18 Dec 2007 11:38 AM EST

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

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I have started testing Communicator on CPS and learned that it is not supported by Microsoft on Terminal Server.  I also found that the catalog that OCS uses is stored in the Local Settings/Application Data directory and is typically around 90MB.  This is a problem because you cannot redirect Local Settings and local settings are not part of a roaming profile so this files gets copied down every time the user logs into OCS.

 Not to mention OCS is a resouce hog during startup.   

Posted by Anonymous at Jan 04, 2008 14:29 | Reply To This

When you say Communicator, do you mean the Offfice Communicator client or the Office Communicator server?  I'm trying to find documentation that the Office Communicator client is supported on Terminal Services and I'm finding nothing.

Posted by Anonymous at Jan 15, 2008 16:16 | Reply To This

As Derek described in his post, we succesfully tested the Communicator client in CPS including the Office integration features (outlook presence, etc).   I took a quick look at our test environment looking for any large items in the user's profile and did not find any.

 When you mention that OCS is a resource hog during startup, are you referring to the OCS servers or to the Communicator client?

Note that in a typical OCS deployment using CPS, only the Communicator client would be installed and executed on the CPS server.  In our experience, the Communicator client is light-weight and quick to start.

Posted by Modesto Tabares at Jan 18, 2008 10:14 | Reply To This

I was only speaking of the OCS client.  In our desktop environment the client consumes up to 70% CPU of the laptop for a few minutes during startup.  The file I was refering to that Communicator uses to perform lookup of peaple is called GalContacts.db (85MB in my environment) and is found in %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Communicator\.  I too was able to get the OCS client to work and IM people and have the Outlook presense work, but the fact that the GalContacts.db has to be downloaded everytime if you are using roaming profiles is rediculous.  We have a case open with Microsoft to try to get the location of the GalContacts.db moved or configurable, among other things.

Posted by Anonymous at Jan 23, 2008 16:19 | Reply To This

That does sound like a problem. 

Galcontacts.db is an unholy marriage of your personal Outlook contacts and the OCS Address Book, with some phone normalization thrown in if you are enabled for RCC or Enterprise Voice. The OCS Address Book is pulled nightly from AD by one of your OCS front-end servers, and is downloaded at client startup.

I've got a few hundred contacts in Outlook, and a few hundred OCS users currently enabled in my environment. I've got phone integration going on, so my contacts include telephone contact information. My Galcontacts.db file is 1.5MB in size. You must work for a big company, have a huge number of contacts, or both.

For anyone that is interested in seeing the contents of their Office Communicator address book you can create the following registry key, relaunch Communicator, then click Tools, and click View Received Files to dump it from Communicator. The resulting file will be called Contacts.csv in \My Documents\My Received Files.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Communicator

Dword: DumpContactsToCsvFile

Value= 1

Posted by Anonymous at Apr 15, 2008 21:23 | Reply To This

If I am not mistaken Local Settings are not part of roaming profile. 

Posted by Anonymous at Jan 24, 2008 23:04 | Reply To This

You are not mistaken, Local Settings are not part of the roaming profile and that is why the GalContacts.db have to be downloaded every time. 

Posted by Anonymous at Jan 30, 2008 11:09 | Reply To This

We're piloting OCS2007 now as well.  One major issue i've found is that the communicator user's "status" can be affected by a Privelged access user connecting to the PS Server's desktop via RDP.  If the Administrator's desktop goes inactive, all ICA users running Communicator will show "Inactive". (Activity goes from "Green" to Yellow")  Once the Administrator unlocks his desktop, the communicator's status will go back to Active (Green).  This happens for all users on the the PS server.  Wierd to say the least.  Other than that, adding the custom .adm file for OCS2007 to the GPO will restrict users from accessing features that do not work. 

Server 2003, PS40, Communicator 2007 with patch KB941441 


Posted by John Christian at Feb 12, 2008 17:19 | Reply To This

Update to my previous post....  I've been working with MS on a couple issues including the one described in my previous post.  I'll post again as I get information back.

Posted by John Christian at Mar 06, 2008 20:56 | Reply To This

Microsoft has recently posted an article regarding their support at:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951152/en-us

Posted by Anonymous at Apr 24, 2008 16:24 | Reply To This

Here's the fix for presence awareness when running in a Terminal Server Environment. 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/951662/en

Posted by John Christian at May 01, 2008 08:42 | Reply To This

I have also noticed that through Terminal Server, the current location option is grayed out.  Anyone else experiencing this?

Posted by Anonymous at Jun 27, 2008 12:04 | Reply To This

I need to enable video conferencing to my clients,i have installed Live meeting on Citrix PS4.5 so what i need to do that?

How to map camera and microphone on Citrix?

Posted by Toni Cerkez at Jul 23, 2008 06:18 | Reply To This