Recently in Microsoft Category

I grew up reading PC Magazine and I looked forward each couple weeks to picking up my copy of PC Magazine at the local grocery store. But today, Ziff Davis has announced that the legendary PC Magazine print publication is shutting down its print publication and focusing exclusively on online content. This is truly a sad day... Hold on while I grab some tissues...

PC Magazine started the whole in-depth comparative reviews of PCs and Microsoft software. They expanded later to including gadgets, MP3 players, mobile phones, GPS, and other technology. PC Magazine offered insightful tech tips and great columnists like John C. Dvorak. Back in the 80s and 90s the print publication was 400-500 pages, making for hours of tech- reading pleasure. Today, it's down to 150 pages and soon to be 0 (January 2009).

Well, I guess it's "greener" that way. But I for one will miss my print copy of PC Magazine.

As one of my sources told me a few days ago, IBM and Microsoft planned on offering Sametime and OCS 2007 integration to be announced at VoiceCon. Three days ago I wrote:


Well, it just hit the newswires. At Voicecon, IBM and Microsoft announced that IBM Sametime and OCS will offer Interdomain Federation in Q4 of 2008, using SIP/SIMPLE.

The support will require an update to the Sametime Gateway 8.0.2. It will support OCS 2007 and OCE 2007 R2.

I'm always a bit skeptical of VoIP security vulnerabilities discovered by firms which sell security products. Nevertheless, I thought it was worth sharing this bit of news.

Update: Microsoft responded that VoIPShield's test is "on a non-secure implementation of OCS, which you would have to disable as we are secure with a default installation."

See, that's why I was "a bit skeptical"!

VoIPshield Laboratories, the research division of VoIPshield Systems Inc., is making its first-ever announcement in a new category of research related to security vulnerabilities in VoIP and Unified Communications (UC) systems. These vulnerabilities affect applications that use media stream protocols like RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol), a popular standardized packet format for delivering audio and instant messaging over the Internet.

The Microsoft products affected are Office Communications Server 2007, Office Communicator and Windows Live Messenger. These products deliver software-powered VoIP, presence, instant messaging and audio/video/Web conferencing functionality to end users. Microsoft estimates that over 250 million computers worldwide run these applications. All use RTP to deliver the content of the message; therefore all are vulnerable to this class of attack.

"Most of the attention in enterprise VoIP/UC security has been paid to the control channel, where SIP and other signalling protocols are used," said Ken Kousky, CEO of security research and analysis firm IP3 and advisor to the VoIP Lab at Illinois Institute of Technology. "Until now, the media stream has been largely ignored by the security community as a source of malicious activity. But attacks from these vectors have the potential to be dangerously persistent and widespread."

The Microsoft vulnerabilities announced today, if exploited, cause a Denial of Service (DoS) condition against not only the stated applications but the entire desktop environment.

"Today's announcements are just the tip of the iceberg," said Andriy Markov, director of VoIPshield Labs. "Although they are specific to Microsoft's applications, similar flaws exist in other VoIP vendors' products. And many other media stream attacks exist that have more severe implications than service availability. We're presently validating new research that shows an attacker can gain unauthorized access to an unsuspecting user's laptop by manipulating the packets of a VoIP phone call. We believe that these attacks can even be made to traverse a PSTN gateway."

Under its Responsible Disclosure Policy, VoIPshield confidentially discloses full details of the vulnerabilities to the affected vendors, and works with them to facilitate the development of application fixes. Details of the vulnerabilities are not publicly disclosed.

Securing the media stream is particularly challenging because once the messaging session is established, the flow of voice packets is not always monitored and managed by the call server.

"Media traffic, whether it's voice or video, can travel peer-to-peer," Kousky added. "Security practitioners have historically considered blocking peer-to-peer traffic as the best protection practice. Unfortunately, for voice packets that strategy doesn't work and so careful consideration has to be given to the placement of the protection mechanisms within the network."

"VoIP and Unified Communications represent not only new technologies, but new paradigms in the way information is communicated and consumed," said Rick Dalmazzi, VoIPshield's president & CEO. "The result is brand new vectors of attack against the entire corporate IT infrastructure. Companies must start now to educate themselves in this new area of security. VoIPshield has been working exclusively in VoIP and UC security since 2004 and has compiled a number of assessment and protection techniques and products for enterprise networks."

Effective immediately, customers of VoIPshield's VoIPguardTM VoIP/UC Intrusion Prevention System can download the new signatures using the VoIPshield UpdateTM subscription service. VoIPguard contains over 500 VoIP/UC specific signatures to detect and prevent malicious signalling and media traffic.

In April, VoIPshield was named one of five "Cool Vendors in Infrastructure Protection for 2008" by Gartner. In October VoIPshield was named one of the "Top 50 Canadian Companies" by Red Herring.

Internet Explorer 6 Mobile browser is close to release, with the Windows Mobile Team Blog announcing the availability of emulator images of Windows Mobile 6.1.4 containing the updated browser. Even though Microsoft is finalizing IE 8 for PCs, it's only up to version IE 6 for its mobile platform, though IE8's javascript engine is backported to IE6 Mobile.

Check out the features in Pocket Internet Explorer 6 Mobile (PIE6):

The question is, is this too little, too late? Several browsers have surpassed Pocket Internet Explorer to become the mobile browser of choice, including Opera Mini, which just released Opera Mini 4.2 yesterday, but also Opera Mobile 9.5, and Skyfire, which handles video streaming Flash sites such Youtube. And let's not forget the forthcoming mobile Fennec browser by Mozilla. Still, the touch and gesture support in PIE6 is a welcome addition and no doubt in response to the popularity of the Apple iPhone web browser.

You can download the emulator images from Microsoft here. If you're really good, you can pull out the emulator code, convert it to a .cab and install the browser on your Windows Mobile.

Rumor has it that Microsoft and/or IBM will announce integration between Office Communications Server 2007 and IBM's Lotus Sametime "Unified Telephony" platform at this week's VoiceCon show. If true, this would combine approximately 20 million Sametime users with Microsoft's fast growing OCS 2007 user base creating the largest unified communications user base.

There are ways of getting OCS and Sametime to integrate via 3rd party gateways, however it is somewhat limiting. I don't believe you can do video for instance.

If Sametime and OCS can interoperate and offer IM/presence, voice, and video, that would be HUGE.

NetQoS today launched its first unified communications focused management tool called NetQoS Unified Communications (UC) Monitor. NetQoS is broadening the focus of its formerly named VoIP Monitor product to reflect the growing role and functionality of unified communications. NetQoS UC Monitor 2.0 supports voice and video quality metrics in a Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) environment as well as enhanced diagnostics and reporting for Cisco IP telephony environments.

In my conversation with NetQoS I asked them what the upgrade/migration path was for current customers, and they said existing customers would be upgraded to NetQoS UC Monitor 2.0 free of charge. One interesting feature in NetQoS UC Monitor 2.0 is that it can adjust the MOS alerting thresholds based on codec. For instance, Microsoft's RTAudio FEC codec can have a lower MOS score than other codecs, but sound just as good than other codecs with a higher MOS score. Screenshot of the codec thresholds:


UC Monitor adds support for monitoring both voice and video in a Microsoft OCS environment and it passively monitors call setup flows between IP phones and their call server(s) including 'call setup' and end-of-call quality statistics. It also actively queries voice gateways for end of call statistics. Additionally, it passively receives QoE reports from Microsoft's QoE Monitoring Server, including call setup failures, and audio and video metrics

Here's some screenshots of the tool in action:

With Microsoft OCS R2's pending release, I thought you'd be interested in seeing a video interview of Microsoft's Ananad Lakshminarayanan about some of the new features in Office Communications Server R2, which is Microsoft's popular unified communications platform. In the video you'll see some of the IT Admin specific features in OCS R2, which includes an OCS architecture planner to make OCS much easier to deploy. Essentially, it includes a wizard that you provide with your locations, users, and feature requirements and it spits out a detailed Visio style architecture for you, including recommendations for number of servers and locations, as well as bandwidth requirements. The wizard will even list out all the ports & IPs that you need to open.

They've added load balancing for Edge Servers for scalability. Another change is they've reduced the number of ports you need to keep open. They've changed the archiving feature so that it stores instant messages archives separately from CDRs or voice call records. This assists with compliance using 3rd party compliance utilities.

To Virtualize or not to Virtualize, that is the question...
A hot topic in the Office Communication Server community is virtualization for some of the OCS server roles. In the video, Ananad mentions they are looking at supporting some virtualization for some of the OCS roles. Specifically the roles that don't support real-time media (audio, video, conferencing, etc.). Although the video doesn't mention it, Microsoft told me that the voice & video quality and performance in virtualized environments just isn't up to business-grade quality. Nevertheless, I'd still like to see support for virtualization of all the roles for testing in a lab or pre-deployment testing environment. in any event, excluding those roles that require real-time media they will be able to be virtualized very soon. In fact, in the video Ananand says support for virtualization will be likely be post RTM, which is basically plus 90 days from when OCS R2 RTMs.

Click to go watch the in-depth video including a demo of OCS R2:

Just saw a news release put out today that Telefonica and Microsoft have teamed up for Live Messenger VoIP. CNet also picked up this news. Only one problem - on October 2nd, I discovered Microsoft had added something called "Voype" (a service by Telefonica) to Live Messenger. The article was title "Windows Live Messenger Back in the VoIP game!". In the article I wrote:

So I already wrote about Microsoft and Telefónica teaming up over 3 weeks ago. Apparently, it was an undisclosed partnership at the time. Guess it took them awhile to "officially" break the news about the partnership. But my loyal blog readers already knew this. Score another one for the blogosphere!

Today, Microsoft debuted Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Release 2 (R2), an update to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007. Customers will be able to purchase the release, currently in private beta testing, beginning in February 2009.

Office Communications Server 2007 R2 includes several new important  functionality, particularly for remote and mobile workers. It includes on-premise audioconferencing to help reduce operational costs and introduces new developer advances, including the ability to build communications-enabled business processes.

"Office Communications Server 2007 R2, debuting just one year after the Microsoft unified communications launch, highlights the pace of innovation that is possible with software," said Stephen Elop, president of the Microsoft Business Division at Microsoft. "This new release puts Microsoft on a rapid path to deliver voice software that does much more than a network private branch exchange (PBX) and with much less cost."

Interesting quote, eh? Does this not sound like Microsoft is sounding the death knell for the network PBX (IP-PBX)? This is an interesting turn of events. Microsoft hasn't been pitching OCS 2007 as an IP- PBX replacement, but rather as something complementary. In fact, I remember talking with Microsoft about this last year and they went out of their way to explain that OCS 2007 is not an IP-PBX replacement. Also, Microsoft has many IP-PBX partners in the OCS 2007 arena, including Mitel, Nortel, and others. Slip of the tongue? Or is Microsoft going full-out into the IP-PBX arena? Certainly, the fear by many IP-PBX vendors is that one day Microsoft will offer a full-fledged software-based IP-PBX replacement, but I don't think that day has come yet - even with the new features in OCS 2007 R2.

Microsoft added more fuel to the fire when the explained, "Since the solution became available in 2007, businesses have begun migrating their workers off their PBXs to Office Communications Server for all their telephony needs. Customers such as Royal Dutch Shell plc are already taking a load off their PBXs by using Office Communications Server and Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 for mobile and remote workers in place of PBX phones to provide global employees with innovative communications solutions to quickly and efficiently reach their colleagues and help reduce operational costs."

Then they threw some napalm on the fire when they said, "Customers are leapfrogging an entire generation of Internet protocol (IP) PBX technology to move straight to unified communications and software-powered voice over Internet protocol (VoIP)."  They also stated, "Office Communications Server 2007 R2 allows customers to take the next step toward replacing their PBX with Microsoft's unified communications software and managing voice in the same way as other applications such as e-mail and instant messaging."

Now they did bring out the peace pipe and say, "Office Communications Server interoperates with legacy PBX and IP PBX investments, allowing customers to transition to the new platform without undergoing an expensive rip-and-replace upgrade of their network."

It'll be interesting to see how the IP-PBX vendors take these statements.
In the meantime, check out the key new features of Office Communications Server 2007 R2. One big feature I like is Persistent Group Chat:

Check out the video where Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop talks about the debut of Microsoft's Office Communications Server 2007 Release 2 (R2):

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Apparently, a young a Norwegian developer named Erik Kristiansen has developed an application that lets you run Windows Mobile on the iPhone! Now why would someone go and do something like that? How bout actual copy/paste that works, plus the ability to run 3rd party apps in the background? The video is an interview taken at MyPhone 2008 and he explains that he has essentially created bootcamp for the iPhone. When the phone powers on, you see the Windows and Apple logos allowing you to select between booting OS X and Windows Mobile. Of course, I doubt Apple and Microsoft use the same set of APIs to communicate with the dialer application. So if I launch the Windows Mobile dialer app from an iPhone, will it truly be able to dial out? The video interview does show the Windows Mobile dialer, but he doesn't actually dial out. Windows Mobile also won't take advantage of iPhone hardware such as multi-touch, which lets you zoom in/out with two fingers and other multi-touch tricks.

Still, for hardcore geeks, this could be something fun to try.