Installing Live Mesh on Windows Server 2008

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Live Mesh logoYesterday, I was chatting with Eileen Brown and she asked if tried the Microsoft Live Mesh preview yet?

I didn’t think it was available outside the United States yet but it seems that it is… (in any case, there is a workaround) and within a few minutes I was logged on to a Live Desktop in three browsers on two computers – using IE8, Chrome (on a PC) and Safari (on a Mac). That’s all very well, but the beauty of Mesh is when I can share my data directly between computers, so I tried to install the Live Mesh client software but, unfortunately, it wouldn’t install on my Windows Server 2008 workstation (despite recognising it as Vista x64).

Just as when I installed Google Chrome a few days back, I found that I couldn’t install directly from the IE8 download prompt:

This installation is forbidden by system policy. Details about this problem can be found here.

Running the installer as administrator invoked UAC but it still failed, telling me that:

Installer encountered errors. Please verify your network settings and attempt to reinstall.

Then I found a blog post suggesting the use of the livemesh -force to skip version checking but it was still complaining about my network settings. I did wonder if the problem was that this computer also runs Hyper-V (so the network stack includes a virtual switch) but it seems that I need to completely turn off UAC for the installation (it’s back on again now) and that temporary elevation or TweakUAC are not enough.

Once I’d switched off UAC, rebooted, installed Live Mesh (with the -force switch), re-enabled UAC and rebooted once more, the Live Mesh was client was up and running (on Windows Server 2008). Life is Good.

Live Mesh preview with meshed folders on the desktop and the live desktop as well as the view of connected devices.

It’s early days yet, but my first impressions are that this is very cool. Think about the usability of Groove’s collaboration features – and then some. I have folder sharing, news (e.g. Mark has added this file in this folder), a live desktop and remote desktop capabilities but there is one question, now I have 5GB in Mesh, what do I do with my Skydrive? Can I have all this data in one place?

The other thing I’ve noticed is that upwards syncing over ADSL is slow but once I have some more devices on the local network with the Live Mesh client installed, it should sync up directly (at least, I think that’s what happens). The Windows Mobile client should be here soon but I’m really waiting for the Macintosh client, after which I can really start to get stuck in to what Mesh could do for me to make sure that everything I’m working on currently is available to me, regardless of the device I’m using at the time.

Microsoft Unified Communications: part 5 (notes from a real deployment)

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Over the last week or, so I’ve posted several articles on the Microsoft View of Unified Communications (UC), looking at

  1. An introduction to UC (from a Microsoft view).
  2. How UC can change the ways in which we work.
  3. How the various Microsoft UC components work together.
  4. Some of the things to know about Cisco’s UC solutions, QoS and codecs.

This final post in the series has been part-written for over a year now (ever since I got involved in a UC pilot project in 2007). Even though I was a Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist (MCTS) for Live Communications Server 2005 (the predecessor to Office Communications Server 2007) and have worked with Exchange Server since 1996, I haven’t carried out a real LCS deployment and unified messaging is a new feature in Exchange so the project involved a steep learning curve. This post summarises the points that I learned along the way (with more than a little help from colleagues) – not so much a product review as a collection of notes that I made that might be useful to others.

  • DNS is critical to a successful UC deployment as OCS relies heavily on DNS for name resolution. Specifically, it uses SRV records to hold details of key servers within the organisation for automatic logon (_sipinternaltls for TCP connections over port 5061 to sip.domainname.tld). If users are having problems with OCS, start off by checking the DNS event logs.
  • Other services that are required include Microsoft IIS and ASP.NET.
  • Secure communications require a certificate service. For internal deployments, it might be possible to get away with a self-signed certificate (especially if group policy can be used to ensure that all the clients trust the entire certificate chain); however for external deployments it’s best to get a certificate from a known trusted source. Certificates from well-known and trusted organisations like Verisign are pretty sure to work whilst providers of free certificates may not be trusted (so offer little advantage over self-signed certificates); there is a middle ground though as low-cost certificates can be found which are trusted by default in many browsers. Subject alternative name (wildcard) certificates are also available (e.g. for *.domainname.tld).
  • Like some other products (e.g. Exchange Server 2003), OCS uses a wizard-based approach to deployment, guiding an administrator through each of the stages depending upon the type of server that is being installed.
  • If an organisation is nervous about making schema changes OCS may cause some issues as it requires a schema update (as does Exchange Server). This is often made out to be a bigger problem than it really is.
  • OCS does require the domain in which it is to be installed to be running at Windows Server 2003 functional level.
  • Location profiles can be used to normalise numbers into the correct format.
  • Web conferencing (e.g. for Live Meeting) is enabled in the OCS global properties.
  • OCS contacts are stored in Active Directory in a container called RTC Special Accounts (visible with advanced features enabled).
  • During our deployment, we used method 2 in Microsoft knowledge base article 951644 to get around Outlook integration errors because our OCS signon address did not match the e-mail addresses use in Outlook. The Office Communicator team has published some good advice for troubleshooting Outlook integration and address book errors.

OCS is only one of Microsoft’s unified communications technologies and another key element is the new unified messaging (UM) role in Exchange Server 2007. Note the distinction between unified communications (bringing together multiple forms of communication along with presence awareness) and unified messaging (one inbox for all message types – e-mail, fax or voicemail – for a more detailed explanation, refer to part 1 in this series of posts).

In terms of deployment, Exchange UM is far less user-friendly than OCS and requires the use of Windows PowerShell/the Exchange Management Shell. Setting up Exchange UM to work with OCS involved:

  • Creating a new dial plan (e.g. new-umdialplan -name dialplanname -uri
    type "sipname" -voipsecurity "sipsecured" -numberofdigitsinextension 5    ).
  • Specifying the UM server to be associated with a dial plan (e.g. set-umserver -id exchangeservername -dialplans dialplanname).
  • Enabling mailbox access for users (e.g. enable-mailbox -identity 'msuc.co.uk/Users/username' -alias 'aliasname' -database 'exchangeservername\storagegroup\database').
  • Enabling the user’s mailbox for UM (e.g. enable-ummailbox -id username -ummailboxpolicy "mailboxpolicy" -extensions voiceextensionnumber -sipresourceidentifier emailaddress -pin pin.
  • Creating a UM-IP gateway with associated hunt group and set permissions (run .\exchucutil.ps1 from Exchange Server 2007 service pack 1).
  • Creating a UM auto attendant (e.g. set-umipgateway -identity ocsserver -port 5061).
  • Get details of the OCS pool (run .\get-ucpool.ps1 from Exchabge Server 2007 service pack 1).
  • Running the Exchange UM integration utility (ocsumutil.exe /domain:dnsdomainname) to allow OCS calls to be routed to Exchange Server (for capture as voicemail).
  • Configure SSL on the Exchange Server.

Of course, the beauty of PowerShell is that this may appear complicated but can be scripted for re-use.

All of the above is concerned with deploying OCS for instant messaging/presence and integrating it with Exchange for voicemail. It should be noted that OCS is not a PBX replacement (even though it will integrate with major manufacturer’s PBXs) and that for routing voice calls to/from OCS a mediation server is required. In the pilot, we used an Dialogic IP Media Gateway 1000 but this is very much an entry-level system and there are appliance servers (e.g. the Dialogic DMG4000) that combine the role of OCS mediation server with the IP media gateway functionality. The mediation server is fairly simple to deploy, with the only specialist requirements being the definition of the listening address and gateway, along with the details of the PSTN gateway (the IP-PBX or the media gateway).

Communicator Web Access (CWA) is a potentially useful feature within OCS – providing a OCS client access from within a web browser. The only gotcha that I came across during testing was the need to create a certificate (for activation) using a tool from the LCS 2005 resource kit (lcscertutil.exe) with the web server certificate template.

A couple of other server roles that are worth mentioning are update servers (for updating OCS software on unified communications devices such as IP phones deployed within the organisation) and archiving servers (for archiving conversation history for reasons of compliance). I didn’t set these up in my environment but they complete the picture in terms of OCS deployment.

Further information

Microsoft Unified Communications: part 4 (a brief note on Cisco, QoS and codecs)

Posted on By Mark Wilson

As might be expected for a series of blog posts about the Microsoft view of Unified Communications (UC), it is heavily biased towards Microsoft products but I wanted to take a brief look at another major player in the unified communications space – Cisco. It should be said that I have very limited experience of Cisco’s UC offerings (only as an end user of their IP telephony products) but it’s worth highlighting the differences between the Microsoft and Cisco approaches.

Microsoft and Cisco are partners, but they are also competitors. Some googling suggests that Cisco and Microsoft’s VoIP products can be integrated but not always without challenges (Aaron Tiensivu’s post on integrating Microsoft Exchange and Cisco CallManager is just one example of such a challenge) but it should be considered that they have come to UC from different directions.

Cisco are a networking company and they have approached UC as a networking problem for which there is a networking solution. On the other hand, Microsoft are a software company – they have looked at the overall user experience an attempted to engineer a software solution.

Whilst Cisco concentrates on providing a VoIP solution that offers Quality of Service (QoS) and has grown out of PBX technology, Microsoft relies on codecs that are tolerant of poor network conditions to deliver what they refer to as Quality of Experience (QoE). Those with far more experience than I have commented that the Microsoft approach is sensible for calls that are routed across the Internet (where there is no QoS) but less so in an enterprise environment and Ed Horley made a very valid observation that network links, particularly WAN links, tend to be under-provisioned. I have to say that using the SCCP/UCM solution at work provides fantastic call quality but I also find that the Cisco IP Phone (running SIP) on my desk at home provides a great experience too and, at a recent event, Microsoft even compared their solution with Skype, citing this as a well-known example of a software solution that provides good call quality over variable consumer Internet connections (something which I was surprised to find when I was using Skype for a video call between the UK and Australia recently).

Microsoft’s general recommendation is to let the software select an appropriate codec and Office Communicator will constantly assess the available bandwidth and select an appropriate codec, even switching codecs and/or tuning parameters as required during a call.

The main concern is with voice traffic saturating network bandwidth at the expense of data – that’s where QoS can be used effectively – to manage the network.

In the final post in this series, I’ll wrap things up with some notes from my own OCS implementation last year.

Chrome gears for my desktop

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Google Gears logoFor the last week, I’ve only used two browsers on my Windows PC – Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 and Google Chrome beta – and I’ve been really impressed at how these two browsers have shaken up my surfing. There’s plenty of sites on the ‘net comparing the two browsers (so I won’t do that here) but one thing I heard Paul Thurrott discussing with Leo Laporte on Windows Weekly (Episode 73) was the integration of Google Gears into the Chrome browser. I hadn’t realised that Chrome included Gears (although, now I come to think of it, the installation error I experienced when I was installing Chrome referred to Gears) and it is really cool.

Let me give you an example, a few minutes back, I had a power spike at home. The computers stayed on but my ADSL connection was dropped, as was the WiFi connection from my DNS server to the router… I didn’t even notice – I was happily writing a blog post in WordPress through Chrome and it kept on without missing a beat. Only when I tried to surf to some new sites did I realise there was a problem.

Creating a Google Gears application in Google ChromeBut it gets better (credits to Paul Thurrott for pointing this out) – if you click the drop down menu in Chrome with a file icon, you can select to create application shortcuts. This creates a standalone instance of the current page with optional icons on the desktop, quick launch bar or start menu. I now have Gears applications for Google Reader, Google Mail, Google Calendar and WordPress (I’m using the WordPress one to write this post).

Google Reader in a Chrome/Gears application

(The last time I was interested in things like chrome and gears, I was a teenager and the context would have been my bike…)

Poor performance with Camtasia Studio fixed by adjusting the screen resolution

Posted on By Mark Wilson

A couple of days back, I mentioned some videos I’ve produced for Microsoft. There are various technical requirements for the way in which these videos are produced, one of which is that I have to use TechSmith Camtasia Studio 5 (which seems pretty flaky at times – in fact, it’s the only application ever to have caused a blue screen of death on my Windows Server 2008 workstation – and that was the first BSOD I’ve seen with a non-beta version of Windows in a long while).

When I’m recording these videos, I tend to capture the video on my external monitor whilst I have Camtasia Studio and any applications related to the demonstration running on my main display (then I move them to the recording area as required). Today, I was really struggling to make anything run at a decent speed whilst I was recording and the capture rate dropped to a measly 0.5 frames per second (on a computer with a 2.2GHz Intel Core2Duo CPU and 4GB of RAM).

Last time I’d recorded anything, I’d dropped my monitor resolution to 1024×768 but this time I was using it at full (1680×1050) resolution and Camtasia was just recording a 1024×768 region of the screen. As soon as I reduced the monitor resolution, performance was back to it’s normal level (encoding video on a machine with integrated graphics is always going to hit the CPU hard).

So, if you have to use Camtasia Studio (I blogged an alternative method using nothing but Windows software a while back) and you are experiencing performance issues, try adjusting the monitor resolution.

Some key messages from Microsoft’s virtualisation launch yesterday

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I watched yesterday’s Microsoft virtualisation webcasts with interest and, excited as I am to know that I will finally get my hands on Hyper-V Server and SCVMM 2008 in the coming weeks (and to get confirmation that live migration will be in the next release of Hyper-V), there wasn’t a lot else there that was new on the virtualisation front. Even so, I don’t want to downplay the message – Microsoft does have an excellent story to tell around its virtualisation products – and I was interested in how this fits into the overall “big picture” for IT.

Gartner’s VP and Chief of Research for Infrastructure and Operations, Tom Bittman, presented a really interesting slot about how virtualisation is just one part of a much larger transformation of the way that IT is delivered to business customers (I’ll cover off the rest of Bittman’s presentation in a separate post).

Of course, Bittman was speaking at a Microsoft event and so it should come as no surprise that his view is not dissimilar to Microsoft’s view of dynamic computing, which has two major streams: the dynamic data centre; and user-centric computing – i.e. becoming less concerned with managing devices and more concerned about providing a seamless user experience (leading into predictable demonstrations of desktop, presentation and application virtualisation – Microsoft is a software company after all).

There were some interesting messages in the technology pitch though:

“If you know Windows, you know virtualization.”

This was stated several times, first by Bob Kelly, Corporate Vice President, Servers and Tools Business at Microsoft but also by other speakers. It’s clearly something that Microsoft wants to highlight – i.e. it’s not necessary to spend thousands training people on specialist virtualisation products – Hyper-V is built into Windows Server 2008 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager uses a familiar Windows interface.

“Having a complete management solution is really critical, and with System Center, our customers are able to manage the physical environment, the virtual environment, as well as their applications in a fully integrated way. That’s an offering put together that nobody else in the industry really provides.”

[Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft]

This should not be underestimated. There may be other products that perform various technical elements of a virtualisation solution in a more functional manner, but management is critical to the success of any virtualisation implementation – and I do not know of any other vendor who can manage physical and virtual machines in one place.

I nearly laughed loud when Bob Muglia said:

“There is no magic in VMotion, it’s just a feature and we’ll have that feature in the next release of Hyper-V and Windows Server 2008.”

[Bob Muglia, Senior Vice President, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft]

i.e. we’ve got it working now – so stop slating Hyper-V because it doesn’t do live migration… it can, it will (but is it really that important?).

Even Kevin Turner’s CxO-level presentation was interesting (there will be another post following on that one too) and I was interested to see the slide about the relative costs of Microsoft and VMware virtualisation (based on pricing from the web).

Microsoft slide showing VMware solutions as 3x more expensive

Take it with a pinch of salt, given the source, but it is still a big difference. VMware will point out that software cost is minimal given the overall cost of the solution (and they are correct) but if the low-cost solution also provides a holistic view for management whilst the IT organisation is under pressure to become more efficient and effective at the same time as reducing costs, adapting to changing business demands and providing a dynamic IT service that is better aligned with business needs… I know which one I’d choose.

Microsoft Unified Communications: part 3 (putting it all together)

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Over the last few days, I’ve been describing the Microsoft view on Unified Communications (UC), based on a presentation given recently by James O’Neill.

In the first two posts in this series based on James’ presentation, I outlined the business need for unified communications and some of the Microsoft technologies that can be used to address those requirements before examining some of the benefits to be gained thorough adaptation of communications to fit modern working practises. In this third post in the series, I finally move on to the technology, looking at the main steps involved in implementing a UC solution using Microsoft products.

It may also help to check out my post from April 2006 which provides an introduction to voice telecommunications for IT professionals.

In a traditional communications infrastructure, voice and data networks are managed independently:

Traditional (non-unified) communications

Even though there has been a move to replace telephone cables with standard CAT5/5e/6 cabling in recent years, and IP telephony has become more commonplace so there has been some convergence at the network level, the voice and data systems are typically separate (although their directories may have been integrated).

Implementing Exchange Server 2007’s unified messaging capabilities allows the removal of the PBX voice-mail system and provides voice-mail, fax and speech capabilities within Exchange, accessible via standard e-mail clients, Outlook Web Access or through a voice call:

Unified messaging with Exchange Server 2007

To enable the integration with the PBX, a VoIP gateway may be required (some PBXs may integrate directly).

Replacing any existing instant messaging systems with Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 (or implementing OCS as a new service) can provide VoIP connectivity with the existing telephony systems, enabling both “soft” and “hard” IP phones to be used. In addition, Live Meeting can be used to provide conferencing facilities:

Unified communications with Office Communications Server 2007

With this infrastructure, OCS will integrate with Exchange and work collaboratively to route calls, present caller ID information (used in the subject of messages), perform directory lookups, etc. but for OCS to integrate with a PBX a gateway is required. A basic gateway also requires an OCS Mediation Server to be deployed whereas an advanced gateway includes the necessary technology to integrate directly with the PBX.

Effectively, there a four levels of integration:

  1. None at all.
  2. Basic gateway with mediation server.
  3. Advanced gateway.
  4. VoIP capabilities built-in to PBX.

Microsoft has partnered with a number of manufacturers to provide hardware that integrates with OCS, and the strategic gateway partners are Audiocodes, Dialogic and Quintum.

This approach allows legacy routers, gateways, PBX and phones to be maintained (after all they are a significant investment) but integrated with software solutions to adopt new ways of working, as featured in Microsoft’s VoIP as you are campaign. For organisations that are ready to remove the legacy telephony altogether (e.g. in a green field site) an advanced gateway can be used to integrate the VoIP system with public telephone networks:

Full Microsoft Unified Communications

The call path is as follows:

  • User initiates a call.
  • OCS looks for valid endpoints and sends a packet to say that there is an incoming call (including call forking, if configured).
  • An endpoint (possibly voice-mail) accepts the call and the server drops the other connections.
  • Once the call is established, the server drops out of the conversation (aside from logging the call details) and the call continues on a peer-to-peer basis.

There are a few additional points to note:

  • Where network address translation is in use, an OCS Access Proxy may be deployed.
  • If the call is routed over the PSTN, the gateway is just another party on the call (as if it were a phone).
  • In a conference scenario, Office Communicator clients only have a single channel of data in each direction and so where multi-party calls are placed, a media control unit (MCU) is required to act as a negotiator. At this point, the direct call is dropped and a new multi-party call is set up via the MCU. Live Meeting clients can send multiple video channels (plus sound and desktop conferencing on separate channels).

Having outlined a VoIP-only solution, it’s often the case that the legacy infrastructure cannot be completely removed – there are still some limitations around VoIP that OCS cannot address (at least not in the current release). For example, if there is a loss of power, then there are no network switches and there is no telephony (the same issue also applies for IP Phone systems using Power over Ethernet – such as Cisco IP Phones). As a consequence, and to meet health and safety requirements, it may be necessary to retain some traditional telephony infrastructure for emergency calls. Even if they are accessible through OCS, emergency calls present another challenge in that the call will be placed at the gateway, which may be in another city, country, or even continent to the person making the call, so dial plans need to be carefully designed.

Clearly this post is heavily biased towards Microsoft products and another major player in the unified communications space is Cisco. In the next post in this series, I’ll take a brief look at the approaches that the two vendors have taken to unified communications (and it will be a brief look, as I have very limited Cisco experience!) before I wrap the series up with some notes from my own OCS implementation last year.

Christmas has come early: App-V, Hyper-V Server, SCVMM and live migration in Hyper-V all on their way!

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Get Virtual Now

I’d heard that something big was happening in Redmond today (well, maybe not in Redmond, but in Bellevue anyway…). I knew about the getVIRTUALnow events and I watched the opening session on the web but there had to be something else. Well, there is – Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 (App-V, formerly SoftGrid), which RTMed last week, will be part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimisation Pack (MDOP) R2, due for general availability within the coming weeks. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 will be released within 30 days, as will Hyper-V Server (which will be a free download – not $28 as previously announced). And, as Scott Lowe reported earlier, live migration will be supported by Hyper-V in Windows Server 2008 R2.

Read more in the associated Microsoft press release.

iPhone always out of juice? Reset the battery indicator calibration with a full discharge/charge

Posted on By Mark Wilson

There’s a lot of FUD around about iPhone battery life (and a lot of science involved in understanding the optimum recharge regime for Lithium-Ion batteries) but, even so, I was finding that my brand new iPhone 3G was getting down to around 30% after a just few hours of light use. It didn’t seem unreasonable if I was making calls but just sitting in my pocket?

In theory, the best advice on increasing battery lifespan comes from Apple and they do say that:

“For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down).”

Then, one of my friends told me something that Apple doesn’t mention and it seems to have made a big difference to my indicated battery life.iPhone usage I don’t turn off Wi-Fi, 3G, location services, etc. unless I’m getting low on charge (because I actually want to use those features that I bought the phone for…) and I don’t have push e-mail since moving to GMail but, following my friend’s advice, I let the phone run completely out of juice and it took a long time to completely die after the warning messages for 20% and 10% battery power remaining. Then, after a full charge, my battery indicator seems to have calibrated itself to a much more realistic value (for reference, I’m on firmware v2.0.2).

Of course, usage patterns will vary but my iPhone is currently showing about 60% battery with 55 Minutes of use and 21 hours and 58 minutes on standby since the last full charge.

The iPhone 3G battery guide and charging tips post on Macrumors has a stack of information about iPhone battery life (including cited sources).

Microsoft Unified Communications: part 2 (unlocking the potential for new communications experiences)

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Last week I spent some time at Microsoft in one of James O’Neill‘s presentations on the Microsoft View of Unified Communications.

In the first post in this series from James’ presentation, I outlined the business need for unified communications and some of the Microsoft technologies that can be used to address those requirements. This post looks at some more of the benefits, as communications experiences are adapted to match modern working practises.

The first goal of unified communications: whenever I see a name, I also see presence

We communicate with people, not addresses, yet it doesn’t seem strange to us to dial a network address (a phone number) to speak to someone. Obviously, that’s because telephony has a long history, but it seems pretty odd today – after all, when did you last e-mail someone by IP address? That’s where directories come into play – just as on a mobile phone we tend to store contacts by name, in a corporate environment we should be able to contact our colleagues (or federated contacts) using Active Directory (possibly integrated with other directory systems – such as the internal telephone system).

Having found the right contact, we have a huge choice of media for communications, and the most appropriate medium may vary according to a number of factors:

  • Would you phone someone you know is out? Possibly – but you’d probably call their mobile phone.
  • Would an IM chat save a long e-mail exchange? This one is a little more tenuous – I often find that I’ve spent 20 minutes on IM when a 2 minute phone call would have sufficed.
  • Do you ever ask “is this a good time for a call”? Almost always!

The choice of medium is driven by presence – and when we have presence information, we can use it to make a decision.

After all, how would you connect of the person was:

  • On holiday for a week?
  • In a meeting for the next 30 minutes?
  • Around but not at their PC?
  • At their PC but with a do not disturb sign?
  • Available?

Technologies like the Office Communicator client can even set levels of permission (e.g. personal contacts may be able to override do not disturb status, certain contacts may be able to view home phone numbers but not everyone, etc.) and Office applications can also show presence through smart tags which include a “jellybean” presence icon.

The second goal of unified communications: where I see presence, I should be able to start a conversation (in the right medium)

Once I have a contact’s presence information, I can choose an appropriate form of communication. Should I contact them on a 1:1 basis or multi-party? Should I use voice, video, a data conference, instant messaging or e-mail? Then, using unified communication technologies I can let the computer place the call so that it may be routed according to my contact’s working hours, availability (presence), or other rules – possibly even allowing call forking so that two or more devices ring simultaneously and the first to be answered takes the call.

Using unified communications products a conversation can even switch modes mid-communication, for example:

(Instant message) “Are you free for a call?”
(Instant message) “Yes, but I’m travelling right now!”
(Click to call – and the call is routed to the contact’s mobile phone based on their working hours)
(Communicator-mobile voice call) The conversation continues until… “I’m in the office now, let’s transfer this to my desk phone.”
(Transfer call)
(Communicator-communicator voice call) The conversation continues until some expert advice is needed “Let’s bring Dave into the call – he’s the expert in this area.”
(Click to invite others)
(Multi-party voice call) “But what if I show you this diagram”
(Click to start Live Meeting)
(Conferencing) Each party can see a shared desktop, etc.
…

This example shows that the rich functionality provided by the various unified communications technologies allows for new conferencing experiences. Add in devices like the Office RoundTable and the whole feeling of a conference call changes (I’ve lost count of the number of times when I’ve tuned out of a voice conference because I’d lost track of who was talking or couldn’t hear them properly on a conference phone) – and meeting content can be recorded and stored for subsequent playback. Then there is Unified Messaging in Exchange Server, allowing voice-mails to be stored with notes in the recipient’s Inbox as well as voice access to have e-mails read over a voice call, to move calendar appointments, to access the directory and call contacts, etc.

That’s just the unified communications part – but why should web applications be restricted to e-mail and web addresses to provide contact details? tel: URIs can extend contact to voice calls, and can integrate with directory systems that use the E.164 standard for number formatting.

Incorrectly formatted phone number on Microsoft's websiteSadly, I know of at least one large IT services company that mandates the +44 (0) xxxxxxxxxx format for its directory updates (which is confusing to computers, as they will dial the +44 and the 0, rather than substituting one for the other) and even Microsoft’s own contact pages have an incorrect number which not only includes the UK (44) code in front of a full 11-digit number (including the 0 – which won’t work) but prefixes that with (011) which is the US international dialling code but is by no means universal (it’s 00 in the UK, and 0011 in Australia – hence the standardisation on the + symbol).

LG-Nortel IP8540 (Tanjay) deviceThe unified communications experience need not be limited to software either. Whilst Microsoft claim that the desk phone reached an evolutionary dead end some years back (Cisco, Siemens, et al. may disagree), they have also partnered with LG-Nortel, and Polycom to produce IP and USB phones to integrate with Microsoft unified communications software. Codenamed Tanjay and Catalina respectively, these devices either include an Office Communicator client with a touch screen and a fingerprint reader for authentication or extend the Office Communicator desktop experience to include a handset.

Hopefully, this post has helped to illustrate some of the new ways of working that incorporating unified communications technologies into the infrastructure can facilitate. In the next post in this series, I’ll move past the theory and benefits of unified communications and start to look at implementing the technology.