Search results matching tag 'OCS'

Connecting OCS to the rest of the world

marshallharrison — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 18:26:00 GMT

My friend Ken Stauffer has started a blog series on Connecting OCS to the rest of the world.

I've known Ken since the early days of Speech Server and I'm looking forward to reading his blog series. I have used FreeSWITCH to hook Speech Server up to SIP providers using UDP but I am anxious to see what he has to say about ReSiprocate and Trixbox as I have never used those. I've never tried connecting UDP to OCS so that should be interesting as well.

Followup to my Redmond Trips

marshallharrison — Tue, 18 May 2010 19:33:00 GMT

Well, it’s been two weeks now since the Metro and the Airlift training and I’ve had a chance to play around with Wave 14 and the developer APIs.

As you may know there are two APIs – UCMA 3.0 and the Communicator API. I’ve been begging for over a year for Microsoft to give us the hooks we need and they have done a pretty good job with these APIs. The functionality and extensions that you can add into your business apps is awesome.

I can’t talk much about the APIs but I will list some things that I think you should be learning in order to get ready for them to go public beta.

1. WPF and Silverlight – you will need this to work with the APIs

2. Lambda Expressions – I saw lambda expressions used in lots of the C# code examples.

3. WCF – something that I think everyone should brush up on and I can see how it would help add OCS functionality to your business processes.

4. Windows Workflow – used to build managed code apps that can respond to IM and Voice.

5. VXML – if you are going to develop IVR applications this will come in handy as it is the most portable.

I’ll provide more details as soon as things go public beta. I especially want to address how Speech Server developers will utilize W14 fro IVR applications. There have been some changes and since my real love has always been Speech Server I want to provide direction for all the Speech Server developers that are wondering “Where do I go now?”

UCMA 2.0 Tip: Communications Sequence Activity

ml_ — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:34:19 GMT

I’ve been playing around with the UCMA 2.0 SDK for the last few weeks, mainly in preparation for the upcoming v.next release of Communication Server. For those interested in what comes after Speech Server it is a worthy endeavor to dig into the UCMA. Going forward the UCMA will be the tool we use.

When I first started playing I made one simple mistake that left me scratching my head for longer that I’d like to admit. In an effort to help others avoid my mistake (and to remind me should I forget again):

With the UCMA, all of your activities must live within a Communications Sequence Activity.

With Speech Server the tools automatically provide you with a “parent sequence” in which all your activities live. With the UCMA this isn’t the case; you need to include it in your workflow. When you create a new project it provides this for you, just don’t be like me and think its ok to just delete it….

FTR, the exception I received was:

System.InvalidOperationException: 'Workflow1' does not have a value for Call property. Please specify a name that corresponds to a call in the CommunicationsWorkflowRuntime service

Microsoft Speech Technologies web site now live

marshallharrison — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 03:07:16 GMT

New Microsoft Speech Technologies web site is now live.

Enjoy. I’m off to read all of the content.

GotSpeech on Twitter

marshallharrison — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 20:13:44 GMT

You can now follow the GotSpeech Guy on Twitter. Just use this link and click on Follow - http://twitter.com/gotspeech

I’m finding that I use Twitter a lot for little things concerning Speech Server and OCS. Lots of things happen everyday that are interesting but don’t warrant a large blog post and I find that I’m just tweeting those things and saving my blog posts for more substantial stuff.

Enjoy.

2010 New Year’s Resolutions

marshallharrison — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 22:25:22 GMT

Happy New year everyone!

2009 was a great year for OCS. For how good it was and where we should be going in 2010 see Unified Communications 2009 - A year in review by my friend and fellow OCS MVP Joe Schurman.

It is customary at this time of the year to make predictions and resolutions for the new year. I’m not very good at predicting things so I thought I would list my professional resolutions for 2010. These are the technologies and software that I want to become more proficient at this year.

Silverlight – I think that Silverlight will make a great web based front end for OCS. With it you will be able to provide chats between customers and your tech support staff or your customer service agents. The eLearning modules on GotSpeech are done in Silverlight and it is about time I put some effort into mastering it. The Expression Studio suite of tool sis something that I want to sink myself into.

Powershell – I’ve played around with this some and I love it. I want to learn how to use it to automate OCS and Speech Server tasks. Still need to find a development environment for it that I like and feel comfortable with.

Brekeke PBX- This is something I want to install and learn how to use. I have an 8 port Dialogic Media Gateway in my home lab but I want to be able to setup the lab for direct SIP. First though I need a cheap (read free) SIP provider that I can use.

FreeSWITCH – Same reasons as above except that this is free and will allow small independent developers to setup their own environments without the costs of expensive hardware or software solutions. Many of my readers are using it so I need to know more about it. I’m looking forward to learning from the series that Brian has started on FreeSWITCH. I’m anxiously waiting for part 2.

UCMA 2.0 – This is the future of Speech development and I would like to delve deeper into it. I am convinced that there is going to be a huge need for developers that can enhance, extend and integrate OCS into enterprise level business processes. I would really like to get better at this and I am anxious to get my hands on the next release. I also think there will be a huge market this year for OCS/UCMA developer training. It would be very time consuming to develop OCS training but I think the need is there.

Then there are things like Wave 14 or OCS 2010, Office 2010, Exchange 2010 and Visual Studio 2010 that are just over the horizon. Also, there is WCF, WPF and Linq that I have been avoiding as they don’t fit that well with Speech Server. But with OCS which has a visual interface and the possibility of extending things like Communicator there is so much for me to add to to my tool belt. Its going to be a busy year and I will need to budget my time accordingly.

And lastly I want to blog more and put more time into GotSpeech.Net and GotUC.Net. I want to get out an speak more as well as evangelize all the fascinating things that make up doing Unified Communications the Microsoft way.

Yes, 2010 is looking like a busy year for me.

GotSpeech Consulting looking for developers

marshallharrison — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:40:57 GMT

Things are really starting to take off for GotSpeech Consulting and I am starting to look for some other resources – i.e. Speech Server developers.

So if you are interested in doing some development for GotSpeech Consulting please contact me and/or send me your resume. Most of the need at this point is for Speech Server but there may be some OCS UCMA development and web site work. This is all consulting work and I’m looking for both full and part time developers.

Currently I’m not setup to handle off shore developers though if you are off shore and want to send along your resume go ahead as things may change.

I’m Back…..

marshallharrison — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:00:34 GMT

Yes, I am finally back after a 3+ week absence from just about everything computer related. I somehow caught a really bad cold that then got my sinuses infected and settled into my chest. The net result of all of this was that I just really didn’t feel like doing anything – especially things that required thinking. So no blogging, answering forum questions and no tweets. I pretty much just dropped out of site. Now I am way behind as my online life has been on hold for 3 weeks. Lots of catching up to do in the next few days.

But what better way to perk my interest and get back into the swing of things than with some new toys.

I ordered a Microsoft LifeCam Cinema HD webcam and I’ve got it installed. Now I need to start playing with it and really put it through it’s paces. I want to use if for doing video casts, training videos as well as use if for Live Meeting and Video calls with Office Communicator. I’ve tested it out in a video call but I believe there is something we have to set on the GotUC.Net OCS domain to do HD.

Brekeke SIP Server – I’ve downloaded this and have a license now I need to install, configure it and do an in depth evaluation of it. I may be using this in a a client project shortly so I want to gat familiar with it. Does anyone know where I can get a free SIP trunk to tie to this?

FreeSWITCH – this is another SIP gateway that I want to experiment with. I know several GotSpeech members are using it so I thought I would try it out and familiarize myself with it. The price is right and I understand that it is very extensible. Not sure when I can get to it but it is on my list of things to do.

While I was out I did manage a quick blog that Speech Server runtime is now supported on Windows 2008 Server. I’ll be trying that out shortly to see how well it works.

I still have some more VMs to create and some setup work that I want to do on my Virtualization Server Project so that is on my plate for this week or next.

As you can see I have lots to do so I guess the moral of the story is don’t get sick. Now I’m off to catch up on the GotSpeech forums and my task list.

As usual if you have comments or questions feel free to ping me. If you are using Office Communicator You can get me that way at marshall@gotuc.net.

KB974571 Breaks OCS 2007 R2

ml_ — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 15:59:24 GMT

I came back from vacation to find that I was unable to login to OCS. Turns out that an update installed on 10/14 broke the front-end services for OCS. The event log shows the following error:

The evaluation period for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 has expired. Please upgrade from the evaluation version to the full released version of the product.

Uninstalling the KB974581 update corrected the problem.

Big thanks to Dietmar Kraume’s blog post at http://tinyurl.com/yjefeg9 for pointing to the solution.

Consulting, Virtualization Server, Hyper-V, Training and other stuff

marshallharrison — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:55:52 GMT

Things have really changed for me since becoming an independent consultant. I’ve been busy with work the last two months but I’ve found that what makes up my work day has changed dramatically. For instance I now rely heavily on Twitter and I follow every OCS related tweet. I also have 10 blogs and 3 Microsoft OCS related forums that I follow in addition to the blogs on GotSpeech.net and GotUC.net. I also find that I’m using Office Communicator to keep in touch with the project team at Microsoft and other MVPs more than I have in the past. I do all of that just to stay on top of what is happening in the Unified Communications arena in addition to my consulting work

Virtualization Server

I finally got my Virtualization Server built this week. I met up with Andrew at his house and we wired everything up. I had installed all of the components so we only had to mount the memory, CPU and the heat sinks before connecting all the power and data cables. Other than a few cuts (motherboards and cases both will bite you) things went very well. Since my setup is the same as Andrew’s we opened up his case and compared connections and motherboard jumpers. After I got the server home the boring task of installing the OS started. I installed Windows Server 2008 and though it went smoothly I’ve found that once again I have to figure out a new OS. I’m learning to deal with “features” and “roles” so there has been a small learning curve.

Hyper-V

I installed Hyper-V on the server and then downloaded the the OCS vhds and installed them. The vhds were huge downloads and the install for the master vhd is a little flawed but overall things went fairly smooth. The VMs all work and can see each other on the virtual network but they don’t have internet access and I can’t see them from my other machines. I still don’t fully understand the concept of virtual versus real network (my server has 4 NICs) so I’ll be playing with that until I get it working. I would like to isolate network traffic to the VMs on a separate NIC from the normal traffic. It is really awesome to see 4 or 5 VMs running and the CPU not going over 20%. Having 2 Xeon Quad 4 CPUs and 32 gigs of memory really helps!

I installed Hyper-V Manger on my Vista box along with a Hyper-V Monitor gadget. That was no easy task as it would not connect. Luckily John Howard has lots of good stuff on Hyper- V and has even created HVRemote that automates the process. He even explains how it works in this blog post. Now I can manage my virtual environment without having to connect to my VM server.

New Laptop and Win7

The day before I was to speak at the recent Jacksonville Code Camp my laptop crashed. That created quite a panic at first as the prospect of rebuilding it wasn’t high on my list of things I wanted to do. The laptop was great for travel but with only a 12” screen and slow processer it just wasn’t cutting it as a presentation platform so I jumped on the Internet to check out my options for a new laptop. Since I needed to install all my Speech Server development environment and be ready for the code camp the next day I was limited to what was in stock at Best Buy or CompUSA. I settled on an HP ProBook 4710s with XP Pro and Vista Business. The XP Pro was just the ticket as it alleviated any development issues that Vista may have caused so after code camp kickoff party I was up until 1:00 AM installing, configuring and testing so that I would be ready to present.

The presentation went well so Saturday night after the code camp post party (code camps in Florida love to have parties) I was up until 1:00 AM again installing Vista Business. The install went smoothly but I lost my wireless connection. I ended up calling HP tech support and listening to hold music while working on the problem and watching NFL pre-season football. I finally got the wireless working literally 30 seconds before a live HP tech person answered the phone. I listened to hold music for 80 minutes and solved the problem myself.

Next on Sunday I decided to upgrade to Win7 and that went much smoother than the Vista install. It was quick and everything worked with no problems. I must say that I love Win7 and I’m happy with the performance.

Last night I installed Hyper-V Manager on my laptop but for Win7 it isn’t just a straight download of the utility. So I went back to John Howard’s blog and found a blog post stating that I needed to install Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT). So I did that and then a quick run of HVRemote and I can now manage my VMs for my Win7 laptop – cool.

Other Stuff

Why is it that people think Speech Server and OCS development is cheap? There are literally thousands of ASP.Net and C# developers out there that can develop your web app or desktop app. But there is only a small handful of developers that can develop applications for OCS. There is no developer training available and there is only one book on the subject. Microsoft has one forum and there is GotUC.Net. That is basically it. There are very few guys that can do this stuff so they should be compensated for the work and not compared to to other developers. We work hard to decipher and learn an emerging technology and we don’t want to do it for free.

I’m working with another OCS MVP on an OCS developer training course. There is a lot of work to do to get the manuals and the labs ready so I can’t promise a delivery date but I’ll post more info as things progress.