OCS Journal: Setting the Foundation

I've been meaning to start playing around with Microsoft Office Communication Server 2007 for a while now, but just never seemed to get around to it. A recent Help Desk disaster at the office motivated me to get things in gear.

OCS 2007 can do a lot of cool things, but for right now, I'm mostly interested in the Live Meeting web conferencing features. I'll add in more features of OCS 2007 when I can. And I'm sure that at some point, I'm going to have to make the jump from a virtual machine to a few physical PC servers. I'll have to be prepared to move this experiment back to the office at some point down the road so I can get all of the software I'm going to need running on a real PC hardware.

Please wait while bla bla bla is installing...

I think IT folks spend 75% of their careers watching software install on computers. And today, I'm putting up more hours watching software install.

Installing, configuring, and running Office Communication Server 2007, (OCS 2007) is more of a science project than anything else. I'm running my experiment inside a Parallels virtual machine on my Apple Mac Pro and a RAID 0 disk array so I don't lose all of my work to disk corruption. (The Parallels disk drive file is going to get huge!) The following is a list of my hardware and software.

On the Mac side of things:

• Apple Mac Pro running Mac OS X Server 10.6.2 Snow Leopard
• 6GB of RAM, 750GB RAID 0 disks
  
• Parallels Desktop 4.0

On the Windows side of things:

• Windows Server 2008 Enterprise + Service Pack 2
  
• Internet Information Services 7.0
  
• SQL Server 2005 + Service Pack 3

The Story of the Film So Far...

So far, the install has been going as expected. I have the Windows Server setup as my domain controller running DNS on my virtual network. I have also assigned a static IP address to the server so all of the other machines on my network will be able to see it by IP and by name (either using DHCP (virtual machines) or Unix hosts files (on my Mac boxes).

One weird thing about the install of SQL Server was that it was complaining that IIS wasn't installed. As you can see from the rather lame screen shot of the IIS 7.0 default install index.htm page, IIS 7 was installed before I started the SQL Server installer. I'm guessing that is just because SQL Server 2005 is older than Windows Server 2008 and, well, we all know how that goes. I should note that you will need to install Service Pack 2 (SP2) or later of SQL Server 2005 if you are going to run on Windows Server 2008. To install the SP for SQL Server, install the base product, and then use Windows/Microsoft Update to download and install the latest update. If you want to stick with a specific service pack, then you will need to download it from Microsoft's Downloads site at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads



If you have access to SQL Server 2008, and I do, I was just too lazy to download it, you can probably get around the IIS warning from SQL Server all together.

Side Note:
If you plan on screwing around with Microsoft's software, you'll definitely want to check out the Microsoft TechNet Direct program. For $250 per year, you gain access to all of Microsoft's software, for development purposes only. It's a really nice investment if you are an IT professional or just want to play one on TV.

For now, I'm in Windows Update hell as the updates for SQL Server, Visual Studio, Office, and all the rest download and install on my Windows Server.

I'll post more about my efforts to setup and install a Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 as time allows.

In the mean time, if you want to learn more about Office Communication Server 2007, you can checkout the Microsoft website.