다음을 통해 공유

New Features in OCS 2007 R2

  • 아티클

Executive Summary

This page describes the new features available in OCS 2007 R2.  This effectively represents all of the features that are new or enhanced since the previous release of the product (OCS 2007).

New Enterprise Voice Features 

Call Delegation Feature

The new Call Delegation feature in OCS 2007 R2 enables managers to delegate phone-call handling to one or more administrative assistants or other delegates. When a delegate answers a call, the manager is notified that the call has been answered, along with the name of the delegate who answered.

Team Ring Feature

The new team ring feature in OCS 2007 R2 makes it possible to forward incoming calls to a defined team. When a team receives a forwarded call, each member’s phone rings, and all members can see who forwarded the call. When a team member answers the call, the phones of all other members stop ringing.

Response Group Service

The OCS 2007 R2 Response Group Service enables administrators to create and configure one or more small response groups for the purpose of routing and queuing incoming phone calls to one or more designated agents. These response groups can be deployed in departmental or workgroup environments and in entirely new telephony installations.

Dial-in Conferencing Feature

The OCS 2007 R2 Conferencing Attendant is an application that enables users to join an audio/video conference by dialing in using a telephone on the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).  The Conferencing Attendant service provides audio conferencing capabilities to phone users without requiring the services of a third-party Audio Conferencing Provider.

The Conferencing Attendant also requires that the 2007 R2 release of Communicator Web Access (CWA) be installed to provide the Dial-in Conferencing Web page, which users can access to manage their reservationless meeting information and personal identification number (PIN).

SIP Trunking Support

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 simplifies and reduces the cost of deploying Enterprise Voice by enabling an enterprise to connect its voice network to a service provider offering Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) origination and termination. This feature removes the requirement to deploy 3rd part IP-PSTN gateways in order to enable PSTN connectivity; a company can simply connect their OCS Mediation Server to a SIP Trunking provider directly, typically over a WAN/MPLS Network, or in some cases, a VPN over the Public Internet. 

Mobile (Cellular) Telephony Enhancements

Enterprise cellular telephony, also known as “outside voice,” enables users of the 2007 R2 version of "Office Communicator for Windows Mobile" and users of the new "Office Communicator for Java Phones" to set up and control enterprise voice calls over their mobile phone providers’ GSM networks.

With enterprise cellular telephony, a user’s cell phone becomes just one more unified communications endpoint, providing nearly the same level of connectivity and control as Office Communicator itself. These features include the following:

  • Click to Call
    • A cell phone user can place a voice call by clicking on a contact’s single phone number or SIP URI. The user can also click a number in a meeting reminder to join a conference.
  • One Number Calling
    • Each user has a unique single number through which all the user’s registered endpoints, including his or her cell phone, can be reached. The user will be contacted on whatever device is available. People who want to call the user need to keep only that single number. The user, in turn, only has to hand out that one number and does not have to share his or her cell phone number.
  • Unified Voice Mail
    • Unanswered calls to a user’s one number are forwarded to the user’s enterprise voice mail repository. Calls to the user’s cell phone number are forwarded to the cell phone carrier’s voice mail repository.
  • Support for Emergency Call
    • Emergency calls that are placed using the Communicator Mobile 2007 R2 client are handled as if they were dialed directly on the cell phone. It is each user’s responsibility to know the local emergency number when roaming.
  • Least-Cost Routing
    • A call placed from a supported mobile client to a long-distance PSTN number can be routed over the enterprise IP network to the PSTN gateway that is nearest to the location of the destination number. Routing mobile workers’ calls in this way over the enterprise IP network usually results in lower costs than if the same calls were routed entirely over the PSTN.

 

New Group Chat Feature

OCS 2007 R2 Group Chat enables users to engage in persistent, ongoing IM conversations.  Group Chat differs from group IM in that the latter is not persistent.  After a group IM session has ended, its state is lost.  With Group Chat, however, the conversation persists, along with all message text, files, web links, and other associated data. This persistence makes it possible to maintain complete records of each session that can be viewed by any authorised particpant in the chat room. 

 

Integrated Desktop Sharing

Desktop sharing enables users to transmit a view of their desktop to others. Office Communications Server 2007 R2 introduces a Web-based client to enable users to initiate desktop sharing during any Web conference that is hosted by the server. The desktop sharing client is based on and integrated with the 2007 R2 release of the Microsoft® Office Communicator Web Access client.

NEW SERVER APPLICATIONS

CONFERENCING ATTENDANT makes it possible for an enterprise user without access to a unified communications client to use a public switched telephone network (PSTN) phone to dial in to a conference.

CONFERENCING ANNOUNCEMENT SERVICE uses a tone to announce when a phone user joins or leaves a conference. If the conference organizer dials out to a user with a request to join the conference, a tone plays when the user joins. Conferencing Announcement Service also announces when a phone user has been muted or unmuted. If you run Conferencing Attendant without also running Conferencing Announcement Service, there are no announcements for phone users.

OUTSIDE VOICE CONTROL provides enterprise voice functionality and call control to mobile phones that are not otherwise enabled for enterprise voice. Microsoft® Office Communicator Mobile clients can receive or make calls using a single enterprise number or SIP URI. Unanswered calls are directed to the user’s single enterprise voice mail repository. Users of devices that are running Communicator Mobile clients can use the voice functionality of that device as if it were part of the enterprise network, rather than the carrier network, by providing a call back number to the server.

ENHANCED MEDIA FEATURES

IMPROVED MEDIA RESILIENCY
End users can expect to have reliable voice communications that continue working even if transient network conditions cause signaling failure in an Office Communications Server component. If a user’s attempt to establish a new media connection fails, as during an attempt to add video to an existing voice connection, Office Communicator 2007 R2 automatically tries to restore this connection in the background without further user involvement.

IMPROVED VOICE QUALITY
Overall voice quality is significantly better for Office Communications Server 2007 R2. These improvements include:
• Suppression of typing noise during calls.
• Improved generation of “comfort noise,” which reduces hissing and smoothes over the discontinuous flow of audio packets.
• Improved echo detection and reduced echoing at the beginning of a call.
• Better regulation of audio volume among peer-to-peer callers and conference participants.
• Improved codec selection for calls to the PSTN over low-latency connections.

HIGH-DEFINITION AND VGA VIDEO
High-definition video (resolution 1270 x 720; aspect ratio 16:9) and VGA video (resolution 640 x 480; aspect ratio 4:3) are supported for peer-to-peer calls between users running Office Communicator 2007 R2 on high-end computers. The resolution viewed by each participant in a single conversation may differ, depending on the video capabilities of their respective hardware.
High-definition and VGA video are not supported for conferences.
Administrators can set policies to restrict or disable high-definition or VGA video on clients, depending on computer capability, network bandwidth, and the presence of a camera able to deliver the required resolution. These policies are enforced through in-band provisioning.

SIMPLIFIED FIREWALL CONFIGURATION FOR THE A/V EDGE SERVER
Office Communications Server 2007 R2 simplifies firewall configuration for the A/V Edge service to support audio and video scenarios involving remote users and federated users. In Office Communication Server 2007 the perimeter network’s external firewall needed to be configured to allow inbound and outbound connections with the public Internet to the A/V Edge service on ports 3478 for User Datagram Protocol (UDP), 443 for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and 50,000-59,999 for both UDP and TCP. With Communications Server 2007 R2, the perimeter firewall can be configured to allow only inbound connections from the public Internet to the A/V Edge Server on ports 3478 for UDP and 443 for TCP. This reduced port range for inbound connections simplifies the configuration changes required on the external firewall.

In Office Communication Server 2007 the external IP address of the A/V Edge Server had to be publicly routable and not located behind a NAT. In Communication Server 2007 R2, if a public IP address is not available, the A/V Edge service can be deployed behind a NAT if you are using a single Edge Server topology.

PRESENCE ENHANCEMENTS
• Increasing the number of subscribers to a contact object.
• Enabling the Response Group Service to subscribe to the presence of its agents.
• Creating presence policies with set limits and restrictions.
• Implementing poll-based presence for newly created callers to the Response Group Service.
• Enabling an administrator to publish presence on behalf of a manager and to access all of the manager’s published presence categories.

ARCHIVING, CDR, AND QOE ENHANCEMENTS
• CDR and archiving data for new scenarios and features, including call delegation, team calling, and Response Group Service.
• New CDR usage reports provide system usage details for conferencing, voice and video, and instant messaging.
• New QoE metrics for audio quality, PSTN connections, and network connectivity. These new QoE metrics provide better quality monitoring and diagnostics. QoE reports have been fully redesigned and enhanced with the new metrics.
• A new Office Communications Server role, the Monitoring Server, gathers both CDR and QoE data.

MANAGEMENT AND ADMINISTRATION ENHANCEMENTS

AUTOMATIC UPDATES
Administrators can push updates to the Office Communicator 2007 R2, Communicator Phone Edition, and RoundTable without relying on the refresh cycles of other administrators and with little or no involvement from users.

IMPROVED CERTIFICATE WIZARD
An improved Certificate Wizard allows administrators to create multiple certificate requests offline for the same computer and then send them to an enterprise or public Certificate Authority (CA). After certificates are imported, the Certificate Wizard allows the administrator to specify the certificate assignments to specific services. The Certificate Wizard also warns when Subject Alternate Names (SANs) include spaces and special characters, which are not allowed.

IN-BAND PROVISIONING ENHANCEMENTS
All clients (Communicator, Communicator Web Access, Communicator Mobile, and Communicator Phone Edition) are automatically provisioned at first sign-in with the new settings introduced in Office Communications Server 2007 R2.
Optional Installation of Administrative Tools
Installation of the Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Administrative snap-in is now an option. The Communicator Web Access administrative snap-in, and the deployment command line tool, LcsCmd, are also no longer installed by default.

PLANNING TOOL
The Planning Tool for Office Communications Server 2007 R2 provides prescriptive guidance for planning and deployment. The Planning Tool is a wizard that asks a series of questions about features of interest, information about your organization, and anticipated capacity. Based on the answers you provide, the Planning Tool creates a recommended topology for each of your organization’s main sites, specifies recommended hardware, and prescribes the planning and deployment steps to implement the topologies. The Planning Tool takes about 10 minutes to complete, depending on the complexity of your organization.