Shep’s Pondering’s

Another fine month in IT, seems the projects are slowing down a little. Well, at least the forward momentum has slowed some. Given last month’s drive to get Unified Collaboration into Vanderbilt, we know that we need to move forward, but we are taking a step back and making sure we have the proper infrastructure in place. The test environment has pretty much fleshed out what will be needed and the enormity of the undertaking, but we are up for it.

AD\Exchange 2007 meetings

This meeting has been a standing Friday meeting to help coordinate the introduction of Exchange 2007 into the current exchange organization. The mantra we are saying is “Do no harm”. We have created a plan to test the routing in our test environment, to ensure that we are not missing any last minute details that might cause “harm”. We already had our systems in the test environment so a lot of our time has been hurry up and wait. The other thing slowing this down is the availability of the medical center CMS staff, there is a lot of issues in the production environment so the test one takes a back seat.

Octel replacement

The never ending project, I keep thinking each month I will be able to say we have some to a decision, and it looks like the team has came to the another decision, and now we are working with the vendors to ensure that we have a solid Hybrid system. Now the last part of this is to finish the recommendation, and present it to upper manangement.

FaxSrv replacement

This project has been put on hold. The server that this is on, has started have a hard drive failure. It is out of warranty, and there is not any momentum on getting a fax server in place to send fax, because the unified Collaboration project is overlapping it.

Unified Communications Pilot

I have spent the most time this month on this project; it has been a lot of fact checking and configuration checking. I have also spent time on trying to get the test OCS server federated with the Production OCS server. The edge configuration has been interesting. I am seeing it trying to go out, but it is never arriving. Not sure where to go now. Validation works with a couple warnings, I have set the host file to have the hostnames for the external nics, so name resolution shouldn’t be the issue, but I am not 1005 certain that isn’t the problem.

Exchange 2007 design\implementation

The test exchange 2007 systems are working pretty well; here are still some minor details we are still working on. One being that the contacts doesn’t show up in IMAP sessions with Entourage. Have to give Kudos to Dan and Tony for figuring out what the issue was, it seems when I created the mail enabled contacts I didn’t mark one of the mail attributes.

The other outstanding issue is that of free/busy right now if you log into OWA you can see the free\busy but the Outlook client still isn’t showing it for 2003 users.

 

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Unified Communications

The Unified Communications project has started to take off. We were commissioned to get 1000 Users on a Production pilot by January 2009. This will take a lot of coordination, and focused effort, but is an obtainable goal. We have set up a weekly meeting with the Medical Center to work through AD and Exchange issues. This is due to the joint and AD environment. We agreed to have the test environment ready to go by the Middle of October, with the production AD ready by the first week of November. Over all, the concerns were mainly about training and co-existence; both of these issues have been addressed.

We met with the UC representative from Microsoft to apply for the Lighthouse program. We looked over our current infrastructure and found that we are not as far off as we thought we would be. One thing that was brought out of the meeting was the redundancy of the mediations server. The Microsoft representative is to supply the answer for that design question.

Exchange Training

Brought a trainer onsite to help transfer skill sets from exchange 2003 to exchange 2007, the first three days was based on labs, and lecture. There were small tid bits that were brought out of what would have to happen in a co-existence phase and user migrations. Mainly that the user object would have to be migrated from a legacy user to a full 2007 user, this will have to be also done for resource rooms to make them true resource account for Exchange 2007.

Octel Replacement

This project has been through many different evaluations. The newest avenue is a co-existence between two voicemail systems, the new system to help do ECP’s and a Unified messaging system to do voice mail. The biggest issue is that Microsoft has made their system hard to co-exist with. So the way to transfer messages between the systems will be via smtp. This is an acceptable solutions so now we are revisiting the solution for a Hybrid.

Fax Server replacement

This project has been on the back burner for a while, I have started the build of a new OS on Fax Server2. This needed to be done to get a New Right Fax installed, and to help clean the OS up from the numerous test projects it has been on. Also the IP was needed to be changed to the .7 network and not the .115.

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