http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=29366ba5-498f-4d21-bc3e-0b4e8ba58fb1

• You have an existing Windows Server 2003 x64 forest.
• Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 or Microsoft Office Live Communications Server 2005 Service Pack 1 (SP1) is installed on a supported operating system.
• You upgrade a domain controller in the forest to the Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 edition operating system.

In this scenario, Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Office Communications Server 2007 or Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 does not work correctly. For example, some parts of the Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Office Communications Server 2007 or Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 user interface are not visible.

Additionally, you cannot add new Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Office Communications Server 2007, or Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 servers to new pools or existing pools in the forest.

CAUSE

These problems occur if the Active Directory service is upgraded to Active Direc…

To fix this problem, rerun the deployment of Forest Prep for Office Communicatio…

To fix this problem, rerun the deployment of Forest Prep for Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Office Communications Server 2007 or Live Communications Server 2005. Forest Prep prepares the Windows Server 2008 R2 forest for the installation of Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Office Communications Server 2007 or Live Communications Server 2005.You can also use the Lcscmd.exe command-line tool to prepare the Windows Server 2008 R2 forest for the installation of Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Office Communications Server 2007 or Live Communications Server 2005. To prepare the forest by using the Lcscmd.exe command-line tool, open a command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:

Lcscmd.exe /forest /action:ForestPrep

LcsCmd.exe /forest /action:CheckForestPrepState

  2.  Will i be able to join also audio and video through the web browser using the local PC resources or just dial in conference ?
    >>We can join audio and video through the web browser using the local PC resources. It’s true that Wave 14 web client is implemented by SliverLight.

Web client and touchtone interfaces

Web client:

You will allow attendees to join meetings from a Web Client; the web client will allow them to share contents with meeting participants and collaborate effectively during the meeting.

• Virtualization of specific Communications Server roles
• SQL, Exchange, and AD virtualization where appropriate
• Hyper-V R2 (not R1) and VMWare
• Client virtualization (except Audio / video) – use IP phone

 What’s not supported?

• Branch office / gateway only / mediation server + gateway
• Standard edition servers (already a single box)
• Live Migration of Communications Server VMs

It goes with saying that you need to do appropriate scaling of your virtualized environment.  The challenges with oversubscription that impact some companies will impact voice even more, so its very important to do appropriate planning of your virtual resources

http://blog.concurrency.com/unified-communications/virtualization-of-communications-server-wave-14-really/

Thanks to a product from NET called SmartSIP (originally created by Evangelyze and acquired by NET) the answer is yes!  SmartSIP is a server based app that allows you to register SIP phones to it, and then proxies that registration back to OCS so the SIP phone can act as an OCS endpoint.

This type of functionality is important on many levels.  First of all it gives you a low-cost option (less than 6 Tanjays for the server license) for keeping your existing SIP phones around, lowering the cost to implement a UC solution.  Secondly, and this one is more and more important to the environment as each day passes, we get to keep thousands of perfectly good phones out of landfills.

Now that we’ve covered the purpose of this article we can jump right into the architecture.  The first question we have to cover is how SmartSIP works.  SmartSIP is a SIP registrar that allows devices to connect to it, and then connects to OCS on their behalf.  Once registered to OCS, the SIP phone acts as any other OCS voice endpoint, taking advantage of the native functionality within OCS to send calls to all active endpoints.

For this article SmartSIP will be installed on my mediation server, this is a supported configuration for up to 250 seats and was the exact installation method I used during the private beta testing I did with the product.  For larger scale deployments it is best to have it on its own box.  Here is what my lab environment looked like:

We’ll begin with a mediation server that is already functioning and jump right into the SmartSIP install.  Because we are re-arranging a few ports, we’ll want to do this during downtime.  We start out by reconfiguring our listening ports on the mediation server:

After reconfiguring our ports we are ready to start the install:

Nothing earth shattering here, all Next, Next, Finish….

Just like OCS, after we’ve installed the application we need to configure/activate it.  To do this we go to Start>All Programs>Network Equipment Technologies>Active SmartSIP.  Here’s a “Cliff Notes” version of the install, leaving out screens that aren’t necessary:

Here we see our Mediation servers FQDN and List IP Ports, all but the IP for trunks will be automatically populated.

For the internal Dial Plan all fields are populated; notice the 1-555 is in use.  This prefix is used by SmartSIP to identify and route traffic.  It is necessary to leave this as-is so SmartSIP will function properly.

Next we can set our OCS Pool and our server FQDN Alias.  It is important that the certificate for your mediation server includes this as a SAN field in the cert.  In this example “smartip.ocsguy.local” should be an A record pointing to the data network IP of the Mediation/SmartSIP server and an entry in the Subject Alternate Name field in the certificate.

Next we enter in the service account information:

And now we complete activation:

Once activation is complete we are going to utilize the “Telephone number” and “IP Phone” fields in AD.  We’ll start with the Telephone number field.  This will be populated with a unique extension.  In this example I will use the last 3 digits of the users DID, this information is only utilized by SmartSIP and isn’t seen by the client directly.

Now we get the MAC address from the user’s phone and assign it to them in AD:

Although we see “smartsip.local” in the above screen shot, there is no DNS resolution required, this is for SmartSIP’s internal use only, you won’t need to create a zone for it.

Now we set option 066 for TFTP in our environment to point to the SmartSIP server, boot the phone and start making calls.

This article was written utilizing an early release version of the code so your install screens and possibly install steps might be slightly different.  If you run into any issues, the quickest fix is to contact NET’s incredibly helpful support staff.

Based on above information, we suspect that the ABS download link caused our issue, for we can see that if we don’t install update KB978564, MOC can find the right URL of downloading ABS files; however, if we install update KB978564, MOC cannot find the right link, so we cannot even see the download behavior.

Please note that for network performance consideration, MOC won’t download ABS file as soon as MOC starts, there will be a random delay for Address book download up to 60 minutes. To immediate download address book, we can install update KB972403.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/969695

At the same time, we can modify this registry key on clients, so that client will not use delta file, instead, MOC will download address book directly without any random delay.

Please check above information and then test if we still have this issue, if you have anything unclear, please feel free to let me know.

I have implemented OCS 2007 R2 Edition Enterprise Front End running on windows 2008, connected to SQL 2008 Backend Server which is also running on windows 2008. The front End is using a file share which is running on windows 2008 too.

I received a Tanjay phone so I had to do the normal steps of updating the firmware to make it work with the R2 , I had a look for sure at the Rui Silva link which really explains in details how the update process goes.

According to the Microsoft document and all blogs you have to do the following before you plug the phone:

• Create an A record in your DNS with ucupdates-r2.<DNS domain name and point it to your front end server IP or the pool IP
• Make sure that your domain name is provided into the DHCP scope options 119 and 015
• Download the latest firmware version, (3.5.6907.0). The downloaded file is a self-extracting executable that contains a .cab archive with all the supported phones.
• From the Front end server, run the Device Update Service Management Console: open the OCS R2 Management Console, right click the pool and select Device Updater. From the Tools menu, click Upload .cab File, navigate to the .cab file that you want to upload, and then click Open.
• After the update file is uploaded ,the corresponding firmware can be approved for all devices in the organization by selecting it and then clicking Approve
• Plug the phone and leave it even without sign in and it will take IP from the DHCP and then asks the DHCP for the Domain name provided in the scope options and after it does that it will go to the DNS and asks for the record ucupdates-r2 under that domain name it received and then it will know from which OCS it should get its updates.
• If the version of the device is less than 1.0.522.98 ( which is my case ), it will first get updated to an interim build (1.0.522.103) that comes with OCS 2007 R2. This means that, in this case, 2 upgrade cycles are necessary before the device gets the approved/pending build.

Till now all things sounds normal and fine for me and I did all that by the book , however I found that I am not able to take the updates and I am getting on the phone update error (0x2ee7/0) . After some searching I found that this error means “12007 ERROR_INTERNET_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED The server name could not be resolved

Hmmm, Interesting …why would it say so?!!!, ok then I did some more troubleshooting

• On the Front end I Confirmed that a Virtual Directory named OCInterim is created under the DeviceUpdateFiles_Int and DeviceUpdateFiles_Ext folders in IIS. This folder contains the interim version (1.0.522.103) necessary for devices that are currently with version 1.0.522.98 or lower.
• I made sure that all these directories doesn’t require SSL , I went to the IIS 7 and clicked on the virtual directories then SSL and made sure that the option require SSL option is not checked
• I tried to Open a browser and navigate to the URL that contains the update (for example http://ocs.demo.local/DeviceUpdateFiles_Int/UCPhone/LG-Nortel/IP8540/A/ENU/ 3.5.6907.0/CPE/CPE.nbt). I was able to download the CPE.nbt file. A common cause of problems for the Enterprise version has to do with permissions in the shared updates folder. If that’s the case, you’ll get a 500 HTTP error in the IIS log, but in my case it was fine.
• As I was trying to update a really old version of the software, I made sure that’s not blocked by the Client Version Filter. Using the OCS Management Console, right click the pool name, select Filtering Tools and then Client Version Filter. Edit the OCPhone field to allow rather than block.
• I used wbemtest on the Front end server and I looked for the string MSFT_SIPUpdatesServerSetting , navigated to InternalUpdatesDownloadURL and InternalUpdatesStoreURL . They were NULL so I thought that was the problem and I edited the entry to include this InternalUpdatesDownloadURL: https://FQDN-front-end/RequestHandler/ucdevice.upx InternalUpdatesStoreURL: http://FQDN-front-end/DeviceUpdateFiles_Int

I was sooo sure it will work and the phone will take the updates but Naaaa , it just kept giving me the same stupid error .

To make long story short, here is what I have tried and it solved my problem , I configured WINS with a new record named UCUPDATES pointing to the front end.

Yes WINS and UCUPDATES not UCUPDATES-R2, this has nothing to do with the DNS A record but in the end it appeared that the phone was too old to communicate well with the DNS and specially that it was not running R2 framework then how would it understand the DNS A record of UCUPDATES-R2 !!!

Once I did that and restarted the Phone, the error is gone and in 3 minutes I found it restarting for the first time and after another 3 minutes it restarted for the Second time and here it is running the latest R2 framework.

You can make the Microsoft Office Communicator window or the Conversation window always appear on top of other windows without necessarily making it the active window.

To make Communicator windows always visible

• Do one of the following:
  • In the Microsoft Office Communicator window, click View, and then click Always on Top.
  • In the Conversation window, click the Tools menu, and then click Always on Top.

You can download ServerUpdateInstaller.exe here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b3b02475-150c-41fa-844a-c10a517040f4

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=b3b02475-150c-41fa-844a-c10a517040f4

I would strongly recommend making sure this patch is defiantly installed on your CWA server, it certainly resolved the presence and 504 error for me.

I have checked my deployment notes and I also peformed the following as per http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982021/en-us?p=1

1. Installed the hotfix as described in KB 975858

2. Performed the following process as per KB 982021:

1. Start secpol.msc on a Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system server.
2. Click to select Local Policies and then click Security Options node.
3. Make sure that the following values of the policies are set to “No Minimum.”
   • Network Security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP based (including secure RPC)
   • Network Security: Minimum session security for NTLM SSP based (including secure RPC) servers