For those of you out there thinking about making your user's dreams come true with CUCiMOC, have a quick think about the following before you continue:
You are going to have to deploy a client to all of your workstations. Before you decide to do this, have a quick chat to your Systems Management guys. Depending on your environment, this may not happen as quickly or as easily as you think.
Many CUCM deployments have required a second implementation of Active Directory, due to AD admins refusing to put the required schema changes in the production environment. What does this mean for you? CUCiMOC uses the currently logged on users creds to access many services, such as retrieving voice mail. This means your user name and password must be the same in both domains. No problem right, just manually sync them. This will work, but what happens after 30 days when your password expires?
Check your dial plans... CUCiMOC will just dial the numbers you give it. One problem you may come across is that in your GAL, your numbers are probably in E164 format. Without modifications to your dial plan CUCiMOC won't be able to dial these numbers forcing you to manually modify numbers everytime you make a call.
It is not free. Depending on how you are licensed with Cisco will depend on how much this is going to cost you. Better do the maths up front.
Do you really want to strip your OCS deployment down to being just a presence engine? To make life less confusing for your users, Cisco suggests that you hide all the native functionality of Communicator, leaving only the CUCiMOC calling controls exposed. Not sure this is really what you would have intended when you started on your OCS journey.
So for Matt's 5 cents:
CUCiMOC may be a good option for people who want to start using their PC as their voice endpoint but don't want to use Microsoft's UC platform yet. If you really think this is your only/best option, I would really suggest doing a pilot production with a handful of "real" users before jumping in, as some of these issues seriously impact user experience. For those who are unsure of how Microsoft's offering will compare, why not pilot that too, you may be pleasantly surprised.
Showing posts with label OCS 2007 R2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label OCS 2007 R2. Show all posts
Monday, November 30, 2009
Monday, November 9, 2009
Ever find patching your OCS Servers painful? Relief is on the way...
If you are like me and have all too often wasted precious time working out what patches you need to drop onto your OCS 2007 R2 servers, I have great news for you. Microsoft have just released the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Cumulative Update Installer. This package will determine what packages you need to install, list them out with links to the KBs, download them for you and install them in the correct order. This will save you hours.
So how does one get their hands on this little beauty you ask? Just pop over to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b3b02475-150c-41fa-844a-c10a517040f4 and simply download the ServerUpdateInstaller package.
Once you run the Cumulative Update Installer, you will see a list of the updates that are needed for the particular server you are patching.
After clicking the Install Updates button, the required updates will be automatically downloaded and installed.
As the patches are installed the progress is updated, and a log is created for each update. One thing I love is that once all the patches are installed and you click the Close button, the update packages that were downloaded are automatically cleaned up.
One important note is that you will still need to manually load Group Chat patches and the Database upgrade (OCS2009-DBUpgrade.msi).
If you want to automate things further you also have the option of running the updater with the /silent/forcereboot switch which will install the updates silently and then reboot your server once finished. You can also have the needed updates downloaded for you and placed in a subfolder named Extracted by using the /extractall switch.
So for Matt's 5 cents:
Don't waste your time guessing what updates you need to load on each of your R2 servers, just reach for the Cumulative Update Installer, kick back and watch it do its magic.
So how does one get their hands on this little beauty you ask? Just pop over to http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b3b02475-150c-41fa-844a-c10a517040f4 and simply download the ServerUpdateInstaller package.
Once you run the Cumulative Update Installer, you will see a list of the updates that are needed for the particular server you are patching.
After clicking the Install Updates button, the required updates will be automatically downloaded and installed.
As the patches are installed the progress is updated, and a log is created for each update. One thing I love is that once all the patches are installed and you click the Close button, the update packages that were downloaded are automatically cleaned up.
One important note is that you will still need to manually load Group Chat patches and the Database upgrade (OCS2009-DBUpgrade.msi).
If you want to automate things further you also have the option of running the updater with the /silent/forcereboot switch which will install the updates silently and then reboot your server once finished. You can also have the needed updates downloaded for you and placed in a subfolder named Extracted by using the /extractall switch.
So for Matt's 5 cents:
Don't waste your time guessing what updates you need to load on each of your R2 servers, just reach for the Cumulative Update Installer, kick back and watch it do its magic.
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