Unified Communications with Microsoft

Unified Communications is dangerous! Like methamphetamine – once you try it, can’t stop thinking about it. My name is Drago and I am addicted to UC! That’s it. I said it!

 When it comes to endpoints, the Great Chinese Wall looks like a sand castle compared to the stubbornness of Microsoft to collaborate with other manufacturers. To some extend I can understand – Telephony is essential part of the Workflow and breaking this element will disrupt or break the Workflow itself. In this regard, having endpoints that perform exactly as expected is important – last thing Microsoft wants is bad name of the platform because of underperforming phones. It is a war out there and the competition will jump on every opportunity to throw mud wherever sticks or not. My gut feeling tells me that Microsoft is (for many people yet to be seen, though) a player in the VoIP market already and despite the big words about interoperability and openness, backstabbing and dirty tricks is (and always will be) part of the corporate voodoo… As we say in my country: “If you don’t want the cat to drink the milk, cover the pan”. And so Microsoft does…

 Yes, we have Tanjay, Catalina, Oak – very well crafted in means of design and performance – no arguments here. When I wrote in previous blog that I have a feeling the developers never left the lab and corporate meetings when working on the OCS phone line, I meant – the disconnect between the concept and reality. As IT person, I look for logical reason behind everything. No, your computer did not decide to show pop-ups on its own – you did something that shouldn’t have beforehand! You phone does not ring because you set “Do Not Disturb” as status, not because “This system sucks”. Even if the common sense justifies the logic of presence and call flow, one cannot imagine the frustration of having to deal with perceptions every day, all day! One manager of department insisted the phones must ring even if the person is off for the day. Another, to have every phone ring with different ring tone, so he can determine who is at his desk – from his office. Come on! I am just a Bulgarian, not a magician!

 If you read this, I am sure by now you already asking yourself “Ok… that is your point?”

 I know our deployment will make a lot of people to roll eyes, and yet it is true – we are using non-certified Snom endpoint. 90% of all phones are Snom300. In 100% OCS EV environment, 11 months already! Not a single PSTN line (except the security systems and the elevators) and I blog about UC, not posting job resume somewhere… because it works. Only with Snom I was able to satisfy some of the weirdest requirements of our Departmental Managers… Everybody that attended a corporate meeting knows the feeling of being a “scapegoat” where all others have “legitimate” reason to off-load their failures and channel it toward “the IT and their VoIP system”. The people hate changes by design (intelligent or not) and the best way to fight this is to have the flexibility to fight back with “OK, you got what you want, now shut up” and believe me, nothing sounds sweeter than when the President say “I don’t want to hear any more The VoIP system does not work. Works for me just fine… live with it”. To get there, however, you need to have the right tools at your disposal…

 My point is – Snom went above and beyond to develop firmware that actually works with OCS. It does have its small problems, which we solve on fly when discovered, and I just dream of a perfect world where Microsoft would partner with them in joint effort to offer greater variety, flexibility and price ranges. After all, we do VoIP not only to satisfy our own vision for the feature, but for down to earth reasons as increased productivity, reduced MRC and last, but not least, fast ROI.

In my next post, I will offer a solution as of now one can use Snom phones to ring it with distinctive ring tone depend of where the call ordinates – PSTN -> OCS or within the organizations.

Ah, the touchy subject… Let me tell you what I think.

Microsoft have the leverage to learn from the best when comes to VoIP. OCS EV proves every day to be a valuable alternative to the Big Boys (and big money) solutions. I know at least one place where Nortel slashed their yearly maintenance fees 60% in desperate attempt to “distract” the College from moving to Microsoft UM and… yet this same college uses Exchange as email solution, OCS as IM solution, SharePoint as collaboration solution and so on. What would be the logical choice for VoIP in this case?

OCS on its way to mature as complete solution and yet Microsoft repeated one more time a common in the past mistake – looked in the mirror and said “yeah, we are the biggest and we know better” when comes to the endpoints. It is so typical in the IT world when one programmer write piece of code and another programmer goes like “Man, this is beautiful!” while for the rest of the world this still looks like Sumerian. I have a feeling the hardware part of OCS never left the corporate presentations until hit the market. You see, EDU sector is different. Say, in Geico, you can give the employee a banana, tell him – “This is how you make a phone call from now on” and that’s it. In EDU, we will form a committee and two focus groups to discuss “Is this a phone and can we use it in our college?”

There are three main objectives during the planning phase:

• To reduce or offset completely the stress when pushing major changes in the work environment
• To complete the deployment with the lowest TCO thus achieving fastest ROI
• To achieve maximum savings of MRC

Back in the days, when I told my boss that we need to place a $500 phone on the desk of an entry clerk that makes less than a $20,000 per year, he sent me to take a drug test and began listen only when I introduced endpoint for less than $80. Besides, Snom 300 series looks like a phone, feels like a phone and works like a phone.

We did some ‘physiological” tests. Catalina devices were introduced to different categories in our college. Needless to say, IT folks absolutely love it; the CIS faculties were OK with it and the rest – “Take this thing away from my desk, now!” When Snom 300 was introduced, all we got is “Ah, I have new phone.” And of course, with Tanjay we got “Can I keep it” and the answer is “No! It is too expensive and you will never use even 10% of the features.”

All our executives have Tanjay not because it looks cool but because it introduces features unseen before. It is simply the ultimate collaboration tool one could have on its desk. Let say the CFO calls branch office Director to discuss a budget request from the Dean. At some point the Director will say – “You know, I see the Dean is available, let’s escalate this call to a conference…” and all this from a phone device. Beautiful!

Down on the floor, all we have is “Georgia Military College, Business Office. How may I help you?”

I decided to try StartCom UCC certificate for my test OCS 2007 R2 Edge server. For my big surprise – it works!!! Just found why: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20091010/microsoft-free-root-certificate-authority-windows One tricky part, though – your federation partner must have this update: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=19C4AE49-1127-4537-9E91-35F81D20BCE6&displaylang=en

 Happy Federation

Hopefully by now you are already convinced that Unified Communications concept has great practical application(s) in EDU sector. It is time to look closer as of how it was implemented in GMC.

***If you expect to see a screenshots of installation and configuration – this is not happening. OCS 2007 R2 and Exchange 2007 (including UM role) is very well documented, you can find it all over Internet and having it here (again) would be a waste of time. My idea is to share the path, the line of thinking and the steps we went through in order to complete the deployment.

Oh, once Microsoft lifts the NDA over Wave 14, it will be different story…

The first challenge – extensions schema. Current users of Centrex or any hosted PBX are familiar with the Enterprise Extensions concept. Basically, the user dials three or four digits and connects to another user in the same location. What happens is: a normalization rule takes place to “convert” the 4 digit number to “full”, in some cases E.164 format, phone number. For example – 2704 was converted to 478-445-2704, a match is found and the called party is ringed. This is because all numbers are typically within the same PBX (remember, NPA-NXX-XXXX) where XXXX is the “internal” extension.

This is valid for all our offices. However, one problem – user in Milledgeville dials 4 digits to call colleague in Milledgeville, user in Valdosta dials 4 digits to call colleague in Valdosta, while calls cross-campus required fill 10 digit number. Of course, a long distance charge would occur due to the fact they reside in different Local Calling Area.

Since we will now host (and control) the environment, we wanted to make “dial by extension” available for cross-campus calls as well.  OCS is E.164 compliant. In order a call to be processed, the number must be presented as +1 NPA NXX XXXX. A call (as we know it at home) is typically 7 digits (445 2704) for local calls, 10 digits (478 225 2704) for some local area calls and 11 digits (1 478 445 2704) for long distance. OCS uses RegEx (Regular Expressions) to capture, evaluate and manipulate the input and convert it to E.164 format. For example:  ^(\d{7})$ to be translated to +1478$1

On English, this means “Match numbers that are exactly 7 digits long. Prepend ‘+1478′.” With other words, when users dial 4452704, the number will be presented as +12784452704 for further processing.

Now, we know that Local Area Codes/Prefixes are different for our remote offices, for example 478-387-XXXX for Milledgeville and 229-269-XXXX for Valdosta. So, if I assign a “location” code for every campus (2 for Milledgeville, 3 for Warner Robins, 4 for Valdosta and so on), I could build a RegEx to capture 5 digits input and translate it to E.164:

^4(\d{4})$ to be translated to +1229269$1 i.e. “Match numbers that start with ‘4′ and are a total of 5 digits long. Remove 1 digits from the beginning and add ‘+1229269′.” Now Milledgeville user would dial 40001 and call Valdosta user whose phone number is actually (229) 269-0001.

Number manipulation is a very powerful tool. A full deployment of UC, including Exchange UM, introduces Auto Attendant feature which can be used as “Dial by name” – the caller speaks the name of the called party and if match is found, the call is connected without further interaction. This come very handy especially in our case (we changed ALL phone numbers – a very downing task indeed, and a separate post will be dedicated to it). We created a RegEx to translate *99 to the Auto Attendant’s E.164 number and so, while in the middle of the changeover confusion, our users found easier to dial *99 and dial by name vs. wander around if the user’ number was changed yet or not.

Our remote offices are connected to Main Campus with VPN links (as to any other campus as well), and so, since now the calls are placed over the IP Network, the LD charges which normally occurred in the past, were completely eliminated. Furthermore, by carefully evaluation the Local Calling Areas and creating proper call routes, a further reduction of LD charges was achieved. Now is this possible:

We established already that (in US), there is something called Local Call (free), where IF the caller and the called party are within the same Local Calling Area, no charges will occur. So, with RegEx, we evaluate the number against the Call Routing table and forward the call to the (most) appropriate gateway:

When a user from Valdosta dials ANY number beginning with 478-387, the system will determine that the most appropriate gateway is the one in Milledgeville because the call will be FREE since appears to ordinate from Milledgeville. Translate this to a large business with office(s) on another continent… This is, by the way, the magic behind dialing US number and “John” with Indian accent takes your customer support call…

Follow the money!

Deep Throat was right! Just, in our case, nothing sweetens the life of the Management as a scratched line in the new budget. As IT guy, I have been pitching VoIP for about two years. Every time my boss sent me to “take a drug test”. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it… you know how it goes… However, one day our business office contacted me regarding an ISDN line in a remote office; I went to check what they are talking about and out local Phone Gate exploded. I carried the monthly phone bill with wheel barrel (all 700 pages of it) back to my office and spent next few days digging. You will be surprised what I found in it – charges for a phone service we considered “disconnected” (at least OUR record showed a disconnection order was placed), double charge for the same service (one remote office was charged for three Auto Attendant services and they were not aware of it), number of accounts charged for a Voice Mail box (the people did not knew they had one… hmm, wander if someone from the phone company decided they need one but forgot to inform them). In fact, we were paying for an ISDN line (active or not) located in a building that we no longer occupy. I am not implying it is always the Big Bad Phone Company that cheats. As we say in my native country, Bulgaria – “It is not crazy the one that eats the entire cake, but the one that gives it”. Long story short, our MRC was $10,000, effective charges varied month by month between $11,500 – $13,000 (not sure what your provider charges, but we were paying $250 when moving a user from one office to another and the “number” needed to be moved as well.)

We, at Georgia Military College, already had Office Communication Server R2 deployed and all roles but Enterprise Voice was used. For me, as IT guy, EV integrated with Exchange UM role was the logical choice for telephony solution for the college, just… my approach was wrong! Let me tell you a story. After many attempts, my VP managed to arrange a meeting with the President (sort of Grand Jury) where we presented our case. So, I am going to the meeting and as IT, got carried away talking about the beauty of Unified Communications – integration of presence, email, voice, voice mail, conferencing etc. After 15 minutes or so, the President goes “…why are you wasting my time with this…” and I almost had a hard attack. Fortunately, the second part of the presentation was about the money. Sweet topic, indeed. Needless to say, before the end of the presentation, I had the money for deployment on my disposal with the words – “I want this and I want this now”. Beware what you wish, I can add, but this is whole different story and I will blog about this later.

Today, eight months later, we are 100% OCS EV. Our MRC for phone service is $2,100 (remember $13,000 just few months ago?) and we are very close to our ROI point.

I started this blog to share our experience and hopefully help some colleagues to achieve their dream – Unified Communications at their work place.