Shep’s Pondering’s

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.