11th MVP Award Rewarded

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I am actually on vacation, but as I sit here under the summer sun, toes in the pool and a cold drink within reach, I have been waiting for that email confirming that I’ve been awarded my 11th Microsoft MVP Award! As last year, I am being awarded in both the Teams and Copilot category. To say I’m humbled would be an understatement. Being part of the global Microsoft MVP community for over a decade now has been an incredible journey, filled with learning, sharing, speaking, and connecting with passionate technologists from every corner of the world. What is the Microsoft MVP Award? The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award is given to technology experts who share their knowledge and real-world expertise with communities. With fewer than 4,000 MVPs worldwide, it’s an honor to be part of such a vibrant and dedicated group. MVPs contribute through speaking engagements, writing, open-source contributions, and helping others online and offline. You can learn more about the progra...

Still installing OCS, and getting grey hairs

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I admit it, I guess I was a bit quick on that last post, when I said I did not run into any serious problems. Well, I did. Biggest problems though, were all related to naming conventions, certificates, and a very aggressive firewall on the brand new 2008 windows server.

- First of all the Firewall:
I was fooled by how easy the installation is, and I was not prompted for any errors. The databases and files were created as expected. The only problem was when I started to run the verification tools, and got error messages. I tried to Google the messages, and the answers indicated certificate problems. So I started all over again, being very careful about names and certificates (By the way; If your CA is a 2003 server, and the client is a Vista or 2008 machine. Make sure to search TechNet for CA updates to the website. And enable ssl on the CA site). After rebuilding the pool 3 times, I was pretty sure certificates weren’t the thing, even though the error message indicated the certificate. So what else could it be? In what way did this installation differ from the OCS 2007 installations I had made on 2003 servers? No...! It can't be that simple? Yes it was. As it turns out: Windows 2008 comes with the firewall turned on by default. Pretty nice actually. But if you're not aware of this, you're in for some grey hairs like me. 

Once the appropriate rules were enabled, the validation came through like a charm. Now most of the features are up and running.

My next project is to integrate the Exchange 2007, and really create that UC environment we need in the demo/lab here.