TechContrarian

1) Search; 2) Ask; 3) Contact Microsoft from the revised Office Communications Server and Client Troubleshooting and Support page.
You know it; we know it: Stuff happens. There are times when an unforeseen confluence of circumstances causes problems in your deployment (which only an hour ago was running perfectly): Interaction with some piece of new hardware [...]

We’ve just published a new Updates Resource Center for Office Communications Server 2007 R2 and Clients on the OCS TechCenter.
 
And we’ve gone one step further: Our Sustained Engineering and support teams* have created a Cumulative Server Update Installer tool to help simplify the application of the updates. The Cumulative Server Update Installer applies all updates for [...]

Office Communications Server 2007 and Office Communications Server R2 have two multi forest topologies that have been tested by and are supported by Microsoft. One of these topologies is the Office Communications Server Resource forest \ User forest topology and the other is the Office Communications Server Central forest and User forest topology. The focus [...]

We’ve been working on the Downloads page on the Communications Server TechCenter! Check out the improvements:
·         Separate pages devoted to 2007 R2 Downloads and 2007 Downloads;
·         Clearer categorization of available 2007 R2 downloads;
·         And most importantly…more of the good stuff: More listings!
 
Find even more links than before to all the tools and resources that our team produces, including [...]

October 24 Update – The MS09-56: Vulnerabilities in CryptoAPI could allow spoofing article has been updated with a Known Issues section and FIX for the LCS and OCS product. That article is the authorized content as it requires the proper groups to coordinate and confirm the data published. We thank those of you who both [...]

Hooray! Office Communications Server 2007 R2 XMPP Gateway Has Been Released
This article walks you through setting up the XMPP Gateway and configuring it to work with Jabber XCP 5.4. For those who have been anticipating this release, I am happy to say, here it is, and it’s been worth the wait if you require Jabber or [...]

Important edit October 7- the original post stated Windows 2008 R2. This is incorrect we do not support that version at this time. The correct version should be Windows 2003 or Windows 2008.
Check out the following figure. That’s no illusion-it’s an Office Communicator user communicating with a Gmail user.
If you can’t wait to try [...]

We are excited to announce changes to the Office Communications Server Public IM Connectivity (PIC) license that provides instant messaging and presence federation to the Windows Live, AOL and Yahoo! public IM networks. Starting October 1, 2009, the following licensing changes will be made:
A PIC License will no longer be required for federation with [...]

Following the release of Office Communications Server 2007 Sasa Juratovic posted a PowerShell script  to retrieve user IM conversations form the archiving database.  (http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2008/01/14/69.aspx)
With the release of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 there were changes in the archiving database schema allowing the text/html content type for storage of user instant messages.  This schema change caused [...]

As we all know, in the world of computers we have a binary system. Either something works (1) or it does not (0). And as all of us really know, there is another state, that we all loath, “works sometimes” (1.5).
Recently I ran into a problem with my Office Communicator 2007 Phone Edition (OCPE aka [...]