Nouveautés de Microsoft Communications Server 14

Summary:

• The live meeting conferencing functionality will be rolled into Communicator “14″.  There will be one client, Communicator, for all media modalities and the associated features.
• There will be a new Silverlight-based web client available for those users wanting to joing a web conference, but don’t have the rich Communicator client installed.  This is a new client and not a replacement for Communicator Web Access.
  • When a user clicks to join a meeting from a link, it detects whether the Communicator client is installed. If it is not, you can join via the Silverlight client.
  • Participation via the Silverlight client is anonymous (i.e there is no sign-in required).  This is a powerfull feature that will make it a whole lot easier for external (to your organization) attendees join a meeting.
• MCS 14 will federate with Windows Live “Wave 4″ and will support Audio and Video with Windows Live Messenger contacts.
• All MCS 14 features were designed ground-up to work on-premise, cloud, or hybrid:
  • both in terms of supporting a percentage of MCS users on-premise, in the cloud, and,
  • in terms of having some or all Exchange & SharePoint services in the cloud
• Supported virtualization for all server roles in MCS 14 (with the normal audio and video caveats;  i.e. you must closely follow the virtualization guidelines to support audio and video, and even then it could be more suceptible to jitter and latency)
• The MCS 14 will support a media bypass feature which will allow a consolidated MCS “14″ front-end server to go direct SIP to a supported IP-PBX’s without having to through a mediation server when the call is going to a locally dialed PSTN number.
  • the Media by-pass, coupled with the branch office survivability will remove the need for Mediation servers in most local or branch sites (in most cases)
• Multiple SIP Gateways can be connected to one Mediation server.
• Communicator “14″ will support the G.711 codec and will be able to talk to certified MCS “14″ media Gateways to go out local PSTN access points.
• The visual Presence circle is changing to a square in Communicator “14″!  :-)

Office Communicator “14″

• Many new features nicely summarized in this Microsoft Showcase video: What’s New in Microsoft Communicator “14″.

Management

• A new Silverlight web-based management console (Communication Server Control Panel) that is built on a new set of Communications Server PowerShell cmdlets.
  • Support for Role Based Access Control administration (similar to Exchange 2010)
  • Support for cut-and-paste in the UI (i.e. easily copy Normalization Rules)
  • Can easily see all the Policies (i.e. Voice, Conferencing, Client) for a particular user in one place
• A new Central Management Store (CMS)
  • a central database the holds XML documents that describe your deployment
  • all topology changes get written to the CMS, and a read-only copy is pushed to all servers in the topology
  • the topology is pushed out via a file transfer agent and via HTTPS for the the Edge role
• New tools to help with certificates!
• New support for ’server maintenance’ – a server can be put into maintenance mode for O/S and hardware maintenance
• New PowerShell cmdlet’s
  • Everything in the new UI can be done through PowerShell
  • Cmdlets to manage users, configuration, devices, policies
  • Support for synthetic transactions (test phone calls, sip registrations, simple conferencing)

Topology Changes

• More support for role collocation.  More roles, including the Mediation role and CWA, can be installed with the Front-End
• A new “Site” topology entity which can be used to represent a geographic boundary such as a center or branch location.  A site contains one or more pools
• Similar roles as OCS 2007 R2 (i.e. a backend role that defines a pool, Edge Mediation, AV Conferencing, Archiving, Monitoring, Director, Group Chat)
• The Director role now streamlined and includes a local SQL Express database – removing the need for a separate back-end SQL database.
• The concept of Standard and Enterprise edition still exists
• Support for DNS load balancing within a pool
• New Topology Builder UI which helps you build your topology document

Virtualization

• Support for the virtualization of almost all roles
• Client virtualization support is similar to Communicator 2007 R2 (i.e. IM and application sharing but audio/video is not supported)
• Cannot virtualize the new branch office workload

Monitoring

• New SCOM 2007 R2 management pack:
  • Support for synthetic transactions (monitor the user experience)
  • Media quality alerts
  • Call failure alerts
  • Actionable alerts
• Monitoring role can be collocated with the front-end role
• The ability to ‘heal’ the audio of a particular end-point if the Monitoring role detects degradation in quality.

Office Communications Online

• Second-half of 2010:
  • Peer-to-Peer Audio/Video and File Transfer across the firewall
  • Communicator Mobile
• First-half of 2011:
  • Federation and PIC
  • IM Archiving
  • Recording and Playback
  • Application Sharing
  • Unified Voicemail
  • ACP Integration