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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.
Comments (4)
Feb 08, 2008
Anonymous says:
Cris What about the "white boarding" and "application sharing" features, have y...Cris
What about the "white boarding" and "application sharing" features, have you found ways to make these work?
Feb 20, 2008
Anonymous says:
Hi Chris, any updates on this subject? I'm about to start studying an OCS 2007...Hi Chris,
any updates on this subject?
I'm about to start studying an OCS 2007 deployement in a huge Citrix environment and would like to get your feedback.
Cheers,
Apr 17, 2008
Cris Lau says:
Ok.. a quick update.... I am really impressed by the high level of interest...Ok.. a quick update.... I am really impressed by the high level of interest OCS 2007 with XenApp - this blog averages over 60 view per day. Wow! I also want to thank those emailed me inquiring OCS 2007 with XenApp. Even better yet, a few customers wrote that they have already rolled out pilots of OCS 2007 with XenApp. A couple of customers did report the IM Presence as acting somewhat flaky over XenApp. It was reported that if one user goes to "away", then other users will also inherit the "away" status in the Office Communicator. Another customer reported the Presence status changing randomly for users. As one customer put it...kind of reduce the usefulness of presence". And he is right.
Well, as always, it's great to hear & learn from our customers. Keep the emails and comments coming. I'll report back when I gather more new information.
Cris
Jan 19, 2009
Anonymous says:
however, I found user can talk in text message in OCS 2007, but cannot generate ...however, I found user can talk in text message in OCS 2007, but cannot generate "GalContacts.db" in users profile and cause cannot download the contact list in my setup.
I had checked, the XenApp server can access the ABS folder in OCS server via file sharing.
Should there are any setup missing?
Thanks!
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