Astrid McClean demonstrated the ECP (Exchange Control Panel) feature that is coming in Exchange Server 2010 where users, groups, contacts, transport rules can be created through web interface.

In this visit to Astrid, she showed me a few of the new management features in Exchange 2010. There are many administrative tasks that can now be done via a browser - no management console install required.
There are several things users can now do for themselves, like creating and managing distribution groups, again, via a browser interface.

Watch it here: http://mschnlnine.vo.llnwd.net/d1/edge/2/8/2/3/ex2...ge.wmv

Hello folks,

This package can help you out to explain some of the Office Communicator, Communications Server Attendant, Live Meeting through a desktop or web application. It is really helpful if you want to improve your end-user knowledge of OCS using self-training. You can also customize the tool to display only the features that you have deployed in your environment.

The Microsoft Unified Communications “How-To” training tool is a Microsoft Silverlight™ 2 application that provides step-by-step instructions for common UC tasks. You can customize the How-To application to your company’s needs based on the UC features you’ve installed. For example, if you have installed all UC features except Communicator Mobile and Communicator Group Chat, you can modify the XML file so that those features and topics do not appear in the interface.

Download it from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?di...1f6d15

The Unified Communications Adoption and Training Kit for 2007 R2 provides guidance and resources for IT Pros, HelpDesk, and Trainers to speed adoption and usage of Unified Communications technologies in the enterprise. The kit includes Planning Checklists, Awareness materials, including Poster, Door Hangers, and E-mail samples, and User Education Materials such as Quick Reference Cards, Flash Cards, and links to Web-based Training.

Get it here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa...ang=en

Hello folks,

Microsoft Press is giving away two e-books about OCS, as follows:

• Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Resource Kit
  You can get it here: http://csna01.libredigital.com/?urws8un4p7
• Programming for Unified Communications
  You can get it here: http://csna01.libredigital.com/?urrs4gt63d

Enjoy it!

Cheers,
Anderson Patricio

If your users are having issues searching Outlook mail after installing Google Apps Sync. This post from Outlook team is for your, as follows:

The Outlook team has recently been made aware of a serious bug / flaw with the recently announced Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, and as a result we wanted to provide the Outlook user community with additional details around this problem as well as information on how to address it.

The installation of the Google Apps Sync plugin disables Outlook’s ability to search any and all of your Outlook data. When a Google Apps user installs the sync plugin for Outlook, the plugin modifies a registry key which disables Windows Desktop Search from indexing and providing search functionality for all Outlook data, not just the Outlook data being synchronized from GMail. Because Outlook search relies upon the indexing performed by Windows Desktop Search, Outlook search functions are broken as a result. It is also important to note that uninstalling the plugin may not fix the issue.

More information: http://blogs.msdn.com/outlook/archive/2009/06/17/g...h.aspx

The communicator Team is still blogging about tips and tricks for OC and the last one was how to set message notifications and use shortcut keys on the communicator, as follows: http://communicatorteam.com/archive/2009/06/09/779.aspx

MSExchangeTeam is blogging about some of the new cool features of Exchange Server 2010, and last week the topic was the Moderation capability.

Moderation in Exchange Server 2010

In past versions of Exchange server, the best way to control mail flow to a distribution group or mailbox was delivery restrictions. Delivery restrictions allow you to reject mail from certain individuals or groups (sometimes referred to as a blacklist), allow mail only from certain individuals or groups (or a whitelist), or a combination of both.

In Exchange Server 2010, moderation enables you to control messages sent to groups and individuals based on the human element: a moderator-not who sent it.

Moderation isn’t limited to groups. Like delivery restrictions, you can also moderate mail sent to individual mailboxes or mail contacts, in the same way as mail sent to distribution groups. If you wanted to moderate mail from a mailbox/contact, you would have to set up a transport rule, where moderation is available as an action. For the rest of this post, I’ll be talking about moderated groups/lists.

Read more at source: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/06/10/451584.aspx

Last Friday the Exchange Server 2007 management pack for SCOM R2 was released.

The Exchange Server 2007 Management Pack is designed to monitor Exchange 2007 key health indicators, collect Exchange component-specific performance counters in one central location, and raise alerts for operator intervention as necessary. By detecting, sending alerts, and automatically responding to critical events, this Management Pack helps indicate, correct, and prevent possible service outages or configuration problems, allowing you to proactively manage Exchange servers and identify issues before they become critical. The Management Pack monitors and provides alerts for automatic notification of events indicating service outages, performance degradation, health monitoring, and centralized management.

Note: This Management Pack requires Operations Manager 2007 R2.

Feature Summary

• A number of synthetic transactions ensure the Exchange servers are available and responding in a timely manner. The synthetic transactions are maintenance-mode aware, so that if the target of a transaction is in maintenance mode, the source will not run the transaction, and not alert unnecessarily.
• This Management Pack includes a Management Pack template that provides a wizard-like interface for configuring synthetic transactions against Outlook Web Access (OWA), Exchange ActiveSync, Web Services, POP3, and IMAP.
• This Management Pack includes a Management Pack template that provides a wizard-like interface for configuring mail flow synthetic transactions between agent-managed Exchange 2007 Mailbox servers.
• This Management Pack provides 30+ reports specific to Exchange 2007 that track availability and performance compared to service level objectives. For the list of reports and for more information about the reports, see the Management Pack Guide.
• All the synthetic transactions in this Management Pack use an Operations Manager 2007 R2 hosting feature for Windows PowerShell technology that provides a performance improvement when running synthetic transactions.
• A significant number of rules and monitors that are not actionable or may be noisy are disabled. Note that many of these rules are still in the Management Pack so that you can enable them if necessary.
• Support for monitoring any number of Exchange organizations using a single Operations Manager 2007 management group.
• Full support for Microsoft clustered configurations. For more details, see the Management Pack Guide.
• Discovery of Exchange 2007 server roles is disabled by default, and no Exchange 2007 monitoring is applied by default. This allows you to discover and monitor your servers gradually, as well as tune the Management Pack as you bring more agent-managed Exchange 2007 servers into the Operations Manager environment.

Link to download it: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa...ang=en

A new white paper about troubleshooting UM in Exchange Server 2007 was released and blogged in the MSExchangeTeam blog.

Here is the white paper: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=153717

Read more at source: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/06/03/451539.aspx

Office Communications Server Team blogged about the COMO (Communicator Mobile) installation process on WM 6.0 and 6.1

Read more at source: http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2009/0...6.aspx