OCS 2007 Outage Communication/Online Broadcasting

Wow it is so easy to send the outage notification now just before few minutes of the outage. You have to shoot lcscmd command from the server and the message will reach all the active users :-), making life simple and technology faster.

Simply go to lcscmd.exe path on command prompt which is generally Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 folder and shoot the command:

LCSCmd /server /action:BroadcastMessage /Role:EE /Message:"The system is going down for maintenance at 7:00 PM PST."

Now make sure if you server is enterprise edition then role would be EE else for standard edition of OCS, it would be SE. Message you can change as per your requirement.

OCS Conference Directory/Livemeeting issue

Well I came across one of the issue where conference directory is removed. Users are not able to create livemeetings. Getting error "can not connect to the server because the information might be incorrect or the server is unavailable" and below are the event ids:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: OCS User Services
Event Category: (1006)
Event ID: 32080
Date:  10/14/2011
Time:  2:20:19 PM
User:  N/A
Computer: TestOCS
Description:
This pool is missing a required piece of configuration information. No conference directory exists. Without a conference directory, conferences cannot be registered for phone bridge access.

Now the workaround is either create a new pool and move the newly created conference directory from that pool to the old pool or go to ADSIEdit and create another conference directory:

Open ADSIEDIT.

Navigated to the following.

CN=Configuration.

CN=Configuration,DC=<DC Name>,DC=com

CN=Services.

CN=RTC Service.

CN=Conference Directories.

Right Click on "CN=Conference Directories".

New -> Object

On the New Windows that opens which says "Select a Class:" choose msRTCSIP-ConferenceDirectory

In the Value Field type 2.

Note:- Value Field corresponds to the Common-Name of the Conference Object that we are creating.

Click on Next.

Click on Finish.

Now under the "CN=Conference Directories" we will see the new Directory Created with name "CN=2".

Now expand the following.

CN=Configuration.

CN=Configuration,DC=<DC Name>,DC=com

CN=Services.

CN=RTC Service.

CN=Pools

CN=<pool name>

CN=Microsoft

CN=LC Services

Right Click on "CN=LC Services" and go to properties.

Check for the Attribute called distinguishedName.

Copy the value of distinguishedName.

Now expand the following.

CN=Configuration.

CN=Configuration,DC=<DC Name>,DC=com

CN=Services.

CN=RTC Service.

CN=Conference Directories.

Cn=2

Right Click on the "CN=2" and go to the Properties.

Check for the Attribute msRTCSIP-ConferenceDirectory.

Pasted the Value here.

Also check for the Attribute msRTCSIP-ConferenceDirectoryId

Enter the Value 2 there.

Restart OCS services and you can enjoy livemeeting now.

OCS 2007 Documentation

I was facing issues finding these links on search engines somehow so thought to keep them handy on my blog:

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=24402

One of the other sites I really like for OCS is http://ocspedia.com/

Well this is my first post for this blog, have a lot for the next ones so I will just keep posting :-)