November Monthly Activity Report (mars)
AD Meetings
These meetings are still being productive. We have come up with different scenarios with the Exchange 2007 Schema Changes, and even found dependencies that we might not have seen other wise.
The big dependency is that there has to be a GC in the root domain, even if their will never be email accounts in it. This is largely due to the Universal security groups that Exchange 2007 is based upon.
Octel Replacement
No change this month; most meetings were canceled due to members not being present.
Fax server Project
This project has been put on hold. I have turned of the Faxsrv1 equipment and have started to reclaim the FaxSrv2 equipment. We will be building this out with the Windows 2008 standard server operating system.
Unified Communications Pilot
We have started using the DID lines for communications with the outside world. Some team members have seen the usefulness of having the communicator tied into the phone system. It allows them to have the head set on, that way their hands are free to troubleshoot with tech support.
The other big news is that partner support has started using the Communicator software. This has allowed partner support to be able to familiarize themselves with the product and the idiosynchrocies that come along with it. When we go live in Feburary with the full product offering they will be ready to support any issue.
Exchange 2007 design\implementation
There has been a lot of movement on the project. All the hardware has been built and ready to deploy. A total of 4 virtual machines have been built and prepped for installation.
We have procured a subnet, and created a new AD Site, and have it behind a firewall. The AD team has deployed the DC’s dedicated for this site. We are working with the security team to get the proper firewall rules in place.
The delay in this project is the schema changes and the dependency of having a GC in the root site. The decision to build a new DC and have it in the new AD site has been made to help reduce the amount of replication traffic and latency times.