Deploying Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Public Beta Series

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I have run a version of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 since beta 2 and have been itching to share some more product information and hopefully valuable technical information for those working with the product.

There are some customers and partners that have been running this as long as I have and some of this data will be applicable to them however I will be taking an existing LCS 2005 SP1 deployment and installing OCS 2007 into it, no upgrade from prior betas.

So I will create posts in a series and welcome your feedback on my approach. As we near the deployment of the Mediation server I am going to share public resource information for terms and concepts.

My setup uses Virtual Machines because I am not in production and I can get away with for the 1 - 4 users I might use to test functionality. My goal is to setup the following -

The setup of the product will go through phases -

  1. The simplest topology and the most similar to LCS 2005 SP1 will be an internal deployment of an OCS SE server. Get this working and everything builds upon it. Included with this will be our new conferencing technology using the meeting console.
  2. The addition of an Edge Server (no director) which takes the working internal deployment and allows for external users, conferencing, federation and PIC. Federation will be a bonus item due to the need for 2 deployments.
  3. The new voice technology. I am in fact using this today internally, if you call my published phone number it will route to my signed in sip endpoint(s).
  4. Exchange Unified Messaging
  5. The addition of an Audiocodes MP 114 gateway to help simulate a PBX. This is NOT a supported device for customers but for a demo it does not get any cheaper. This will also require the addition of the Mediation Server role.

Bonus setup items -

  1. I will work to try and use the latest Mac Messenger client and for CWA I will also work to test Safari on the Mac and Firefox on a Linux host with Firefox to share the screenshots and experience
  2. F5 BigIP load balancer - yes I have one and if I have enough ram and drive space with this 1 host I will try to add it to this setup, otherwise I will end up with 2 different topologies.
  3. Federation between 2 enterprises.