Ring Back Workaround by Doug

Doug is one of the leading OCS consultants at Microsoft that I had the pleasure of working with on our OCS project where I work. I was fortunate to have Doug working with me, as he was able to create a MSPL script that solved one of our biggest issues regarding simultaneous ringing. The issue stemmed from a lack of call signaling that was coming from another IP PBX system that OCS was connected to via a gateway. I really like Doug’s blog entry on this subject because it shows the power of OCS’s development capabilities to overcome the issue of another platform it can interoperate with.

While on the subject of OCS, last night I had the opportunity to attend the NW UC Doers meeting. It was a great meeting with lots of open conversation about OCS development with representation from both Cisco and Microsoft at the same user group meeting. Something you do not see every day I am sure. Duncan Blake from Unify Square presented and talked about OCS development using MSPL . Any way, my thanks to Josh Maher for organizing another informative meeting.

CUCiMOC First Call

I managed to squeeze in a few minutes today to work a little on the configuration and managed to make my first call. Unfortunately the PC I am using is not really suitable for anything but for test calls but I got the general feel for what Cisco are trying to achieve. I think they have achieved an interesting integration that will have some legs although after working through the documentation I think deploying this in a multi-cluster (CUCM) multi-pool (OCS) environment of large enterprises would have some challenges in regards to getting the registry settings to the right user. It would certainly take some good planning let’s put it that way.

The AD integration worked pretty well and I am pretty sure I could make some registry tweaks to improve the initial logon. My next biggest challenge will be setting up the correct dialing rules for CUCM. Should be interesting.

UC Doers Upcoming Meeting

UC Doers User Group
Wednesday July 29, 2009 from 5:00pm - 7:00pm
SQLSoft+
1750 112th Ave. NE Suite B-101 (Hidden Valley Office Park)
Bellevue, Washington 98004 Get Directions

We are currently planning on getting a little more in-depth regarding OCS voice capabilities. There are lots of cool things we can enable for our employers and clients through OCS from voice, to presence, to custom applications. Since our group spans Exchange and OCS – we figured starting somewhere on the OCS side of things would be great for everyone. Next quarter, when we are next to the release of Exchange 2010, we’ll try to jump back into the Exchange stuff.

In terms of finding great speakers… We lucked out and got Duncan Blake from Unify Square to talk. He has a long history on the product team at Microsoft and is currently over at Unify Square helping customers implement this stuff in the real world. Of course the small other fact about Duncan is his status as an instructor in the OCS Ranger program. In other words teaching the best of the best in Microsoft’s opinion.

RSVP

CUCiMOC Install and Configuration

This is an interesting little project that I have started. So far, the configuration of the CUCM and the install of the software has been pretty simple. Not too much of a stretch I don’t think. Of course where would we be without having to perform some sort of an upgrade to CUCM to start with. There are a couple of options for version compatibility:

CUCM 6.1.3 with a COP file loaded with the Client Services Framework device type.
CUCM 6.1.4
CUCM 7.x

Not too bad as far as available versions go. I choose just to go to 6.1.4. I was already at 6.1.1 in our lab so the jump was painless with the Linux version upgrade (that and the fact someone else offered to do it for me, very painless:-)).

There are a couple of areas that may make deployment a little difficult if you have never done them before. First is integrating CUCM into LDAP/AD. For a large enterprise this can be a little time consuming getting the right settings and everything else but the overall CUCiMOC configuration will certainly benefit from having done this step and in general your CUCM deployment will benefit from LDAP integration regardless of CUCiMOC.

The second thing people may have issues with is using group policies to setup the parameters for CUCiMOC on the PC for mass deployment. In my lab I will just alter the registry settings but a much larger deployment may choose to either script this during install or use Group policy setting which Cisco provide a template for. This is where the client locates the all-important TFTP server to down load settings from CUCM. I was a little perplexed when I first read the documentation as I skipped this piece and was beginning to think that we had to rely on DHCP. But my worst fearers were placed at ease. This was not the case and I could relax. Not that it’s a big deal for a lab test but just thinking more along the lines of deployment having to add option 150 to the data VLAN scopes is probably not ideal.

So far I haven’t had a successful call across CUCiMOC but more just wanted to jot down impressions as I moved forward. One final note, although CUCiMOC supports CDP and CER it will be problematic for off campus users to provide location information in the case of Enhanced 911 (E911). Not sure if there are any third party providers out there set to support this product yet but there is no interface to enter E911 location information.

For a comprehensive look at third party plugins for VoIP and Microsoft Communicator:
http://voipnorm.blogspot.com/2010/01/microsoft-communicator-native-versus.html

CUCiMOC Released

Over the next week or so I am going to be working on setting up CUCiMOC for the first time. I am very interested to see just how easy it will be. For those of you with an interest in this product here is the links to the CUCiMOC support documentation.
Since the product is now fully released I am sure there will be a number of bloggers out there getting their hands dirty with CUCiMOC. My first impressions after scouring the install documentation is there is more than meets the eye to the install. Only time will tell. I will report back here with my results.

Live Meeting Failures and Permissions

This is an interesting issue we caught last week. For some reason permissions on the metadata share and application share were missing some key groups. Not sure why they weren’t configured or all of a sudden became un-configured but some key errors appeared when some one tried to initiate a live meeting session. Event ID 41038 reported an invalid metadata folder. Our main clue to resolve the issue.

Here is the link to permissions created during OCS pool creation in the metadata and application share.

So a quick tip is to check your permissions even if everything loads successfully during your OCS setup.