Hosted by:
Derrick Buckley, Craig Pringle, James McC, Johann Kruse

Date and time:
Tuesday, 18 November 2008 at 1:30 PM

Location name:
Level 23, World Square, Sydney

View this event on Windows Live

http://blogs.technet.com/markdea/archive/2008/10/14/top-tips-to-run-a-livemeeting.aspx

Cheers

Derrick

It works by federating your Active Directory with Microsoft services. Your employees will be able to access services with their corporate accounts, the same way they access the applications they use today.

Microsoft Services Connector will work for most Microsoft services, including those offered by third parties that use Microsoft developer services.

On the other hand, if you do not have AD and wish to federate directly with Microsoft – use the Federation Gateway http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc287610.aspx

To download the CTP for Microsoft Services Connector, see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=131672

Cheers

Derrick

http://www.microsoft.com/communicationsserver

Key new features of Office Communications Server 2007 R2 include the following:

Next-Generation Collaboration

• Dial-in audio conferencing - Office Communications Server 2007 R2 enables businesses to eliminate costly audio conferencing services with an on-premise audio conferencing bridge that is managed by IT as part of the overall communications infrastructure.
• Desktop sharing - This feature enables users to seamlessly share their desktop, initiate audio communications and collaborate with others outside the organization on PC, Macintosh or Linux platforms through a Web-based interface.
• Persistent group chat - This enables geographically dispersed teams to collaborate with each other by participating in topic-based discussions that persist over time. This application provides users with a list of all available chat rooms and topics, periodically archives discussions in an XML file format that meets compliance regulations, provides tools to search the entire history of discussion on a given topic, and offers filters and alerts to notify someone of new posts or topics on a particular topic.

Enhanced Voice and Mobility

• Attendant console and delegation. This allows receptionists, team secretaries and others to manage calls and conferences on behalf of other users, set up workflows to route calls, and manage higher volumes of incoming communications through a software-based interface.
• Session Initiation Protocol trunking. This feature enables businesses to reduce costs by setting up a direct VoIP connection between an Internet telephony service provider and Office Communicator 2007 without requiring on-premise gateways.
• Response group.A workflow design application manages incoming calls based on user-configured rules (e.g., round-robin, longest idle, simultaneous), providing a simple-to-use basic engine for call treatment, routing and queuing.
• Mobility and single-number reach. This extends Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile functionality to Nokia S40, Motorola RAZR, Blackberry and Windows Mobile platforms, allowing users to communicate using presence, IM and voice as an extension of their PBX from a unified client.

New Developer Tools for Business Applications

• APIs and Visual Studio integration. This improves the efficiency of everyday business processes by enabling businesses to build communications-enabled applications and embed communications into business applications.

Cheers

Derrick

“Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who are awarded for voluntarily sharing their high quality, real world expertise in offline and online technical communities. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts that represents the technical community's best and brightest, and they share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others.”

Thank you Microsoft! I am honoured and really thrilled to be recognised for the community work that I have carried out over the past year.

Thank you especially to the people who nominated me.

Derrick

See you all at SWIG on Tuesday for great talks, prizes and free food and drink.....

We have a great talk on preparing for your Windows 2008 MCITP exam with Ken Schaefer

Ken’s Bio - Ken Schaefer is a systems engineer consultant for global systems integrator Avanade. Avanade is a joint partnership between Microsoft and Accenture and focuses on enterprise projects across the Microsoft product stack.

Ken has worked with IIS for around 10 years, and been a Microsoft MVP for IIS since 2003. He has presented at numerous Microsoft Tech.Ed events across the US, Australia and Asia, written articles for Microsoft TechNet and spent countless hours talking about IIS at other events, user group meetings and roadshows. He was lead author for Professional IIS 7 (Wrox/Wiley) and co-author of Securing IIS 6.0 (Syngress Press)

He is currently an MCITP (Win2k8 EA), MCSE+Security, MCDBA, MCTS and holds a Masters in Business and Technology from UNSW. Ken blogs about IIS at http://adopenstatic.com/blog

Our second talk is now confirmed and Amit Pawar has agreed to give us a talk on the new Windows Hyper V technology. Amit Pawar is a Technology Solutions Professional specialising in Windows Server technologies. As a technical specialist, his role involves being able to explain and demonstrate the features and benefits of the Windows Server platform as a infrastructure platform to customers and partners. In the past 7 years Amit has worked in a varied roles within Microsoft Australia ranging from Microsoft Consulting Services to Product Support Services.

We also have a Demo from Chris Mohan on File Server Resource Manager for Windows 2008. Have a look at Chris’s blog - http://www.chris-mohan.com/ The demo will  be recorded and entered into the Microsoft Demo competition....best of luck Chris!

See you on Tuesday
Derrick Buckley