Tuesday March 16, 2010

Live Comm Server 2005 going away, even though it never really existed

For the last few years, there has been a "pilot" implementation of Microsoft Live Communications server 2005 running to provide interested parties with a test environment for an AD-integrated and secure instant messaging platform. Despite a lot of people who have tried it and liked it (and a few who have stuck with it), no group has stepped forward to take ownership of this service so it never was officially supported nor was it brought up to production standards.

WINSYS is now in the final stages of working with the Yale Office of Development (OOD) to set up a fully-functional and production-quality Office Communications Server 2007 R2 service for their use as a LiveMeeting hub and other purposes.

Because Office Communications Server is an Active Directory-integrated application like Exchange and Sharepoint, we must tear down the LCS2005 pilot system entirely and purge its configuration data from the AD in order to make way for the new system. This work will begin during the week of March 22nd.

I have received some inquiries from groups and individuals at Yale who heard that we are working on this project and are interested in getting on board with the new OCS2007 service. Currently, WINSYS is focused on delivering the production environment to meet the requirements of the Office of Development. However, with the gracious permission of the folks at OOD, we are also incorporating the necessary groundwork to allow appropriate groups at Yale to also utilize the service as long as doing so does not impact its use by OOD. Currently, the target for availability of the new service is early April 2010.

Once we have launched OCS2007 for OOD, we will begin work on the process changes to make this service available on a wider basis. This will require, at a minimum, that each person be licensed individually in order to access the service. The cost of a license should be fairly low on a per-user basis.

The new system will be highly functional -- you can read about the many interesting capabilities of OCS2007 here. It works great in our test environment and everyone who's used it agrees that LiveMeeting is a very powerful tool.

If you have any questions, please email me.

To anticipate everyone's question, yes there is a strong client for non-Microsoft platforms. In the screen shots below, the first picture is the native client running on Windows and the second is the multiplatform web client running from Google Chrome.

Yes, I know the SSL cert is untrusted in the web client, the test environment has a temporary certificate.