Devin on Earth

The speaker just said, and I quote, “regular expressions, which are fairly straightforward.”

That’s, um, well, interesting. And wrong.

So, I’m in Sydney for a training conference that I’m talking about in my work blog if you’re interested. There’s a lot of interesting small differences that have more of a mental impact to me than the big ones:

• The exit signs inside buildings are green with white letters. I’m used to the opposite.


• Didn’t find a single country radio station. Of course, this could be because the alarm clock/radio in my hotel room is cheap.


• Speaking of hotel rooms, holy crap are they small! I’m having flashbacks to the really crappy hotel room in London from a couple of years back.


• Did I mention that the hotel rooms have a distinct lack of ornamentation? Very small, very functional, but it feels like living in a cupboard.


• Apartment buildings are painted interesting colors.


• Window dimensions are subtly off.


• They’ve got Taylor Swift’s Teardrops on My Guitar on the muzak system here at the conference center. I noticed an interesting lyrics change: the line “it’s just so funny” is “it’s so damn funny” here. Apparently, in the United Nanny States of America, the terrorist will win if a 17-yo girl says “damn” in a country song.


• The magazine in my hotel room had Nicole Kidman on the cover, but I’ve not yet seen a single mention of Kylie Minogue.


• Speaking of Nicole Kidman, she’s done two movies with Daniel Craig — The Golden Compass and Invasion, which I watched on the plane. Basically another cover of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, only they wimped out on the ending.

If you like the Discworld novels, you’ll think this is cool.

If you like cake, you’ll think this is cool.

You might think this is cool anyway.

The Discworld as a cake

Thanks, Nick!
 

Good morning! Back for day 2. (You can see my day 1 notes here.)

09:13: Talking about dialing requirements. Just heard the best explanation of E.164 I’ve heard — very simply, it’s a format for writing phone numbers that makes them globally unique. A lot of the configuration energy for OCS and PBX systems is focused around translating dialed numbers (and fragments of numbers) into E.164 so that the call can be routed appropriately. Exchange 2007 RTM didn’t support E.164 dial plans, but SP1 does. (source http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb803637.aspx and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb676323.aspx)

09:38: In the UC roadshow sessions we did last fall, we were telling people that the RTAudio-WB codec used on average 45Kbps bandwidth per channel. This is true (can use lower or higher, but that’s a good average), but that doesn’t take into account the various network overhead components. Turns out, you should use 57Kbps as your average planning number for each one-way channel – 57Kbps send and 57Kbps receive for each endpoint While this may seem like a lot, remember, that most conversations have only one user speaking at a time for the majority of the time. However, be sure to plan for this if you have different upstream/downstream capabilities! (source http://forums.microsoft.com/unifiedcommunications/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=2697675&SiteID=57 – not an “official“ guide, but the calculations are there and check out; the official planning guide still has the numbers that don’t account for overhead, and the overhead can change based on network conditions)

10:54: E.164 is an ITU standard for normalizing phone number, as I mentioned before. However, RFC 3966 defines the tel: URI scheme, which is basically a superset of E.164. E.164 applies only to public numbers; RFC 3966 applies to private numbers as well. Anytime you see a tel: prefix on a number in OCS, you’re dealing with RFC 3966. (source http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3966.txt, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URI_scheme)

11:06: OCS 2007 normalization rules use .NET regular expressions, which can be pretty confusing to grasp. However, the OCS 2007 Resource Kit can help — it includes the Enterprise Voice Route Helper, which includes a normalization tool that helps you build your regular expressions. (source http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=b9bf4f71-fb0b-4de9-962f-c56b70a8aecd&displaylang=en)

11:20: PSTN breakout is a cool process — use VoIP across your network, then break out the call to the PSTN at your location closest to the destination so you reduce or eliminate long-distance costs. OCS allows this pretty easily. However, you may not always be allowed to — in India, for example, you must be registered as an ISP in order to switch calls back onto the PSTN from VoIP; point to point Communicator calls are just fine. (source http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=24E72DAC-2B26-4F43-BBA2-60488F2ACA8D&displaylang=en and http://www.ilocus.com/2008/01/bsnls_voip_will_kill_the_grey.html)

11:44: Lectures are done for the day — on to death by labs! We’ve got a series of really crunchy voice interop labs to work our way through. Woohoo!!!

Continue on to my day 3 notes.

Greetings from Sydney, Australia, where I’ll be spending the next week (along with Kevin) at the UC Voice Ignite event. (If you’re one of my readers and you’re here too, look me up.) I want to capture some neat bits and info that you should know but may not. I can’t put everything down, of course, and I won’t post anything that I can’t verify from publicly available material from Microsoft — yes, Virginia, I take my NDAs seriously.

12:06: Exchange 2007 UM RTM didn’t directly detct fax tone on incoming calls — I didn’t know that. Your IP gateway had to do it, then UM would renegotiate the media as T.38. SP1 changes that — UM will detect fax tone, but the detection is off by default, you must manually enable. (source http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb691398(EXCHG.80).aspx)

12:08: If you’re planning on doing both Exchange 2007 UM and OCS 2007 using the same VoIP gateway, be careful it’s certified for both! There is currently only one gateway (from Dialogic) that is certified for both applications. In theory, you shouldn’t need two separate gateway products. (source http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/telephony-advisor.mspx and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/bb735838.aspx#qualified)

12:10: How do I know if Exchange 2007 UM works with my PBX/VoIP PBX? See the Microsoft Telephony Advisor and the IP PBX and PBX Configuration Notes.

12:12: Which IP PBXes connect to Exchange 2007 UM? At this point, Cisco Call Manager 6.x gives full interop (voice and fax), 5.x gives full interop for call answering, 4.x is not tested, and CallManager Express is not supported. The Mitel 3300 (v7.1 UR2) also supports direct interop (this is what we’re using), but look at Interactive Intelligence CIC (v 2.4 SU13 at least). Avaya and Nortel CS1000 v5.0 require SIP proxies. Note that this is talking solely about Exchange 2007 UM interop, not OCS interop! (source http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/exchange/telephony-advisor.mspx)

12:19: During Q&A, it’s already been noted that the 12:12 information is out of date. Moral of the story: many vendors are working hard on this, so keep a good watch on the previously mentioned websites and talk to your vendor!

13:35: Lunch was tasty! Added source links to previous points so it’s clear I’m not posting any information under NDA. (Thanks, Kevin!)

14:47: Remember how you had to pick whether a UM Auto Attendant was DTMF-enabled or voice-enabled, but not both? Fixed in SP1. (source http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124501(EXCHG.80).aspx)

15:35: Lots of labs — crunchy but not too deep for this first day.

Continue on to my day 2 notes.