Day 1 (Intro is here)
At 9am the session begins and we received a nicely articulated overview of Unified Communications (UC) Voice focused on 3 segments of UC:
Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1, Unified Messaging (UM)
Office Communications Server 2007 Voice
Office Communications Server 2007 Conferencing
During the aforementioned segments I learned that the Exchange UM role cannot detect a fax tone of an incoming call, this was left to the IP-Gateway to differentiate the calls and route to the UM where it would renegotiate to T.38. Since the release of SP1 for Exchange 2007 this has changed and the UM role will detect fax tone, but is off by default. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb691398(EXCHG.80).aspx
Unified Messaging doesn't support IPv6 in any version of Exchange 2007. Unfortunately even now with SP1, despite the impressive list of improvements in Exchange 2007 Service Pack 1. This is primarily due to limitations with existing PBX and VoIP standards.
Here is another valuable link that contains information about the improvements included in Exchange 2007 SP1 pertaining to IPv6. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb629624(EXCHG.80).aspx
Labs:
I was quite impressed with the performance of the lab environments, I don’t think we have had any mishaps that I was aware of. From memory each lab consisted of 2 x HP Laptops with approx 3GB of RAM, and a zippy internal drive, AudioCode MP-114 (FXS-FXO) VoIP Gateway, and a Gigabit Switch.
The FXS ports in the VoIP gateway were used to emulate an outbound PSTN connection or PBX etc.. To perform some promiscuous mode network monitoring we used X-Lite Softphone registered to a OnDO Sip Server, this way we could saved us some time by evaluating the SIP traffic without reconfiguring OCS to use TCP rather than TLS.
Next segments were based on:
UC Vision and Deployment Scenario
UM Architecture and Technologies
UM Deployment and Configurations
Next segments were based on:
UM SP1 and SIP
Dial Plans
Troubleshooting
VoIP Gateway selection is critical when planning a deployment for both Exchange 2007 UM and OCS 2007. Careful consideration needs to go into VoIP Gateway selection, and certification should be checked prior to acquisition. Dialogic provides, at present, the only gateway certified for both applications. Looking forward to future devices being available in which can cater for this need.
In formation surrounding these devices and compatibility can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/telephony-advisor.mspx and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb735838.aspx#qualified
This guide is also useful if you need to research a particular type of IP-PBX for compatibilities and/or limitations. It’s hard to state anything factually in a blog about compatibility due to the speed in which these guides are being updated.
Hint: Keep your finger on the pulse of those sites.
Afternoon SIP Protocol Hands-on Labs
SIP and UM Hands-on-Labs
Voice Deployment Scenarios
Four Scenarios
Telephony Interoperability (Gateways and PBXs)
Mediation Server
Day 1 was a ripper looking forward to posting the content about Day 2.
For Day 2 blogs - see here -> Day 2 - Unified Communications (UC) Voice Ignite Program - Voice Design