I posted a blog earlier this year on running OCS 2007 on XenApp. Since that time, I've received many emails from customers telling me they've started rolling out OCS 2007 via XenApp in either pilot or production environments. Most of these customers are running IM and Presence with integration into office apps. For those who are still not sure about delivering OCS 2007 via XenApp, I have good news. Citrix Consulting Solutions team has documented a best practice guide detailing how to you can deliver Office Communicator with XenApp 4.5. Come download the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Application Delivery Best Practices guide at: http://support.citrix.com/article/ctx118216

A couple months back I posted a blog on running OCS 2007 on XenApp. In it I highlighted a couple of known issues (doesn't support voice or video at this time), but I also posted a feedback received from customers that the user status changes intermittently. E.g., Communicator will change your status to "Away" even if you are online and available. If you have experienced this annoyance, it appears this issue (sporadic presence change) has been addressed in Microsoft's April 30^th update for OCS 2007. You can find more information about this update here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951662/

If you are familiar with Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS) 2007, you probably know OCS 2007 introduces communication and collaborative integration with Microsoft Office and Exchange.  What you may not know is that between 60 - 80% of customers surveyed said they use Presentation Server to deliver Microsoft Outlook and Office apps to their users. And with increasing number of customers putting focus on user communication and collaboration, we needed to see whether we can run OCS 2007 with PS. With help from the Microsoft Unified Communications team late last year, we were actually able to get some good results from our preliminary testing.
The Setup:
Our test bed was quite simple - 3 servers and 3 clients configured as diagramed below. Obviously, your environment probably looks different, but you get the point.

 
  
The Results:
With our setup, we were able to get the following OCS2007 features to work on PS:

• Office Communicator 2007 - the IM client running in PS 
• IM (instant message) - IM'ing with other users on your IM list
• IM Presence - see in real time whether the user is available (online, offline, etc.)
• Microsoft Office integration - IM and presence of a colleague... say, you want to see in Outlook if Jane is online before sending her the email

And while we didn't test the Remote Call Control (RCC) features in OCS 2007 (couldn't get permission to connect to the corp PBX), we believe this feature should work without issues. After all, Presentation Server is simply "rendering" the remote call control interface over ICA (just like any other app) and the calls are handled by the OCS2007, Mediation Gateway and PBX. If anyone out there can try RCC over Presentation Server, and I'd love to get your feedback on this!

More Work Underway:
Of course, it's clear there is more work to do - notice voice and video are missing  from the above list. We tried voice, but that didn't work. We need to figure that one out. Video conferencing is yet another hurdle at this point. Some customers have told me the wider adoption voice and video is still 12 - 18 months out. Do you agree?

In the coming weeks, I'll follow up with more information on the configurations and setup. Hopefully, I'll have time to do a video demo'ing the OCS 2007 features we test with Presentation Server as well. Meanwhile, I'd love to hear about your plans for bringing communication and collaboration to your organization! Submit your comments or shoot me an email!

May 14: Sporadic presence status with OCS and XenApp? Please see my blog on Microsoft's update to address this problem.

We recently conducted some tests to confirm that Office Communications Server 2007 can be delivered via Citrix Presentation Server 4.5. While these are not "official" test results, I thought many of you might appreciate an early look at what we found in case you're considering rolling out OCS 2007.

Office Communications Server, the successor to Microsoft Live Communications Server 2005, is Microsoft's entry in the Unified Communications space. It brings together Voice-over-IP (VoIP), Instant Messaging (IM), audio and video conferencing, and integration with Microsoft Office. OCS includes presence information so you can see at a glance whether someone is available to receive your phone call or instant message.

We didn't test video conferencing. That would require USB webcam support on Presentation Server. Our focus was on the Instant Messaging and Microsoft Office integration features of OCS 2007.

We published the Office Communicator client on Presentation Server and successfully used its Instant Messaging and presence functions. OCS integrates presence information from multiple sources including the Outlook calendar and Out-of-Office Assistant. From an e-mail message in Outlook, you can view the presence information for each addressee and then initiate real-time communications from within the message without switching applications.

Office Communicator can also be used to control a physical telephone set. For example, you can instruct Office Communicator to place a call in your behalf and, leveraging your telephone system, it will ring your phone (office, home, or mobile) and then call the other party and bridge the connections. You can't yet use Office Communicator on Presentation Server as a pure softphone with voice-over-ICA; one of the reasons is that softphones need to open the audio driver more than once (ringtone/busytone, voice) and the current audio driver in PS 4.5 FP1 doesn't support that. (We previewed an enhanced audio driver for softphone support and voice-over-ICA in the Tech Lab at iForum in October and I'll blog on various aspects of voice-over-IP in the new year.)

If you have any experiences running Office Communicator on Presentation Server that you'd like to share, please write a comment on this blog post. And I'll keep you informed as we learn more about delivering Unified Communications via Presentation Server and XenDesktop.

Derek Thorslund
Product Strategist, Multimedia Virtualization