For two years now Microsoft has been building its assault on the global corporate telephony market. What appeared to be a bold, new approach has now been ratified by the latest Gartner research.

Some may say that the big news is Microsoft making it on to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony – (report published on 8th August 2008) – albeit only in the “Visionaries” quadrant. However, the real news is in the text of the report itself.

The report’s introduction immediately positions the importance of Unified Communications as a framework in which Telephony is merely a component. This is a critical distinction that should not be overlooked.

“…decisions to invest in unified communications take precedence over telephony”

“…although companies are still deploying PBX and IP telephony, most should make the decision in the context of a broader unified communications strategy”

With respect to Microsoft, the report is specifically talking about Microsoft’s Unified Communications platform product Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 emerging as a credible contender for corporate voice communications, while cautioning that OCS does not offer a like for like replacement for PBX and IP-PBX solutions.

This should come as no surprise to anyone following the entrance of Microsoft into the Voice market. Gurdeep Singh Pall (Sr. VP of Microsoft’s UC division) summed it up at Voicecon last year by saying “Microsoft is not building a replacement PBX, it is building an alternative to a PBX”.

Microsoft’s placement in the visionaries quadrant is a powerful statement and will surely guarantee their inclusion in future voice RFP’s and tenders – but is the position as a Visionary while scoring low on the “Ability to Execute” axis a major concern? The report also cautions that OCS 2007 “lacks key [PBX] functionality, questions scalability and considers OCS 2007 expensive as a voice only solution.”

Our opinion is “absolutely not.” The report talks about the changing role of the IP PBX and highlights 2010 as the year many users will be using an integrated set of collaboration tools beyond telephony, encouraging companies to consider their telephony partners in the broader context of a UC strategy.

It’s only been 10 months since OCS 2007 officially shipped, so it’s not surprising that widespread adoption has been a slow burn rather than a wildfire. History tells us that Microsoft is extremely good at iterating on a product strategy over multiple releases and any questions around functionality and scalability will be addressed over time.

One cannot dismiss the significance that Microsoft, as the industry leader in corporate desktop software, will play over the coming years with current and future versions of Office Communications Server. If you’re serious about a long-term UC strategy that includes telephony, it’s time to give that OCS pilot project a kick start to see what all of the fuss is about.

Note to self:  When starting a company with the potential for global market reach, don’t put the name of a specific country in the company name.

Chart courtesy of EQO.  Thanks to Om for picking this up and posting it.

-John Lamb, Modality Systems

Straight to voicemail

The New York Times brings us news about an innovate new communications technology:

Don’t Want to Talk About It? Order a Missed Call
“The technology, called Slydial, lets callers dial a mobile phone but avoid an unwanted conversation — or unwanted intimacy — on the other end. The incoming call goes undetected by the recipient, who simply receives the traditional blinking light or ping that indicates that a voice mail message has been received. Ms. Gorman used a test version of Slydial that has been available for months. But since the finished product was unveiled to the public last week, more than 200,000 people have used the service…

The article goes on to state that the concept may sound like the antithesis of interactivity, but “[products like] Slydial turn out to be only the latest in a breed of new technologies that fit squarely into an emerging paradox: tools that let users avoid direct communication.” 

The tools it’s referring to are things like email, blogging, twitter, text messaging, etc, which allow users to publish communication asynchronously while avoiding 2-way synchronous communication entirely.

So is Voice Mail just another communications modality?  Why shouldn’t the caller be able to choose “straight to voice mail” in the same way that the call recipient can do so today?  This balances the power to avoid far more equally.  After all, one person’s ability to communicate is another person’s ability to interrupt.

Software, like any good tool or product, should encourage appropriate behaviour through its design.  I won’t begin to pretend that this sort of thing doesn’t happen at work, but there’s no need to lower productivity.  Text-based systems are a far more efficient way to avoid someone.   

-John Lamb, Modality Systems

Technorati Tags: voice mail,unified communications

We recently implemented the full Microsoft Unified Communication (UC) solution at Modality Systems to provide Voice and Unified Messaging (UM) capabilities for our employees.  

At present, our production email system is a Hosted Exchange 2003 service run by a 3^rd party hosting company, and we needed to integrate our internal Exchange 2007 UM deployment with our hosted Exchange service.

The solution we developed to solve this problem also broadly applies to organisations who are running a pilot or proof-of-concept Exchange 2007 UM systems (running in a separate AD forest) and want to forward the voice mail and missed call notifications to their user’s production mailboxes.

It sounds like it should be straightforward enough, until you dive into the details.  We realised that we effectively needed to forward email between two independent messaging systems that were hosting identical SMTP address spaces.

There are number of advantages to deploying the pilot using the same SMTP address space as the production system

• The display of Office Communicator presence information in Outlook, SharePoint and other applications requires the user’s SIP address and SMTP address to match (there are exceptions to this rule, but using workarounds complicates the configuration).  
• The Exchange UM mailbox SMTP address needs to match the user’s SIP address in order to integrate the OCS 2007 Voice system with the Exchange UM system (specifically, the user’s OCS SIP URI must match their EUM proxy address)
• A production pilot will be more successful if it integrates with the user’s daily experience seamlessly.  Giving user’s multiple addresses and multiple accounts will almost  guarantee that the user will not use the pilot system effectively.

Here is a summary of how this was achieved. 

1. Configure the pilot OCS 2007 system to integrate with the pilot Exchange 2007 system for Voice Mail and Unified Messaging.  Details of how to do this can be found here.
2. On the pilot Ex2007 system, we set up our @modalitysystems.com domain as an Internal Relay Domain
3. Next we created a Send Connector using the Address Space of modalitysystems.com and a Smart Host pointing to the FQDN of our production email system.   Important:  Do not just edit the existing connector as you will need a “*” address space connector to send all your other email out through.   (This now meant that anything sent to an address of *@modalitysystems.com that didn’t exist in the pilot Exchange 2007 Global Address List would now be sent out externally to the production system for delivery.)
4. Next, we created Contact Objects within the pilot environment a gave them new “UM” addresses. We used the format of username.um@modalitysystems.com, but you can use whatever format you want as long as the user portion is different from the actual GAL address.
5. Next the new Contacts were set up as forwarders on each corresponding Exchange 2007 account.
6. Finally, we needed to add the new “UM” SMTP addresses as secondary addresses for each of our users in the production email system. 

Now, UM email received by pilot mailboxes would be automatically forwarded to our user’s production mailboxes.  This provides a limited version of the UM offering, giving you the basic voice mail & missed call service into our production Exchange 2003 accounts.  

These are the limitations of this approach:

• This solution only provides a way to receive voice mail and missed call notifications.  The other features of Ex2007 UM such as calendar integration and “play-on-phone” will not be available since the UM system is integrating with the non-production mailbox.
• A clean-up process of the pilot mailboxes may be required since users will not typically connect to these mailboxes.  Voice Mail messages can pile up over time with no way for the user to delete them unless you give them access to this mailbox via, e.g., OWA.  The Managed Folders feature in Exchange can be used to automate this process. 

We’ve been using this for a couple of months now and it provides a great interim solution until we migrate from hosted email to our own internal Exchange system.

-Nick Seagrave, Modality Systems

We’re very happy to announce that Modality Systems has fulfilled the qualifications necessary to achieve the Voice specialisation within the Microsoft Partner Program’s Unified Communications Competency.

Earning the Unified Communications Competency Voice specialisation required the completion of a rigorous technical readiness program that included specific staffing requirements and an internal deployment of the complete Microsoft Unified Communications offering.

Companies who achieve the Unified Communications Competency Voice specialisation are qualified by Microsoft to deploy Microsoft unified communications technologies such as Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.

Thanks to John, Mike and Nick for the hard work required to make this happen.

Also, special thanks to our Microsoft Voice Partner team: Katherine, Tom, Tom, and Ian!

View our full press release here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/presskits/uc/docs/modality.doc

-James Rodd, Modality Systems

I have a habit of tearing out interesting articles from newspapers.  I rip them out, fold them, and stuff them into the breast pocket of my suit.

This has the interesting side effect of letting interesting nuggets of information surface when I least expect it.  Today I found an fragment of an article that I tore out ages ago, and it could not have appeared at a better time as I was contemplating how to tackle a rather large engagement that we’ve started. 

I have no idea what the source of this is other than it’s from a British newspaper sometime between 2006 and 2007.

There are two dangers in consultation. On the one hand, it can simply be lip service, or window dressing, at one extreme; and at the other extreme it can be the experts almost abandoning their responsibilities, saying to people - "What do you want? We will then build it ." If experts are worth anything, they know about pre-risk experience, about how things have been done differently elsewhere. They can look after the longer term and, to my mind, "longer term" sums up the nature but also the problems and the opportunities [in this type of work].

Sunand Prasad

President of the Royal Institute of British Architects

Why do people hire consultants?  I think there are two main reasons:

First, if you’re having a lot of pain, you may want to hire someone to take the pain away.  By and large, this reason applies to contract consulting (we need 1,000 pages of documentation in order to meet a regulatory requirement - let’s hire some unsuspecting consultant to do it.), or to outsourcing companies (We’re still running Windows98 in the accounting department - anyone want to migrate our users data to our new systems?  Anyone?)

The second reason is exemplified Mr. Prasad’s quote.  Consultants tend to focus in a particular area and then do lots of projects in that area.   We’ve not done something once, but dozens or even hundreds of times.  The experience and insight developed from these activities means that we can build risk-mitigation into the design and into the system.   It also means that we understand how things have been done elsewhere.  We constantly refine our approach, picking up best practices and lessons learned.  We build flexibility into the system when possible so that it can be changed or amended later.

The equally smart, but novice designer will spend too much time trying to figure out what to do, essentially because there is a fear that an action taken now could cause an un-retractable problem in the future.  They will spend too much time and still not get it quite right.  

When used correctly, consultants can save companies immeasurable amounts of time and resources by eliminating future problems before they happen.

This also requires a responsible consultant.  One who is aware of her practice as craftsmanship.  Once who does not give lip service or who does not go in too far over their head in doing "whatever the client wants."    

-John Lamb, Modality Systems

There are two kinds of people in this world:  Those who have tried to install and configure the "Microsoft Office Communicator, Phone Edition Software Update Service" (aka, the Tanjay Update Server)… and those who haven’t.

If you have, you’re probably smirking because you know what I’m talking about.  If you haven’t yet, I might suggest you let sleeping monsters lie. 

Though if you’re a brave knight and want to test your luck, help is available.  I’ve been working with Microsoft and we’re documenting solutions to the most common problems. 

TomL (LCSKid) has posted our work over on his blog : http://blogs.technet.com/toml/archive/2008/06/02/update-server-problems-with-configupdateserver-vbs.aspx

Thomas Lee (from Global Knowledge) also has an excellent post on his blog that covers the infrastructure requirements.  http://cacorner.blogspot.com/2008/05/getting-tanjay-working.html

If you have any questions or issues not covered in these blog posts, please post a comment or email me.  We’re tracking the problems and will post updates with solutions.  Thanks!

-John Lamb, Modality Systems

We’ve just been through the exercise that every IT consultant / engineer / analyst goes through at some point:  The reverse engineering of permissions applied on active directory objects. 

Hopefully this post will spare you the tedious task.

In this particular case, we needed to give a non-Domain Administrator the ability to install and activate an OCS 2007 server. 

The OCS installation wizard (setup.exe) and command-line configuration tool (LCSCmd.exe) both give you a simple way to delegate installation & activation of OCS Servers.  The challenge however, was that our client wanted to know “what, exactly” was being delegated.   It’s a fair question.  What would be the point of having a Domain Admin delegate permissions to a user, if the user received 90% of the privileges of the Domain Admin as a result of the delegation? 

Presumably, the OCS delegation wizard only delegates the minimum permissions required to do the job.  That is what we set out to prove.

OCS Installer Group Required

First, you must pre-create an AD security group that will receive the delegated permissions.  Let’s call this “OCSInstallersGroup” for the purposes of the example.

Any user who will perform installation and activation of OCS servers will become a member of this group.   The delegation wizard delegates permissions to this group, not to an individual user.

OCS Service Accounts Required

Before running the delegation wizard (or LCSCmd) you will also need to know the names of the OCS SIP Service and OCS Component Service accounts.  These are AD user accounts that are being used to run the various OCS Server services.  If this will be the first OCS Server in the domain, you will need to pre-create these user accounts. 

• OCS SIP Service Account (default: RTCService)
• OCS Component Service Account (default: RTCComponentService)

Delegation Wizard Inputs

The delegation wizard must be run by a user who is a member of the Domain Admins group in the domain where we are installing the OCS Servers.

The wizard requires 5 input variables:

1. TrusteeGroup:  The name of the OCS Installer Group, e.g., OCSInstallersGroup
2. TrusteeDomain:  The domain where the group exists, e.g., europe.yourcompany.com
3. SIPServiceAccount:   The name of the OCS SIP Service account, e.g, RTCService
4. ComponentServiceAccount:  The name of the OCS Component Service Account, e.g., RTCComponentService
5. ComputerOU:  The DN of the OU where the OCS Servers are located, e.g., OU=OCS2007,OU=Servers,DC=europe,DC=yourcompany,DC=com

Delegation Wizard Outputs

The wizard performs the following tasks:

1.  The TrusteeGroup is added to the Following Groups:

• RTCUniversalGlobalWriteGroup - Members have write access to RTC global settings
• RTCUniversalGlobalReadOnlyGroup - Members have read access to RTC global settings

(The OCS Global Settings are AD objects typically stored in the configuration partition at: CN=Global Settings,CN=RTC Service,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=yourcompany,DC=com.   In some cases, the Global Settings may be stored in the Root Domain Partition instead.)

2.  The TrusteeGroup is granted Read and Write permissions* to the ComputerOU (the OU containing the OCS Servers).

3. The TrusteeGroup is granted Read/Write Service Principal Name (SPN) permissions* on the OCS SIP Service Account object

4.  The TrusteeGroup is granted Read/Write Service Principal Name (SPN) permissions* on the OCS Component Service Account object.

*  If you would like to see a list of the specific Access Control Entries (ACEs) that are applied in Steps 2 - 4, we’ve documented them here.

Analysis

Our findings were pretty much what we expected.  The person installing OCS needs to be able to create the Pool and Server objects in the Global Settings and they need to be able to register new Service Principal Names in AD (Use a utility like SetSPN.exe to see what these are).  

We were happy with this… and more importantly, our client was happy with this. 

John Lamb, Modality Systems

Technorati Tags: office communications server 2007, active directory, delegation of administration

At Modality Systems, we like to experiment with technology.  (Actually, that’s not exactly true - we like to abuse technology.   You don’t get good orange juice by being nice to an orange.)

One of the things that’s captured our fascination recently is the utter elegance and simplicity of the software and hardware coming out of Cupertino.  The "creative types" have known this secret for quite some time, but as a Enterprise-centric company, we’ve had our heads in the sand to some extent. 

James decided to buy an iPhone recently and we’ve all be wowed by the web browsing experience.  Outlook Web Access looks so good on this thing that he’s not entirely missing Active Sync yet.   With ActiveSync on the roadmap for the iPhone, it begs the question:  Will the iPhone become the de facto corporate communications device?  It’s not unthinkable.

For us, the important question is how this will integrate with your Unified Communications infrastructure.   There is no Communicator Mobile software for the iPhone, so the logical the logical question is how well web-based UC applications will work.

We started by running Communicator Web Access.  After you manage to get pop-up blocking disabled, it runs really well in the iPhone’s Safari browser.   The contact list doesn’t appear for some reason (though CWA works fine using Safari on a Mac or PC), but the search function works nicely and allows the user to look up a contact and send an IM.

We’ll continue to test the Microsoft UC stack on Apple products and report back our findings in a series of posts.

-John Lamb, Modality Systems

Two industry shows in the last 2 weeks, both asking the same question: “What is the killer application for Unified Communications?”  Having attended both, it is fair to say that the question was not answered.

There has, however, been lot’s of attempts to re-brand a lot of legacy technologies as Unified Communications.

I’ve made two observations: 

From one perspective, you can make the observation that “Presence” is the killer application for Unified Communications - Introducing pervasive presence information as a horizontal feature across a range of isolated applications provides immediate value; “Presence” becomes the enabler to improve technology disconnects and drive instant event-based communication.

The second observation is that trying to define a killer application for UC forms something of misleading question.  The application is really just “communications”, and it’s not really even an application but a platform.  It’s the unification of disconnected communications silos that is killer, much in the same way that the web provides a connected and contextual framework for vast amounts of data through hyperlinking.

The true value to your organisation comes from being able to build on and leverage this platform level presence into existing killer applications and business process.  Just imagine what can be achieved by embedding contextual and relevant presence information into existing processes; and then further by extending this presence into key customers and partners.

Technorati Tags: unified communications