New features in OCS 2007 R1

There are new features added in OCS 2007 R1 apart from LCS 2005 and they are –
• On-Premise Web Conferencing
• Enhanced Presence
• Federation Enhancements
• Deployment and Administration Improvements
• On-Premise Web Conferencing

Office Communications Server 2007 introduces the capability for enterprise users both inside and outside the corporate firewall to create and join real-time Web conferences hosted on internal corporate servers. These “on-premise” conferences, or meetings, can be scheduled or unscheduled, and they can include IM, audio, video, slide presentations, and other forms of data collaboration.

Multimedia Capabilities:
OCS 2007 provides rich multimedia capabilities like group IM, audio and video, multiparty audio conferencing. For these it includes 4 servers—
IM Conferencing Server
Web Conferencing Server
A/V Conferencing Server
Telephony Conferencing Server

OCS 2007 also includes multimedia conferencing with external users – For this it includes edge servers to be configured in the perimeter network.

There are 4 main types of multimedia conferencing –
? Group IM
? Data Collaboration
? Audio/Video
? PSTN Connectivity

Group IM
This refers to IM conversation among 3 or more parties. We can send IM to a group and when replying back the IM will be delivered to that group.
We can invite other person to IM when the conversation is happening between 2 members.

Data Collaboration
OCS 2007 Web Conferencing support a rich mix of data collaboration which includes—
Power point Support, Application Sharing, Microsoft Office Document Imaging Support, Web Page, multimedia, snapshots etc.

Audio/Video
OCS 2007 support multi party audio/video support. Users can specify a/v when scheduling a conversation or to an existing IM conversation.

PSTN Connectivity
When a user places a call from an enterprise voice client
1) Server normalizes the number to E.164 format and invokes routing rules based on the location profile and user policy and directs calls to Mediation Server.
2) Mediation Server performs any necessary media transcoding and routes call to IP-PSTN gateway.
3) Gateway, based on topology applies local dialing rules or PBX dialing rules and passes call to the PSTN or PBX.

For Enterprise Voice, this uses 2 protocols –
SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) for Signaling and
RTP (Real Time Protocol) for Voice.

Enhanced Presence
This provides infrastructure to enable client application to publish extended presence information. This infrastructure includes Categories and Containers.
Categories include presence information like status, location and calendar state.
Containers are logical buckets into which clients publish instances of various categories of presence information.

Federation Enhancement

OCS 2007 had made some federation enhancements which include –
Federated Conferencing – Users in federated domains are considered to be authenticated for the purpose of joining on-premise conference.
Support for partners with multiple domain name – Enhanced federation now uses SANs (Subject Alternate Names) in certificate to support enterprise with multiple domain names.

Deployment and Administration Improvements
OCS 2007 has come up with new set of management tools which made administrative and deployment task simpler.

Universal Group Support
OCS 2007 supports the native mode universal groups in the Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 Server operating systems. Members of universal groups can include other groups and accounts from any domain in the domain tree or forest and can be assigned permissions in any domain in the domain tree or forest. For example, it is no longer necessary to add one domain to another in order to enable an administrator to manage both. Eliminating the domain-add requirement also simplifies deployment.
Enhanced in-band provisioning
Office Communications Server 2007 administrators need to be able to customize clients in accordance with the requirements of their particular deployments.
Office Communications Server 2007 uses in-band provisioning to convey the following categories of information to the client:
• User Identity includes display name and e-mail address.
• Server Configuration includes such information as Address Book Service download URLs, group expansion Web Service URLs, console installation URLs, and conference troubleshooting URLs.

Integrated Address Book Server
Address Book Server daily provides global user information to Communicator clients. In Live Communications Server 2005 with SP1, Address Book Server was optional and had to be installed separately from the server. But in OCS 2007 Address Book Server is required and which is installed as part of Standard and Enterprise Edition Setup.

Call Detail Records
Call Detail Records (CDRs) provide a way to collect both IM and meeting data, and generate reports on usage characteristics, which can be used to determine network bandwidth load, employee usage patters, and return on investment. CDRs capture user logons and logoffs, IM conversations, and conference starts and joins.

Support for Globally Routable User Agent URI (GRUU)
OCS 2007 has improved the routing capabilities by introducing support for GRUU technology.
A GRUU uses the following syntax:
sip:ted@contoso.com;opaque=epid:qIIWS2j5AVeD_HxnQdxmlwAA;gruu
The “opaque” parameter makes this URI unique even though the prefix of the URI is still the user address (ted@contoso.com).
In summary, a GRUU is a URI for a specific device whereas ted@contoso.com is a SIP URI that refers to Ted as a user. The Communicator client running on Ted’s laptop will have its own GRUU that allows other applications to route messages specifically to that device.

Conference Protocols Used in OCS 2007
• SIP(Session Initiation Protocol) – This is used for initiating, managing, and terminating sessions between one or more participants.
• HTTP(HyperText Transfer Protocol) – This use in OCS for communication between the focus and conferencing server, downloading address book server updates to clients, and downloading meeting content to users.
• CCCP(Centralized Conference Control Protocol) – A custom protocol for communicating conference creation and control commands from clients to OCS 2007.
• PSOM(Persistent Shared Object Model) – A custom protocol for transporting web conferencing content.
• SRTP(Secure Real-Time Transport Protocol) – This used for securely transporting audio and video content to various media devices.
• RTCP(Real-Time Control Protocol) – This used in conjunction with SRTP to convey information about the signal quality of an audio-video conferencing session to various media devices.

Questions and Answers (FAQ)

1) When we are done with a IM Conference, where is the History stored ?
After the IM Conversation, all the conversation details will be there in “Conversation History” Folder in Microsoft Outlook .

2) When we are doing a Group IM , all the members in the group can receive the message, but can they reply to the same message.
We can go with the Group IM feature, and when the members in the group will receive the message and when replying for the message it will received by all members in the group.
3) We can transfer a file to a single person in the conversation but not to a group.
4) We can have a audio between the 2 members and in a conversation.
5) In OCS 2007 , Presence Information is—
Status, Location, Calendar date, Display Names, Title, mobile phone, home phone, company, meeting location, meeting subject etc.
6) PSTN Connectivity –
In LCS 2005 Front-End Server will connect to CTI(Computer Telephony Interface) and then to PBX to PSTN-gateway and to phone.
In OCS 2007, Mediation server has been introduced. From here it connects to IP-PSTN gateway and there to PSTN to Phone.
Signaling for phone calls coming from the PSTN is converted to SIP by the Media(IP-PSTN) gateway