Developer: Deploying Office Communicator 2007

Deploying Office Communicator 2007

Collaboration suites are being increasingly used to save communication costs. Presented here are the key requirements and benefits of using Office Communicator 2007 straight from somebody who's actually deployed it

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

BANGALORE, INDIA: In a global economy, most companies need to make persistent calls to clients, colleagues, vendors and other stakeholders on a daily basis. And when chasing business you don't mind whether it's a national or international call. However, the expenses incurred on this mammoth activity do warrant a rethink in strategy. Our organization makes 20+ international calls a day, each with a duration of more than 30 minutes.

The average cost per month incurred due to this comes to Rs. 1,50,000. We decided to have VoIP in place and also a collaboration mechanism where users could exchange information at will. This would be topped with a mix of chat, conferencing and web meeting abilities. After a careful evalution of solutions available, MS Office Communicator came out trumps.

Hardware requirements
When going for a wideranging deployment across branches, it's advisable to use the best wares available. That would also ensure sustainability for at least three years even if there's a massive churn in technology. The minimum requirements are a Standard Edition Server comprising a dual processor CPU working at 3.2 GHz with HT.

Then attach two 18 GB hards disks for storage. In addition, you would need two 36 GB 15k rpm SCSI disks running on the collocated SE Server. A 1 MB cache, 2 GB memory and Gbit NIC card would complete the list of hardware requirements.

We used HP ProLiant DL380 G3 server, the Intel Xeon CPU 2.80 GHz, 2GB of RAM, 3 Ultra 320 SCSI HDD of 72.8 GB (RAID5), for display we used Rage XL PCI Family (ATIES), and 2x 1HP NC 7781 Ethernet Adapter, alongwith an optical drive.

Software requirements
The minimum and recommended operating system platform requirements for all Office Communications Server 2007 server roles are 32-bit Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 Standard Edition and Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition.

You can check the availability status of a colleague. Plus, you can send messages, invitations for conference call, schedule a meeting, etc.

A point to note here is that OCS Server Roles will only install on 32-bit Windows 2003 operating systems. 64-bit OS is not supported and this has been verified by Microsoft UC SWAT Team.

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