world when one programmer write piece of code and another programmer goes like “Man, this is beautiful!” while for the rest of the world this still looks like Sumerian. I have a feeling the hardware part of OCS never left the corporate presentations until hit the market. You see, EDU sector is different. Say, in Geico, you can give the employee a banana, tell him - “This is how you make a phone call from now on” and that’s it. In EDU, we will form a committee and two focus groups to discuss “Is this a phone and can we use it in our college?”
There are three main objectives during the planning phase:
We did some ‘physiological” tests. Catalina devices were introduced to different categories in our college. Needless to say, IT folks absolutely love it; the CIS faculties were OK with it and the rest – “Take this thing away from my desk, now!” When Snom 300 was introduced, all we got is “Ah, I have new phone.” And of course, with Tanjay we got “Can I keep it” and the answer is “No! It is too expensive and you will never use even 10% of the features.”
All our executives have Tanjay not because it looks cool but because it introduces features unseen before. It is simply the ultimate collaboration tool one could have on its desk. Let say the CFO calls branch office Director to discuss a budget request from the Dean. At some point the Director will say – “You know, I see the Dean is available, let’s escalate this call to a conference…” and all this from a phone device. Beautiful!
Down on the floor, all we have is “Georgia Military College, Business Office. How may I help you?”
Microsoft have the leverage to learn from the best when comes to VoIP. OCS EV proves every day to be a valuable alternative to the Big Boys (and big money) solutions. I know at least one place where Nortel slashed their yearly maintenance fees 60% in desperate attempt to “distract” the College from moving to Microsoft UM and… yet this same college uses Exchange as email solution, OCS as IM solution, SharePoint as collaboration solution and so on. What would be the logical choice for VoIP in this case?
OCS on its way to mature as complete solution and yet Microsoft repeated one more time a common in the past mistake – looked in the mirror and said “yeah, we are the biggest and we know better” when comes to the endpoints. It is so typical in the IT world when one programmer write piece of code and another programmer goes like “Man, this is beautiful!” while for the rest of the world this still looks like Sumerian. I have a feeling the hardware part of OCS never left the corporate presentations until hit the market. You see, EDU sector is different. Say, in Geico, you can give the employee a banana, tell him - “This is how you make a phone call from now on” and that’s it. In EDU, we will form a committee and two focus groups to discuss “Is this a phone and can we use it in our college?”
There are three main objectives during the planning phase:
- To reduce or offset completely the stress when pushing major changes in the work environment
- To complete the deployment with the lowest TCO thus achieving fastest ROI
- To achieve maximum savings of MRC
We did some ‘physiological” tests. Catalina devices were introduced to different categories in our college. Needless to say, IT folks absolutely love it; the CIS faculties were OK with it and the rest – “Take this thing away from my desk, now!” When Snom 300 was introduced, all we got is “Ah, I have new phone.” And of course, with Tanjay we got “Can I keep it” and the answer is “No! It is too expensive and you will never use even 10% of the features.”
All our executives have Tanjay not because it looks cool but because it introduces features unseen before. It is simply the ultimate collaboration tool one could have on its desk. Let say the CFO calls branch office Director to discuss a budget request from the Dean. At some point the Director will say – “You know, I see the Dean is available, let’s escalate this call to a conference…” and all this from a phone device. Beautiful!
Down on the floor, all we have is “Georgia Military College, Business Office. How may I help you?”
Friday, January 8, 2010
StartCom certificate- why it works
I decided to try StartCom UCC certificate for my test OCS 2007 R2 Edge server. For my big surprise - it works!!! Just found why: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20091010/microsoft-free-root-certificate-authority-windows One tricky part, though – your federation partner must have this update: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=19C4AE49-1127-4537-9E91-35F81D20BCE6&displaylang=en
Happy Federation
Happy Federation
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