This past weekend one of the awesome pastor’s at my church (@robwegner on twitter) delivered a very powerful message about arrogance. I have to admit this really hit home with me. If you are in the IT field you know exactly what I’m talking about. Information Technology has to be one of the most arrogant filled careers in the market today. After all the world depends on technology right? As IT professionals we tend to make sure everyone...

The UC team at Microsoft has released the Office Communications Server Remote Connectivity Analyzer. The analyzer allows you to verify users can properly connect to your OCS servers remotely. I decided to take the analyzer for a test drive. 1. The connectivity analyzer is accessed using your web browser. Simply type the URL https://www.testocsconnectivity.com 2. After the main page loads choose to perform a Remote Connectivity Test or...

Microsoft has a nice KB article posted describing how to re-arm activation for Windows Server 2008. You can re-arm Windows Server 2008 to provide up to 240 days of usage without being required to activate the server. One example of when you may need to do this is when you have lab/dev servers that you don’t want to waste a MAK activation key. This feature also allows you to extend Eval copies of Windows Server 2008 beyond the initial...

Here are 4 “gotchas” I’ve found when installing OCS 2007 R2 Group Chat. I will expand this list as I find more. 1. Don’t Forget the IIS Scripts – If you are installing Group Chat on Windows Server 2008, be sure to install the IIS Admin Scripts. They are needed as part of the install. 2. Set your SQL Collation – If you have studied the deployment guidance, you know that you have to manually create the Group Chat database. When...

I have come across several good blog posts and KB articles on how to properly setup OCS to support OCS IM on Blackberry devices. In an attempt to not repeat what has already been done, I wanted to post the basics and note some of the gotchas I have seen in this process. 1. Deploy OCS R1 CWA Server BEFORE installing OCS 2007 R2 This is a critical step in the process. As of BES Server 5.0, the Blackberry server requires AJAX Javascript API...