Podcasts

Unified Communications: Exchange Server 2007 SP1, Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Valuable Insights, Best Practices, Lessons, Resources, Top Tips from Most Valulable Professionals: Part 1

Interview with Lee Benjamin: Microsoft Certified Trainer, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, Chairman of Exchange Server Boston and Secretary Global Board of Cluminis:

Interview with David Elfassy: Microsoft Certified Trainer, Microsoft Most Valuable Professional, Microsoft Learning Contributor:

RunAs Radio Podcasts

Excerpts from RunAs Radio podcast series:

Listen to this podcast series that provides meaningful and useful information on capabilities and considerations, planning and designing, deployment and configuration for unified communications solutions in the areas of voice, messaging & presence, and conferencing.

Exchange Server 2007 In Depth (Part 8 of 8): Master Concepts and Optimize Your Server Environment

In this final session of our in-depth series on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, we start with a look at message hygiene. Your e-mail system is constantly being bombarded with unwanted and undesirable messages, and as a messaging administrator, it's your job to clean that up. Next, we discuss messaging policies. With recent accounting scandals and the global terrorism threat, governments and their agencies require organizations to store, and produce on request, pertinent e-mail messages. Exchange Server 2007 provides policies to help you achieve this goal with simple to setup and administer policies. Finally, we explain how messages can be made secure whilst in transit through your organization, between organizations, and across untrusted networks, like the Internet.

In this session, we talk about disaster recovery in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. We discuss how you can plan for disaster recovery by understanding what can go wrong with your servers running Exchange Server and the information they store and handle. We look at server roles, what each server role does, and what happens to your Exchange Server organization when a server role fails. When a disaster occurs, you need to get the server up and running as quickly as possible, so during the session, we also look at the available recovery solutions and tools.

In this session, we cover Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Client Access Services. The overall goal of Client Access Services is to add value to the data in your inbox by letting you access that data from wherever you are. As well as Microsoft Office Outlook, Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access (OWA), and mobile device access, we cover some new client access features introduced in Exchange Server 2007. We look at the various underlying components of Exchange Server 2007 Client Access Services. We explore improvements to calendaring functionality, the new Unified Messaging, and the Exchange Server Web services and programmatic access to messaging data. We conclude the webcast by looking at Exchange Server ActiveSync improvements.

Join this fourth session of our in-depth series on Microsoft Exchange Server to discover how you can use Windows PowerShell to perform day-to-day administrative tasks. In this webcast, we provide an overview of Windows PowerShell commands and describe how to construct them. Next, we demonstrate how you can build more complex scripts in Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. And then we conclude the session with a review of the reporting facilities available in Windows PowerShell.

In this session, we focus on using the new Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Management Console. We start with an overview of the differences between this new interface and the old Exchange System Manager. We then look at how to manage different aspects of the system with the new Console, starting with recipients, and then servers and the organization, using transport rules and so forth. Finally, we spend some time looking at the new Toolbox, which includes the queue viewer and the Best Practice Analyzer.

Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Storage Deep Dive

In this session, we provide advanced training and tools to help you design the right storage architecture for your Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 deployment, with an emphasis on the Mailbox server role. Expand your knowledge of Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) architecture. Learn how to properly balance disk performance and capacity. See the Exchange Server 2007 mailbox storage requirements calculator in action. Understand the Microsoft best practices for designing, testing, and monitoring your storage solution.

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Historically, Microsoft Exchange Server routing was designed to enable mail delivery over early point-to-point networks using discrete next-hop solutions and had evolved little to take advantage of the advancements in network technologies. Join this session to learn how mail routing works in the Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 environment using IP networks and Active Directory site topologies. Discover how Exchange Server 2007 and Exchange Server 200x mailflow interoperability works. Hear about recommended topology and deployment best practices. We also explain how administrators can maintain their network by adjusting spam and virus settings and implementing the appropriate security policies and we examine how users can use simple and familiar interfaces to recover junk e-mail and apply message classifications.

In this episode there is a talk with Greg Patchev (IT Manager from Gerrie Electric) and Andy Papadopoulos (president of Legendcorp) on how they came about deploying a Microsoft based Unified Communications solution to replace an end of life PBX system for 17 offices. At first they were only looking for a collaboration / presence solution, but they soon discovered that Office Communication Server 2007 met most of their needs without having to introduce more complexity to their IT environment by going with one of the typical VoIP PBX vendor solutions. Now that they are fully deployed, they are already positioning themselves to take advantage of Office Communications Server 2007 R2.

Part 2 of 6 on new OCS features! Renee Lo is definitely the gadget girl of the OCS Product Managers that I met with - a quick look around her office showed the latest slick HTC Smartphone, a Roundtable and big video conferencing TV. Why does she need all that stuff? She's looks after the conferencing features in OCS, and in this interview she gave me a tour of some of the new features. Like the ability to start a conference on your cell phone, then seamlessly move it to your office phone when you get in. She showed the new video conferencing performance, and the ability to change resolutions on the fly during a video conference. She also spent some time at the whiteboard drawing out the OCS architecture, showing how your connection, via corp LAN, pots, internet/etc., works, and the workflow of a con call initiated in OCS. Cool stuff!

Part 4 in a series. Who? Ashima Singhal and Bob Serr. What? Group Chat - new functionality coming in OCS 2007 R2. Once I saw it, I got it. Group Chat gives you the ability to set up multiple chat rooms, and subscribe to those rooms. You can set up key word notifiers to let you know when certain topics come up. All chat transcripts are archived and indexed, so you can go back and search for previous discussions. All this, plus a lot more. Bob and Ashima give a great demo of all the things you can do with Group Chat.

Christian Aguilera is an IT consultant for Ultragestion in Santiago Chile. In this session, he talks about how their Unified Communications deployment, including OCS 2007, was so successful in their division of the company; it's being rolled out to the entire company across multiple countries. He talks a little about the infrastructure, the challenges they faced, and changing user behavior around how calls are handled.

How OCS 2007 solved environmental challenges and created new customer experiences

Brepols Publishers, a small Belgium company of 30 employees has deployed Office Communications Server 2007. Wim Borgers explains in this session how OCS 2007 helped them overcome the following challenges:

- Be environmentally friendly and implement a modern phone solution that is compatible with buildings from the 16th century, protected by the UNESCO.

- Create exceptional user experience routing incoming calls to different Exchange 2007 auto-attendant based on source number identification.

- Have a robust solution ready for the future of enterprise communications.

How Microsoft IT Deployed Live Meeting Service Portal

In this session you will learn how Microsoft is delivering on the Software + Service vision by integrating server-based technology with a hosted service. Using Live Meeting Service Portal as an example, you will learn how Microsoft IT handles Active Directory, security, and other issues related to deploying applications in the cloud.

Microsoft Exchange Online is the messaging component of the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) from Microsoft Online Services. In this webcast, we explore the application capabilities of Exchange Online, including steps for configuring and managing the service, such as adding custom domains, configuring for external relay, provisioning mailboxes, creating distribution lists, and adding contacts.

The Business Productivity Online (BPO) Suite from Microsoft Online Services includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Exchange Hosted Filtering, enterprise-class software delivered as a subscription service, hosted by Microsoft, and sold with partners. In this session, we introduce the Microsoft Online Administration Center (MOAC) and the process for setting up and on-boarding an organization to the BPO Suite.

In this webcast, we demonstrate coexistence and migration tools and strategies for Microsoft Online Services. These tools help organizations synchronize their on-premise Active Directory forest with the Microsoft Online Service directory structure in the cloud, migrate mailboxes from on-premise mail servers to Microsoft Exchange Online, and operate their on-premise Active Directory forest and Exchange Servers in coexistence with their Microsoft Online Services deployment.