August Monthly Activity Report (MARS)
Octel Replacement
This project is intersecting more and more with the Unified Collaberation Initative, in multiple ways. The push for a unifed environment has driven the project team to engage in discussions with other univeristes on their deployments of Office Communications Server and Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging. Even though this has been one of the four candidates, there seems to be some lack of functionality in the young product. So we are back to discussions of how other vendors will be able to integrate into the Unified Communications environment.
Office Communications Server – Proof of Concept
Seems the snowball has gained momentum. This month there was a huge push to get integration into the IPBX. We have some functionality, using the Dialogic 2060 sip gateway; we are still looking at routing issues that can cause one way voice communications. The issue seems to be a timing problem on the PBX and we are looking for a patch for it.
We now have 41 users on the POC, all at different levels of service, ranging from full Unified Communications, to just instant messaging and presence.
The team produced a small video displaying the agility and spontaneity that can be gained from the use of Unfired Communications. This four minute video has been showed to different groups to gage the interest in such a project. There seems to be a large interest in this technology.
Microsoft Unified Communications – Production Pilot
The other initiative is to get the schema changes into the Production Active Directory. To accomplish this we deployed the schema changes into the MS-Test environment. We also deployed a working OCS Standard server into that environment, to help identify the attributes that will be needed for the development team to automate activations.
After two weeks of life in the MS-test environment, we were able to make the schema changes into the Production Active Directory, there were some hurdles in this deployment, most of them have to do with the locked down security model of the root domain, and being able to add attributes into the child domain using the Enterprise Administration roles.
We have also set up meeting with Microsoft and one of their Partners to help validate our Design, and to gain us entrance into the MS Lighthouse program.