Mike Stacy

Jun 30 2008   2:42PM GMT

Filtering Contacts for OCS 2007

Posted by: Tony Bradley
LDAP, filter, contacts, Active Directory, UC, Unified Communications, OCS 2007, Mike Stacy, EC, Evangelyze Communications

For most organizations, the fact that OCS 2007 can pull the contacts from Active Director is not a problem. However, situations can arise in larger companies with separate subsidiaries where one group is deploying OCS and another isn’t, or where multiple organizations within the company are deploying OCS, but they don’t want to share contacts in OCS. There is no truly elegant solution, but there are rudimentary options available to enable this sort of filtering. Evangelyze Communications Voice Program Services Director Mike Stacy explains how to do it on his blog site.

Jun 5 2008   2:42PM GMT

Planning Capacity and Bandwidth for OCS 2007

Posted by: Tony Bradley
Director of Professional Services, Evangelyze, Mike Stacy, VoIP, Unified Communications, UCC, UC, OCS 2007, Office Communications Server, Microsoft, calculator, capacity, bandwidth

One of the most important factors in a successful VoIP or unified communications implementation is ensuring that adequate server processing horsepower and network bandwidth exist to handle the load. Streaming audio and video are less tolerant of latency and packet fragmentation, and the infrastructure has to be capable of meeting the demands of unified communications. Mike Stacy, Director of Professional Services for Evangelyze, has created an OCS Capacity and Bandwidth Calculator. The calculations to determine the number of users a given server can support, or the bandwidth capacity necessary for those users to use unified communications technologies are contained in an Excel spreadsheet which Stacy makes available for free.

May 31 2008   12:24PM GMT

Monitoring OCS Certificate Expiration

Posted by: Tony Bradley
UCC, UC, Unified Communications, Mike Stacy, Evangelyze, certificate, OCS, Office Communications Server 2007

Certificates are a key component of enabling communications between the various components of Microsoft UCC implementation. The OCS server maintains certificates with the various servers in order to facilitate secure communications. Having the certificates expire unexpectedly means losing communications unexpectedly, so admins need to be proactive about ensuring certificates are renewed or replaced before they expire. Mike Stacy, a Director at Evangelyze, discusses how to monitor OCS for certificate expiration.