Confused Amused

Other parts in this series: OCS Installation - Part 1 OCS Installation - Part 2 This should be a short post, we’ll just be finishing up the installation so you can start some OCS 2007 testing internally. I purposely chose a different internal and [...]

Assumed Pre-Existing Environment   This will be the first part of many in showing the steps necessary for standing up an OCS 2007 server. In the examples that follow the internal domain name is ptown.com and the SIP domain, or my external facing address will be confusedamused.com tap-dc-2k3.ptown.com [...]

One of the more useful items from the OCS 2007 Resource Kit book was the extras disc that contained a few Excel worksheets on setting up backups for different types of servers. Using those worksheets I created a script that automates some of the backup process for a standard edition server. I tried to make [...]

One of my pieces of OCS testing involved putting it through the paces of various IM clients other than Office Communicator and seeing what works and what doesn’t work so well. Even though I’ve read several pieces stating that Mac Messenger 6.0.3 was supposed to work with OCS, I cannot find a way to do [...]

One of the more obnoxious pieces of OCS is the fact that there isn’t a dedicated MMC snap-in for the Edge Servers, but instead you have to open the entire Computer Management console. The method below will let you create a simple MMC that only opens the OCS Edge server parts. [...]

Yesterday afternoon I was tinkering with the custom states you can define within Office Communicator 2007 and found actually creating the custom states obnoxiously difficult for an end-user. In an effort to remedy that problem I whipped up an application I’m going to call the Communicator 2007 Custom Presence Tool. Let’s call it a beta [...]

So you want to redirect any client HTTP requests for OWA to the HTTPS version? Easy enough. For our external clients this is fairly simple because you can simply have ISA do the hard work. For the internal clients, which I’ll show here, it requires a little more work. So open up the [...]

The OCS team posted a PowerShell commandlet today that lets you pull out conversations between users and output to an HTML file. I’ll try it out soon, but it has to be much better than the current method of writing your own SQL queries and retrieving some ugly looking code. Here’s the link: http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2008/01/14/69.aspx [...]

On the same subject as the previous post, I ran into some more issues with the integrated authentication on CWA. It worked from any PC except for the CWA server itself. If I tried to sign in from the CWA box I’d get the endless Windows authentication dialogs and it would eventually fail. The solution? [...]

This morning I set about adding a Communicator Web Access (CWA) server to my lab and had a small issue with the integrated Windows authentication piece. Basically, I’d click the sign in button and get a Windows authentication dialog instead of being signed into CWA. Even with valid credentials my login would fail and I’d [...]