ShoreTel public/unofficial support resources

These resources are frequented by individuals who install, support and administer ShoreTel systems. They are not official support channels.

ShoreTel Forums: http://www.shoretelforums.com/forums/index.php

RSS feed: http://www.shoretelforums.com/forums/external.php?type=RSS

Yahoo ShoreTel group: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/shoretel/

Q&A session with ShoreTel’s CEO John Combs

Part 1: http://www.voip-news.com/feature/shortel-ceo-interview-pt1-082207/

Part2, his views on Microsoft’s offerings: http://www.voip-news.com/feature/shoretel-qa-part2-082307/

Live Communications Server 2005 support lifecycle

Now that OCS 2007 has been released, please be aware that the support lifecycle for LCS 2005 shows mainstream support being retired in April 2010 for both the enterprise and standard editions.

More info can be found on http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=6450#

The lifecycle FAQ can be found on http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/gp/lifepolicy

Microsoft TechEd IT Forum 2007

Barcelona 12/11 - 16/11
Details of the Unified Communications track can be found on
http://www.mseventseurope.com/teched/07/itforum/content/pages/technicaltracks.aspx#ucm

OCS documentation on TechNet

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb676082.aspx

Configuring Thunderbird for receiving RSS updates

If you already have an RSS feed, then please jump to the “If you already have subscribed to an RSS feed but want to add a new one” section, otherwise start here to add RSS feed for the first time.

• From within Thunderbird, go to the Tools menu
• Click on Account Settings
• Click on Add Account
• Select “RSS News & Blogs”
• Click Next
• Click Next to select the default name of “News & Blogs”
• Click on Finish

If you have already subscribed to an RSS feed but want to add a new one.

Please continue onto the following steps to add a feed to the Unified Communications blog:

• Right click on “News and Blogs” in the left hand plane
• Click on New Folder
• Enter “Unified Communications” into the name field.
• Click on OK to accept the default as being a subfolder of “News & Blogs”
• Highlight “Unified Communications” in the left hand pane
• Richlt click and click on subscribe
• Click Add
• In the “Feed URL” field, enter http://dbracken.wordpress.com/feed
• Click on the red X to close the “RSS Subscription” window. Unfortunately, there isn’t an OK button at that point which would be the logical choice.
• Click on OK in the bottom right hand corner of the “Account Settings” window.

Congratulations, you have added an RSS feed to your Thunderbird email client.

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 eval

Yesterdays (Volume 9, Issue 16, Aug 8th) TechNet news letter announced the availability of OCS 2007 trial version. More details can be found on http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=7224267

Lotus Sametime integration

A future project will include integration with Lotus Sametime. A demo can be found here.

Adding Tandberg video end points to the network

A Tandberg MXP T150 was added to the network today. The T150 is similar to that pictured on http://www.tandberg.com/products/video_systems/tandberg_150_mxp.jsp but without the telephone handset. It was initially configured to contact the corporate gatekeeper and so this was changed to point to the lab environment.

Using the Exchange Integration Init as described on page 24 of the Tandberg Exchange Integration Installation Manual, the end point was added as a domain user. This allows the end point to be booked as a resource via Outlook Calendar. As described on page 27, the user is configured to automatically allow meeting requests. When I logged on as the newly created user, there was an email in the Outlook inbox explaining this. The setting is “Automatically accept meeting requests and process cancellations”. This can be found on the resource scheduling settings of the Outlook calendar options. The Office online help page http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HP052432221033.aspx shows the steps. In this instance, the option had been set correctly though a warning on page 27 suggests this might not always be the case.

At this point the video end point is known to TMS as a video end point and to Exhange as a bookable resource.

Installation of Tandberg’s LCS Integration products

Tandberg’s LCS integration enables both call and control of video end points by Microsoft’s Office Communicator client. Version 2.4 of the “Tandberg LCS Integration installation manual, getting started” guide was used during the installation. The LCS Integration package consists of two parts, the Tandberg SIP-CX Gateway and Tandberg Communicator Integration.

Tandberg SIP-CX Gateway.

The Tandberg SIP-CX Gateway provides a multi-participant conference facility when coupled with a Tandberg MPS.

Page 6 of the installation manual says “Do not install the SIP-CX gateway on the LCS Server as this will lead to problems with LCS setting up trusted sites”. Page 8 of the manual says “The SIP-CX gateway can be installed on the TMS server, the LCS server or a dedicated server. The only difference is that if installing it on the LCS server, the default SIP-CX port (5060) cannot be used for the LCS/SIP-CX gateway communication as it will cause port conflicts with the LCS software”. This is somewhat conflicting advice. I chose to go with a seperate server as Server3 is only running Tandberg’s TMS. for performance reasons, you would want this to be on a dedicated server for typical deployments. The diagram on page 10 shows the port settings. I chose to change from the default 5060 to 5080 just so I could see how a slightly different configuration can be done from the LCS configuration tools when establishing an authorised host (page 14) and most importantly during the steps described on pages 16 and 17 as this is where the port setting is entered when creating the static route. As there is no CA for the domain, I didn’t select a HTTPS connection to the TMS server as shown on page 10. As per the advice on page 17 suggesting the use of a different domain, I chose horizon.sip for conferences. A copy of the conferences.xml file was made and then using the Tandberg LCS Configuration tool as shown on page 37, a demo config was created.

Tandberg Communicator Integration

The Tandberg Communicator Integration is an extension to Microsoft’s Office Communicator and adds a Tandberg tab to the client.

TandbergCommunicatorIntegrationPreRequirements.msi was run on the LCS server followed by TandbergCommunicatorIntegration.msi. I created a local user called TandbergCommunicator as per page 34 and as per suggestion on page 35, a domain user called VideoConferenceAssistant. VideoConferenceAssistant is used as a bot for sending feedback to Office Communicator clients.

The Tandberg Communicator Integration Configuration tool TLCSConfigTool.exe was run to generate the registry file containing the Office Communicator extensions. As only a few clients are involved, I manually imported the .reg file on each workstation. When Office Communicator was restarted, the Tandberg tab was visible on the bottom of the client. The extension is essentially a customised http interface to the TMS. Unfortunately the tab was not visible on all of the clients and Appendix 4 covers adding the TMS server as a trusted site. Once Office Communicator was restarted, the tab was visible.

Rather than editing the IM filter as per Appendix 2, the filter was disabled using the LCS MMC. Obviously in a live environment, the filter would be edited to allow traffic from the Tandberg bot.