First, I’ll be honest, I love OCS. I have pitched it as a consultant up against GTalk. It is a superior product. It does way more but at times, I just want to be able to chat with a client that doesn’t have OCS yet. Almost everyone has a Gmail account. Well, thanks to the new XMPP Gateway for OCS I can achieve my wish.

Now, I’m not going to go into all the details on how to set this up. The OCS Team has already done a great job on that here. I did however end up having to do things a bit differently. We had run out of IP’s on the Internet connection on which our Edge server lives therefore I had to go with a dual-homed approach. I placed external interface on a different Internet circuit which had available external IP’s and I put the internal interface on the same DMZ as our Edge server (we are NAT’ing our Edge server).

Now, the OCS Team blog does a great job describing what happens with a single IP but when you have two IP’s you really need to know what you are editing.

First, the config file (“%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2\XMPP Gateway\TGWConsoleGUI.dll.config”) has two spots where you need to enter an IP. In a single IP solution, the IP is the same in both spots. If you are using a dual-homed box like me, then you need to put the IP that will communicate with your Edge server in the SipIP and the IP that will communicate with Gmail (outside world) in the XmppIP value. Here’s an example:

<?xml version=”1.0″ standalone=”yes”?>
<configuration>
<appSettings>
<add key= “cultureName” value = “en-US”/>
<add key= “SipIP” value= “Internal IP”/>
<add key= “XmppIP” value=”External IP(actual IP on the NIC if you are NAT’ing)”/>
</appSettings>
</configuration>

Now, my second issue was that I originally placed my internal interface on the same “internal DMZ” that the Edge servers internal interface was on. The XMPP gateway has to be able to communicate with the Access Edge interface. I switched my internal interface over to the “External DMZ” and reconfigured the file above and was able to successfully test.

At this point I had it partially working. I could send IM’s from my Gmail account and receive them but I could not send messages from my MOC to Gmail, nor could I see presence in MOC. It took me a bit on this one but I finally figured out that the cert that you attach to the internal interface on the XMPP has to have the CN be the same as the FQDN of the computer name. I had placed the FQDN of the computer name into the SAN field and the XMPP software must just ignore the SAN field. Once I re-issued my cert with the FQDN of the computer as the CN, everything just “fell into place”.

Anyways, I hope this helps anyone else out there who might be trying to set this up with dual IP’s. I highly encourage you if you are GTalk user to check out OCS. It is a fantastic product. Especially when you can utilize it for Enterprise Voice.

Wow, I decided it was time to do some blog posts and I realized it had been over a year since the last post. Well, I’ve collected 3 or 4 ideas and will be working to get them out over the next few weeks. Three of them are on leadership and one is on Office Communications Server.

For those of you who still have me in your RSS feeds, I’m sure this post will be a bit of a surprise but hopefully you will read the next few posts and like what you read.

I struggle with expectations. I constantly expect a lot from everyone, including myself and I’m consistently disappointed. I decided to write out my expectations so I thought I would share them.

I expect people to work when at work. I understand that there will be times when you have fun and talk at work but in the end, I expect you to work.
I expect that you will use your time wisely.
I expect you not to spend significant time surfing the web or playing games on the computer.
I expect that you can be competent in our core functional areas (whatever that may be for your company).
I expect you to act in a professional manner at all times.
I expect you to expand your knowledge.
I expect that if you use your time wisely that you can expand your knowledge while at work.
I expect you to be to work on time and to be available during core hours (again, whatever those may be for your company).
I expect that you will pursue professional certifications and that you can prepare for them outside of business hours.
I expect for you to try. I don’t expect perfection but I do expect an honest effort. If you need help ask for it but only after you have given an honest effort.
I expect you to complete tasks in a timely manner.
I expect for everyone to lead by example.
I expect that you will do what you said you were going to do, when you said you would do it.

Now, looking back at these, I don’t think they are that high. Some people aren’t going to meet these (maybe their lazy or just don’t care). Most people will. I realized what I was consistently being disappointed by was not my expectations but by my standards. I have very high standards and I expect everyone else to as well. News flash – They DON’T!

People will consistently do just a good enough job not to get fired. Most people don’t go above and beyond to try to gain a better understanding or to do it 100% right. This is where I get most frustrated. I don’t know how to deal with this 100% yet but I’m learning. I’m learning to control myself a bit better. I’m learning to try and see what others are thinking. It doesn’t mean that I have to accept mediocrity but it does give me the chance to achieve teachable moments.

I have seen this several times and have had the idea of how to fix it but I was missing some steps. The guys over at Xtravirt have it solved. If you haven’t heard of them, take some time on their site as it has a bunch of useful knowledge. Here’s the link to how to solve it:

http://knowledge.xtravirt.com/hot-tips/virtualcenter-2x/12-virtualcenter-2x/32-virtualcenter-and-iis-conflicts.html

I’ve been thinking about this subject for a few weeks now. In general, no matter what, every so often I struggle with the leadership around me. I see great leaders out there but typically, I’m not engaged with them for whatever reason.

Lately, I have noticed that many people who are in leadership positions don’t do the same things that they ask their subordinates to do. In my case, it is my direct boss and because of this, I am losing more and more respect for him. Too often he makes requests of my co-workers and me to do things (such as get certified, etc) but yet he is unwilling to do those very same things. In the case of certification, we all need to have certain professional certifications (him included) so he tells us to go study and take the tests. His best advice is schedule the exam as it will force you to study when there is a deadline. While I completely agree with this and have done so just to keep me motivated, it is hard to stay motivated when you have taken and passed 8 tests in the past 12 months and he hasn’t taken any.

Granted, this is just one case, but it happens time and time again. He blatantly ignores customers or tries to push them off to people who have no business dealing with some of the issues.

It’s not only myself losing respect for him but my co-workers as well. I have a firm belief that if you want to lead, you should be the first one into the muck and the last one out. That means you are willing to do what you ask of others. Not only should you be walking the walk, your people need to know that when you say yes, you mean it and when you say no, it means no, but that is a whole other topic.

In the end, if you want to lead, do the things that you are going to ask of your people. If you aren’t, it won’t be long before you start losing people due to them losing respect for you. There are times when you need your underlings to do things that you shouldn’t be doing but in long run, you know that you have to walk the talk.

Done. Whoo-hoo. I’m stoked that I passed first try. While I may know the product pretty well, I don’t tend to test well, especially with Microsoft tests. I scored a 785 which is much lower than I would have liked. I’m just a bit competitive with myself.

Here is my take on the test, I thought the questions were either very hard or very easy. I also disliked when you could get it down to two answers and they only varied by a few words. Now, I know where and what I need to change but I don’t always remember off the top of my head what the EXACT dialog is on that box.

Anyways, it wasn’t too bad. Reading the documentation to study for it turned out to be a good thing. There were several things that I had either forgotten or didn’t know so that was good.

Best of luck to all those who are getting ready to take it.

Here is a repost from my old blog. This was originally posted on July 27th, 2007. Sorry all pictures are gone.

Yeah, I’m trying new things with PowerShell. Someone challenged me to see if I could come up with how long til the movie. Well that was pretty easy. I did:

New-TimeSpan (Get-Date) “7/27/2007 12:01:00″

Days : 1
Hours : 20
Minutes : 31
Seconds : 53
Milliseconds : 146
Ticks : 1603131460301
TotalDays : 1.85547622720023
TotalHours : 44.5314294528056
TotalMinutes : 2671.88576716833
TotalSeconds : 160313.1460301
TotalMilliseconds : 160313146.0301

I turned around and used the PowerGadgets and borrowed some code from Richard Siddaway to come up with this:

param([datetime]$end = “Friday, July 27, 2007 12:01:00 AM”)

$t = $end – (get-date)

if ($t.Seconds -lt 10) {$s = “0″ + ([System.Math]::Truncate($t.Seconds)).ToString() }

else { $s = ([System.Math]::Truncate($t.Seconds)).ToString() }

$d = ([System.Math]::Truncate($t.days)).ToString()
$h = ([System.Math]::Truncate($t.Hours)).ToString()
$m = ([System.Math]::Truncate($t.Minutes)).ToString()

$d + ” Day ” + $h + ” hours ” + $m + ” minutes ” + $s + ” seconds “

I then outputed these results to a PowerGadget:

.\simpsons-countdown.ps1|out-gauge -Type Digital -refresh 00:00:01 -ToolTip “Time til The Simpsons Movie” -Appearance_color Yellow

And this is what I got:

Pretty cool huh? I may have to purchase the PowerGadgets when my 30 day trial is over. I could get some use out of them.

So, the second biggest issue that I faced in getting the UC Software Update Services up and working was getting the configupdatesserver.vbs script to run correctly. Whenever I ran it I got a Unknown Username or bad password error. Well, turns out we must have an invalid character in our password cause I changed it to something without a special character (^,$,~,etc) and everything worked.

Seriously, this is just one crappy product. I spent at least 15 hours trying to get it to work. The documentation is ok but is missing key steps (see my previous post) and then this. I love OCS 2007 but the Phone Edition is not nearly as easy to update.

Saw this and thought it was a great idea. Having a console that I can look at and see what is going on without risking root privileges is pretty slick.

Over the past week, I have been setting up UC Software Update Services to be able to push out the updates to our Tanjay phones. Man, talk about a crappy solution. Sorry Microsoft, but this one needs a lot of polishing.

I got to the step where you create the UCUpdates SharePoint site and everytime I ran the command I would get a “The request failed with HTTP status 401: Unauthorized.” I was running the command with the same user account that I installed SharePoint with and verified that it was a local admin on the box as well as a Farm Administrator and a Site Collection admin. Still no go.

I was looking and saw that the Authentication Provider was set to Kerberos by default. I then looked and realized that the AppPool’s were running as a Network Service. I changed them (SharePoint – 80 and the Central Admin AppPool) to be a domain account and everything worked.

I have a feeling the issue is that I used WSS 3.0 SP1 to install WSS. I have read a few comments out on the web that have said there are issues with it. None the less, the lack of good documentation on this piece is sad. Our Tanjay’s are still on beta code cause I can’t get this working but that is for another post (Issue #2). Hopefully if you are facing the same issue as above, this will help you get on to the next step.