Communicator Mobile is now Available

Microsoft just released the new version of Office Communicator Mobile or CoMo. CoMo runs on 2003 SE and v5 versions of Smartphone and Pocket PC. As a beta tester, I quickly learned that getting CoMo working is not as easy as installing the application. You have to install the correct certificate. Installing the certificate is different for each phone. Microsoft has made available several deployment and planning guides. I suggest reading through these before deployment.

I Am Now a LCS Microsoft MVP

I am happy to announce that Microsoft has awarded me the Microsoft MVP award for Live Communications Server. I want to thank the person/people who nominated me and provided input to this award. My goal is to continue providing the same level of contribution to the Microsoft communities in the area of real-time collaboration. These days my time is split between the RTC products (LCS, Live Meeting) and Office 2007 RDP programs. I hope to contribute more to the SharePoint communities starting with the beta newsgroups. I look forward to meeting the MVP community.

Eventually, my bio will appear on the MVPs Awardees web site.

MVP ID - 33624

AJAX SDK for Communicator Web Access Available

Yesterday Microsoft released the AJAX SDK which allows developers to build pure web applications that interface with LCS. Effectively, this allows corporations to take advantage of the presence gumdrop and dropdown menu that can be seen in Office 2003 client applications and SharePoint.

SharePoint 2007 in October?

I know this is not news to the well connected, but after the recent announcement on the delay of Office and Vista, I thought this CNET article was interesting. CNET is stating Jeff Raikes is still committed to delivering Office 2007 (includes Office SharePoint Server) in October of this year. The consumer business has to wait until Vista is released in January.

http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-6054088.html?part=rss&tag=6054088&subj=news

I was in Redmond this week attending Office Developer Conference 2006 where Steve Sinofsky co-presented with Bill Gates as keynote. Steve spoke as if he was leading the Office team. Ironic that he was walking around the conference knowing the next day he would be announced as taking over the Vista group. I didn't even hear a whisper before the announcement. I guess I'm just a small IT fish in a big Microsoft ocean.

Notes from Office Developer Conference 2006 Part 1

Today was the last day of the Office Developers Conference 2006 which covered mainly the next version of Office - Office 2007. I will comment on what I learned from sessions in a future post but want to comment on an Ask the Expert's lunch session with Gurdeep Singh Pall. Gurdeep is the Corporate VP of the new Unified Communications Group. With the conference not under NDA, I can share what Gurdeep had to say.

Gurdeep talked about Real-time collaboration and focused on Communicator and LCS. He even talked about the next version of Communicator and LCS. He gave us a couple statistical and personal tidbits I found interesting including:

• 7 out of 10 phone calls at work go to voicemail.
• The LCS growth trajectory is higher than Exchange.
• Microsoft's RTC investment is double that of the next version of Exchange
• Sales teams don't know how to sell the value of telephony because they are never in the office having that need.
• Calling people on a cell phone is an intrusive and many times inappropriate action. For example a sales person could be in an important meeting with a customer and gets interrupted by a phone call. Better presence functionality will alleviate that issue.

Gurdeep discussed how a user will be able to start an IM thread from an email using embedded presence. This can be done in Office 2003. In the new version, when you use the "send to email" function of the next Communicator, metadata will be added to the IM history thread email that will tie it back to the email thread. Fantastic.

He spent alot of time on AJAX that will allow developers to add the presence gumdrop to .Net applications and web applications without requiring office or communicator to be installed locally. The future version of LCS will provide each LCS user their own "presence document". This is an XML file where the user can ACL their presence effectively allowing the user to show different levels of presence to different contacts. There were 2 other sessions on RTC and Office 2007. I hope to share that information in a future posting.

Office Communicator Issues with Vista Feb CTP

Somebody was nice to enough to respond to a call for help on Blogcastrepository regarding issues with Office Communicator installing on the latest build of Vista.

The "hack" requires disabling User Account Protection (UAP) which seems to be causing quite a ruckus in installing applications on Vista. I have pasted the meat of the solution below for convenience.

1. Press WinKey (the flag key on your keyboard) + R and type secpol.msc. (Without the quotes).
2. If asked to permit Microsoft Management Console to run, allow it.
3. In the Local Security Settings window, in the left hand pane, navigate to Security Settings, Local Policies, Security Options.
4. In the pane to the right, scroll all the way to the bottom.
   Set the first two User Account Protection items to No Prompt, and Disabled on the remaining three items.
5. Close the Microsoft Management Console (MMC), and if you are asked to save the settings for Console1, press No.
6. Reboot or log off and log back in to enforce the new settings; or alternatively open an elevated Command Prompt and type gpupdate /force (without the quotes), and then press Enter.
   
   We had to reboot the machine as the gpupdate /force did not work for us.

MS to Offer Free VOIP in Mobile Communicator

Interesting article on Bink.nu

http://bink.nu/Article6251.bink

External Download of the Address Book for Communicator

I've run across an interesting behavior with downloading the address book files when logging in outside the network. PSS has confirmed that this is by design so I thought it would be valuable to share with others.

The address book is a set of files created nightly that sit on a file server. A new file is downloaded the first time you run Communicator each day. For details on the Address Book Service, see this link.

When installing ABS, you specify a folder to generate the files. In LCS, you create an entry that is basically a file share path which tells the communicator client where to download the files. To my knowledge, it uses windows authentication. If your machine is in the corporate domain and you are on the internal network, you are logged into both communicator and the file share automatically. There are two logins that occur each time you run communicator. One is for the LCS and one is for the address book share. Internally, you are not prompted. Nice.

It gets interesting when you are outside the firewall or running communicator externally. Because file shares do not resolve externally (VPN does not count as external here), Microsoft provides another way to get the address book files to you. You create an IIS virtual directory on the Enterprise Edition server pointing to the folder containing the files and publish it externally through your reverse proxy/firewall. It must be SSL over basic authentication too.

The documentation states to remove windows authentication on the website but check basic. Based on our IIS knowledge, this guarantees the user will be prompted to authenticate. No automatic windows integrated authentication happening here.

If my machine is in the domain and I leave the office, when I login to Communicator, I am NOT prompted to authenticate to LCS. Communicator uses my cached credentials. However, I still get the login prompt to download the address book files. I created a PSS ticket because I felt that if I use cached credentials, I should get single sign-on behavior although the IIS settings told me it wasn't going to happen. My logic is if Communicator can pass credentials to LCS then why can't it do the same for the ABS? If you cancel on the login prompt, you are still logged into LCS. Now that's confusing! For people whose machines are not members of the domain, you are prompted only once to login to both LCS and ABS which is nice.

This is a long winded way of saying that if you are external, you will be prompted to authenticate to the address book web site.... Unless you set the web site to anonymous

Knowing When PIC is Enabled

LCS Public IM Connectivity is a licensed service Microsoft provides that allows a company's Live Communication Server implementation to federate with the 3 public IM vendors - MSN, Yahoo, and AOL. Company's must purchase licenses from Microsoft and then go through a provisioning process.

At the end of December after we had submitted our online provisioning form we were notified that there was a hiatus in new provisioning through early January. Interestingly, we received an email in mid-January stating that provisioning had been approved. We configured LCS to allow Public IM connectivity. However, our Communicator clients could not add PIC contacts.

Our users who had MSN passport accounts using their corporate email address were sent warning emails that their MSN accounts would no longer work after a specified date. There is a process to convert these passport accounts that allow users to continue to use MSN Messenger with their existing contact lists.

In short, Public IM connectivity began working the day after the email stated the change would take place. This date was not in the provisioning approval email. I am curious to see if anyone else has experienced this scenario.

What this means is that somebody in the IT department may want to create an MSN passport account for messenger using a corporate email address before provisioning so they receive the true enablement date!

Live Meeting Integration with Communicator

If your company uses Microsoft Office Live Meeting you can establish a session via Office Communicator 2005 in one-click. For the other contacts in the chat, they have to make just 2 clicks.

Assuming you have Communicator installed, the first step is to install the latest Live Meeting 2005 Add-in pack.

You are prompted to configure your preferences next. It is important to get the correct URL for you company. Also note that the username and password is for the Microsoft Live Meeting servers. For those of you using Live Meeting Portal, you have to ask your administrator for the password if they do not make it available. I will cover Live Meeting Portal in a future release.

















The final step is to configure the Live Meeting settings to create a new session with an attendee limit higher than 2. This allows you to start a Live Meeting session when you have a IM discussion with more than one person. By default, the session size is 2.

In the Start Menu select Microsoft Office Live Meeting Meet Now Options. Change the Session size to something larger than 2 (e.g. 5). Select OK.









If you want to start a Live Meeting with a contact, right-click on their contact and select More Start Microsoft Office Live Meeting. If you already have a conversation window open with one or more contacts, just select the Live Meeting button at the top.

LCS IM for Blackberry

Handango is offering an entry level IM client for the Blackberry that can connect to LCS and MSN. $45. It looks pretty weak compared to the Mobile Communicator pictures I've seen.

Issue Converting .Net Messenger Accounts for LCS

When implementing LCS 2005 with public IM connectivity, all users who have IM accounts using your corporate domain (e.g. will @corpdomain.com) have to convert their accounts to a Microsoft domain (hotmail.com, messengeruser.com) in order to maintain their contact list when using MSN Messenger. We have ran into issues with this conversion process, escalating to MS, and have a solution, albeit not a good one.

This article provides a straightforward description of why you have to convert and includes a link to quickly convert. You get to choose a new IM account name and MS converts the account in about an hour the article states. Essentially, once the conversion takes place and your contacts login again, their contact for you is converted to the new account. There is no disruption. We have found that sometimes when the person converts and then logs in with the new user account, even a day later, all of their contacts appear offline. Reboots and attempting to login with the corpdomain.com account do not work.

MSN support recommends:

1. Log in to MSN messenger with new account name.
2. Export your contacts to a file (Option in Menus)
3. Delete all your contacts manually
4. Import the contacts file.

We have found this works fine but is not a satisfactory solution if you are converting dozens of accounts and this happens frequently, especially for less technical savvy users. A MS MVP noted that the conversion may take a couple days if ever. It may be quicker just to walk the person through the above steps.

Adding EASI Accounts to Communicator

When implementing LCS 2005 with the public IM connectivity feature, there are a couple extra steps to take to be able to add MSN IM accounts to your Communicator client. First I want to touch on what happens when you implement LCS and MSN IM accounts associated with your corporate domain.

Converting Corpdomain.com Accounts

Some users in your company will inevitably create MSN IM accounts using their work email address (e.g. will@corpdomain.com). Once you implement PIC (public IM connectivity) with LCS for corpdomain.com, users can no longer login to MSN Messgner with their IM account. This is not a big deal if the LCS implementation occurs over a weekend and there is no downtime to the users. The users simply re-add their contacts to the Communicator client and start using this as their IM client. However, the users may want to maintain a separate IM account with all their contacts with no disruption. The users need to convert their corpdomain.com IM accounts to a MS account. The following article provides good instructions on how to convert the IM account to a messengeruser.com or msn.com account. In theory, you wait an hour after conversion and once all your contacts login again, their contacts lists reflect your new account. I have seen sporadic issues with this process which I'll cover in a different entry.

EASI Accounts

EASI accounts are IM/Passport accounts using non-Microsoft owned domains. Until recently, you could not add IM accounts to Communicator that were EASI accounts. There is a good article on issues with EASI accounts and PIC.

Today, Jeremy Buch (Microsoft), responded in a community thread where I posed the question about when EASI accounts would be supported. According to him, they are supported. There is a slight variation when adding a contact with an EASI account. Instead of adding the account as will@ personldomain.com, you add the account as will(personaldomain.com)@msn.com. This applies to adding the account from outside the MSN cloud or from your LCS implementation using Communicator. If you are using MSN Messenger, add the contact using the email address.

SharePoint Indexing Issue

I came across an interesting issue with moving the Indexing role to a new server in a SharePoint farm. I haven't seen anything online to suggest any solutions.

I have a small server farm with separate physical sql server. Due to the timing of availability of the second front-end server hardware, we are building the Index server first. We are enforcing SSL for our Portal. The Portal has been restored from a different environment using the spsbackup. I am able to add the new server to the farm. I am then able to move the Index and Job roles to the new server.

When I navigate to the Portal's searching and indexing page, I see an error message under each section (i.e. content indexes, content sources, search scopes). The error states cannot contact the indexing server and shows the server name of the server assigned the role.


After digging around and reinstalling SharePoint with no fix, I decided to add the default content access service account to the local administrator group. That fixed our issue in the search and indexing screens. We successfully rebuilt the indexes.

Now we were receiving a "path not found error" in the event log as the indexes were not propagating to the front-end server. We added the same service account to the local administrator group on the front-end server and the propagation completed successfully.

MS documentation states to add this service account to the Power Users group. This doesn't seem to be sufficient for our scenario. When I get some free time, I need to figure out if the issue is due to SSL enforcement or the fact the indexes are on a separate machine as the search indexes.

SharePoint Searching CMS Sites Tip

We are replacing a customer's intranet web site with a SharePoint & Content Management Server solution. I encountered an issue when configuring SharePoint to crawl CMS channels and postings.

Environment Background

Before diving into the tip, here is a brief background. SharePoint and CMS are installed on the same front-end servers in the same Default Web Site. That should be enough background. Microsoft states that you install CMS first, followed by SharePoint, and finally the CMS/Sharepoint Connector.

SharePoint's Domination of IIS

SharePoint takes over managing an IIS website when you extend it. If you have any other folders or virtual directories in a website you have to create exclusions in the virtual server settings. The virtual directory in our case is the top level Channel in CMS. There is a fantastic KB article on coexistence of CMS and SharePoint on the same web site. In addition to creating an exclusion path, you have to go into your excluded CMS virtual directory in IIS and remove the custom HTTP SharePoint Header. What we found is that SharePoint and CMS coexist fine without removing the Header.... except for Search.

Configuring Search

There is documentation all over the web to configure SharePoint to crawl CMS. We were able to get SharePoint to index the channels but not the CMS postings (web pages).

TIP: After you create a virtual directory in a SharePoint managed web site, you have to remove the SharePoint HTTP header. That's right. SharePoint monitors the IIS web site and stamps anything new with a custom HTTP header.

On our project, the infrastructure person configured the environment and then the developer created the top level channel and began developing the templates within the channels. It was a timing issue. I hope this saves somebody several hours of troubleshooting.

By the way, the Contoso Virtual Machine has the same issue. MS forgot to remove the http header for each of the Woodgrove sample sites. Ironically the CMSConnector sample site in the same IIS web site is indexed because the header has been removed.

SharePoint Portal 2003 SP 2 Released

I was somewhat surprised to see Service Pack 2 for SharePoint 2003 was released. Now SharePoint Portal implementations can take advantage of the recently released WSS SP2 enhancements.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=171dc9a7-b4ba-4759-bd64-6b7d851a97ef&displaylang=en

Welcome - My First Post

This is my first post. I should start off by explaining what I do for a living and why I'm spending time on this blog.

I've spent the better part of 7 years in IT consulting. The last 5 years have been spent working strictly in the Microsoft arena. I have been working on teams helping enterprise customers solve their business problems leveraging Microsoft technology. My experience includes Active Directory migrations and implementations, Exchange upgrades, .Net Application Development Infrastructure rollouts and support, Data Center management, SharePoint Portal 2001 and 2003, CMS, and finally LCS 2005.

I currently work for PointBridge Solutions who happened to win Microsoft Partner of the Year this year for Advanced Infrastructure Solutions. I had nothing to do with it, but I can't still gloat. I'm part of a Practice that focuses on anything Information Worker or Collaboration. Though most of the practice focuses on development, I am an infrastructure guy. I do have some PeopleSoft development experience that I leave off the resume.

I play two roles which I believe could provide some interesting information for others to read about. First, I'm a consultant that delivers technical solutions for our customers. With the complex challenges our customers face, I'm bound to run across a technical challenge worth sharing. Secondly, I work in the Engagement Manager capacity on a smaller basis which involves making sure our customers are happy and that we are delivering quality solutions.

My goal is to have this blog be a diary of experiences delivering on Microsoft's Information Worker vision. Entries will range from deep technical to philosophical and yes.... managerial. Enjoy.