OCS 2007 Speech Server MMC Bug
While at a client site recently we encountered a bug in the Management Console for OCS 2007 Speech Server. You could call it a quirk but it is really a bug. However, there is an easy work around and if you are using best practices for deploying your applications then you won't encounter the bug anyway.
The client wanted us to install Speech Server and set it up to run one of their VXML applications. All went well until we tried to create the application in the MMC. As you can see below the Start Page defaults to the name of the application in a virtual directory named the same as the application. In our case the application was just a test page and it was located in the root of the web site (i.e. //localhost/HelloWord.vxml).
We tried changing the start page and several other things but we could not get around this error -
It seems that the MMC won't allow you to create an application that resides in the root. It has to reside in a virtual directory below the root. The work around is to deploy the application to a virtual and this just makes good since as you should not deploy applications to the root of the web anyway. I don't think the client usually follows this approach but since it was just a test app they simply dropped it in the root.
Microsoft has said that this is not a Speech Server bug as it can handle the page being located in the root but it is a problem with the MMC that won't allow you to create the application that way. I suppose that if you really wanted to deploy your application in the root then you could create the application then just edit the registry to have the correct URL but messing with the registry can be dangerous.