We are excited to unveil today a software product suite that will help global enterprises optimize their UC investments by monitoring and driving OCS usage, integrating with billing and chargeback information, and enabling comprehensive bandwidth planning across the enterprise. Our new Unify² PowerView offering comes as a result of direct customer input and discussions about the measurement and billing support they need to better understand and maximize their UC investments.

PowerView is a sophisticated product for global enterprises looking to better track and measure OCS deployments based on business division or geography. Of particular interest are integrated billing options that can track and charge-back costs across business units. 

Complimentary to PowerView is Unify² PowerPlan, which enables an enterprise to determine its expected OCS bandwidth consumption across its entire network infrastructure--based on enterprise-specific usage parameters--to “right-size” its network and facilitate a quality OCS end-user experience.

PowerView generates detailed reports on enterprise OCS adoption, identifying usage patterns and estimated cost savings achieved through the use of enterprise voice, video conferencing, instant messaging, and application sharing. Snapshot of customizable reports:  

1. OCS Usage Analysis: Tracks OCS usage across the enterprise over time, adoption of OCS workloads and features, customized around organization hierarchy, department, business divisions or geography.
2. OCS Operations Optimization: Tracks communications device and client usage, and provides inbound and outbound voice call trends by geography or organization, which is geared towards reducing infrastructure costs.
3. OCS Billing Integration: Provides two options for implementing departmental billing, with subscriber fixed-fee or usage-based billing models. Enterprises can calculate and share costs assigned to different business units, and optionally export the data to corporate finance applications.
4. OCS ROI Tracking: Tracks cost savings of deploying OCS for internal and PSTN dial-in conferences based on per-user per-minute savings.

Complimentary to PowerView is PowerPlan, which allows global OCS enterprises for the first time to develop a comprehensive bandwidth model for their actual OCS bandwidth consumption across all the network nodes and links of interest, including all branch offices in the enterprise.

PowerPlan lets enterprises simulate the impact of OCS workloads across a representation of their entire enterprise network, and thereby estimate the maximal bandwidth consumption on each link in actual operation. PowerPlan factors in current network consumption by other applications on the enterprise network, and can provide an integrated picture of network needs, both in the planning phase itself and on an ongoing basis as OCS usage and other network applications change over time.  By understanding actual usage, enterprises can refine bandwidth consumption models using PowerPlan.

Used together, PowerPlan and PowerView enable an enterprise to “right-size” its network for OCS on a continuous basis. Read more about PowerPlan and PowerView on our Product page. Let us know how you're managing your OCS usage today, what's working, what's not, and if you think PowerView and PowerPlan can help.

Upgrading from an evaluation version to a fully licensed version of a product is a frequent outcome of a pilot or lab deployment project. After all, why go through all the trouble to deploy a complex environment again, if you already have a working one?

Over the years, this has come up regularly for LCS and OCS, and I wanted to give a quick summary of the process for Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (covered in this TechNet bulletin), especially considering that there is a major caveat that you should be aware of early in the process.

The in-place upgrade from evaluation to fully licensed version can ONLY be performed if you are using Volume Licensed editions of OCS.

If you are using non Volume Licensed editions, then the only supported technique is to do a separate server or pool install, and then migrate the users to the new server/pool.

In either case (Using Volume or Non Volume editions of the software), you do *NOT* need to upgrade/replace the following roles, as they do not need a license key to install, and will not expire:

• Mediation Server 
• Archiving Server 
• Monitoring Server 
• Communicator Web Access
• Group Chat Server 

 This means that the only server roles you DO need to upgrade/migrate from evaluation to fully licensed are: 

• Director
• The core server/pool roles where users would be homed (SE or EE makes no difference)
• The Edge Server roles.

In the case of a Director, it’s probably easiest to simply deactivate the server role, uninstall the Eval software and re-install with the fully licensed media. Since there are no users to migrate, this can be accomplished with only minimal downtime, even if there is not a load balanced group of directors to provide HA. The alternative is to bring up a new director server, and then change the IP address and settings on the other servers to point to the new Director.

Please do read the TechNet documentation for details and planning guidance on the upgrade process, but I wanted to highlight the issues around non Volume Licensed editions and upgrades.

One of the papers I authored back in June of 2008 was the following whitepaper, published through Microsoft.  http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=5ec060fd-ba9a-4c52-8bd8-148f502b791f&displaylang=en  It references a bandwidth calculator that I created and have posted as a link to this blog.  The calculator is just in Beta form and only covers OCS 2007 scearnios.  It may contain bugs and there are some limitations, such as lack of support for time zone considerations and not factoring address book download.  It also requires fairly intimate knowledge of OCS scenarios, so you wouldn't want a customer to fill this out without some guidance.  If you have any customers that need guidance on bandwidth planning, let me know and we'd be happy to assist.

We're currently working on an R2 offering that will take this spreadsheet to the next level.  I'll keep you posted when I have more concrete details on that.

 -Alan

BW Calculation v1.0 Beta.xlsx (350.50 kb)