Shep’s Pondering’s

Exchange 2007 Deployment

The exchange 2007 deployment has started out pretty well, we have moved all of ITS over to the new system. There have been very few issues. One of the largest issues has been with the MAC Entourage client. Once we rolled out Rollup 6, the Entourage client is no longer able to see the contents or folder structure of the mailbox. This is all Entourage clients, even the new beta one.

On the positive side, there have been numerous other clients that have been able to attach to the new Exchange 2007 Systems, including two different versions of Thunderbird, and one version of Alpine. These are all using the IMAP settings, but seem to working as expected.

The next steps are to work through the issues presented by the entourage clients, and then we will continue to retire the VUexchange 2003 systems.

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Deployment

This has been the month for OCS, we have been anticipating the Lighthouse engagement, and the rollout of Office Communication Server 2007 R2 since last October. We have built the infrastructure, 5 physical servers, an Enterprise front end, a SQL Backend, a mediation server, and Edge server, and a Unified Messaging server. This will allow us to implement presence, IM, federation, public Internet connections, voice mail, and remote enterprise phones.

The deployment has been successful; we have normalized our phone numbers to an E164 format, and have the SIP gateway doing the conversion that the PBX is expecting. Learned more about regular expressions while doing this, regular expressions are very robust and powerful once you understand some of the syntax.

We currently have 175 people provisioned on the Office Communications Server.