Microsoft Office Communications Server

Welcome to the Dell TechCenter page for Microsoft® Office Communications Server (OCS) and Office Communications Server R2. My name is Akshai Parthasarathy. I am one of the Systems Engineers in the End to End Solutions Team. My colleagues and I study Office Communications Server in order to develop sizing guidelines for your enterprise messaging infrastructure and also produce collateral such as white papers and magazine articles. With Unified Communications enabled through Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging, you can seamlessly allow instant messaging and presence, Web conferencing, audio/video communication, and e-mails and faxes to be routed to your mobile workstation. This means that you have connectivity to reach anyone at any time using a single computing and communication device. If you choose, you can also use Office Communicator Mobile for Windows Mobile phones to have access to your colleagues when you're away from the office. Imagine leveraging your internal VoIP system to make calls globally. Say you have your IT call center in Bangalore, India, and your operations in Austin, Texas. First, you can use Microsoft OCS R2's Response Groups feature to implement the call-center functionality at Bangalore. Second, using enterprise voice, all the internal calls will be seamlessly routed through your OCS infrastructure without ever reaching the phone line. This means cost savings for every single long-distance call made within your enterprise. You can also integrate your Outlook calendar with Live Meetings hosted within your enterprise infrastructure. If you're in the Austin area and would like to consider being shown a demo of Microsoft OCS on Dell, please don't hesitate to send me a message. Dell UC Solutions Microsoft UC Landing Page

Welcome to the Dell TechCenter page for Microsoft® Office Communications Server (OCS) and Office Communications Server R2. My name is Akshai Parthasarathy. I am one of the Systems Engineers in the End to End Solutions Team. My colleagues and I study Office Communications Server in order to develop sizing guidelines for your enterprise messaging infrastructure and also produce collateral such as white papers and magazine articles.

With Unified Communications enabled through Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging, you can seamlessly allow instant messaging and presence, Web conferencing, audio/video communication, and e-mails and faxes to be routed to your mobile workstation. This means that you have connectivity to reach anyone at any time using a single computing and communication device. If you choose, you can also use Office Communicator Mobile for Windows Mobile phones to have access to your colleagues when you're away from the office.

Imagine leveraging your internal VoIP system to make calls globally. Say you have your IT call center in Bangalore, India, and your operations in Austin, Texas. First, you can use Microsoft OCS R2's Response Groups feature to implement the call-center functionality at Bangalore. Second, using enterprise voice, all the internal calls will be seamlessly routed through your OCS infrastructure without ever reaching the phone line. This means cost savings for every single long-distance call made within your enterprise. You can also integrate your Outlook calendar with Live Meetings hosted within your enterprise infrastructure.

If you're in the Austin area and would like to consider being shown a demo of Microsoft OCS on Dell, please don't hesitate to send me a message.

Dell UC Solutions

Microsoft UC Landing Page

Unified Communications Advisor Tool

The Unified Communications Advisor Tool can be used for sizing guidance. It provides detailed information for your Dell hardware needs after you answer a series of questions.

OCS R2 White Papers

Load Balancing for OCS 2007 R2: Do you have a large Unified Communications deployment? Do you want highly available communications in your enterprise? Consider leveraging the Dell-F5 OCS R2 solution for your deployment.

This white paper addresses the topic of load balancing of OCS R2 Enterprise Edition configurations. These are typically for Highly Available OCS R2 servers with greater than 5,000 users.

To support larger deployments of Microsoft Unified Communications and for production purposes, it is recommended that you set up a hardware load-balancer for scalability and high availability of the Edge server, Front-End server pool, Director and Communicator Web Access server. For the scalability of other server roles, Microsoft Network Load Balancer (NLB) can be used, if required. This white paper describes the OCS R2 infrastructure components and how they can be effectively scaled for enterprises. As an example, F5 Networks' BIG-IP® Local Traffic Manager (LTM) in an OCS R2 environment is presented to illustrate best practices for configuration and hardware load balancing.

SIP Trunking for OCS 2007 R2: Do you want to utilize all the capabilities of Unified Communications and have connectivity to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) without using a PBX? SIP Trunking is your answer.

SIP Trunking technology offers a cost-effective means of voice communication by offloading the Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) integration requirements of PSTN to an SIP service provider without a loss of end-user functionality when compared with traditional TDM-based deployment. OCS 2007 R2 is configured with dial plans that achieve the desired level of internal and external routing. It uses a defined set of transport protocols for SIP signaling and media traffic.

OCS White Papers

High Availability for Enterprise Voice in OCS 2007: This white paper addresses the use of hardware load balancers for the Enterprise Voice component in an OCS 2007 deployment. This white paper also explores Basic, Hybrid, and Advanced Media Gateways.

Implementing Live Meeting with OCS 2007: Wondered about the primary advantage of OCS for Web conferencing? This white paper explores on-premise Web conferencing, i.e., conferences hosted within servers in your enterprise, instead of by a third party.

Live Meeting allows users in your enterprise to collaborate using whiteboards, shared notes, polling, questions manager, and seating charts with mood indicators for Web conferencing, audio-video conferencing, and application sharing. Consider using advanced IM, enhanced presence, and enterprise voice features in a Live Meeting session hosted on-premise. At the end of this article, a comparison of an on-premise conferencing solution vs. Live Meeting as a service offering is provided.

Building Highly Available Communications Infrastructure with OCS 2007: Learn about the differences between OCS 2007 Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition in Consolidated and Expanded Configuration. Explore how your enterprise can make the Front-End, Back-End SQL database, Edge, and Archiving servers highly available.

Dell Power Solutions Article

F5 Load Balancing for Microsoft OCS R2: This article explores the use of F5's BIG-IP LTM to enable high availability and scalability for your enterprise.

OS and Applications