Before you can plan for an Office Communications Server 2007 deployment, you have to be clear about the deployment goals. Deployment goals are not just the selection of scenarios that will become enabled; you must also be sure that the Office Communications Server 2007 infrastructure complies with the reliability and regulatory requirements of the enterprise.
The available scenarios with Office Communications Server 2007 can be found in Part III. It is neither necessary to always enable all scenarios, nor is it technically required to always enable selected scenarios for the entire user population. Furthermore, it is possible to enable additional scenarios even after the initial deployment. Office Communications Server 2007 allows you to enable scenarios on a per-user basis.
Contoso wants to enable the scenarios shown in Table 11-2 for its users on the various sites.
Table 11-2. Contoso Selected Scenarios per Site
Scenario/sites | Chicago | Paris | Madrid | Singapore |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Instant Messaging (IM) and Presence | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Conferencing with Audio/Video | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Remote Access Scenario for IM and Presence | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Remote Access Scenario for A/V and Conferencing | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Federation Scenario | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
PIC Scenario | — | — | — | — |
Phone Control Scenario | — | — | — | — |
✓ (only for 100 users) | - | ✓ | — |
Note
Because the PBX in Madrid is already nine years old, it makes sense to investigate whether all PBX users or just a subset of those users can be migrated to Voice over IP (VoIP) by enabling the Enterprise Voice Scenario as part of the Office Communications Server 2007 deployment. The integration of one of the telephone scenarios as presented in Chapter 9, "Understanding the Remote Call Control Scenario," or Chapter 10, "VoIP Scenario," adds another dimension to the planning process, as the existing telephone environment has to be included.
Contoso wants to get experience with the VoIP Scenarios (also known as Enterprise Voice) offered by Office Communications Server 2007. Therefore Contoso management decides that all users in the Madrid office will use the Enterprise Voice Scenario of Office Communications Server 2007 as their primary enterprise telephone solution. Management makes this decision because Madrid has only standard office information worker users, who are able to accomplish their daily work with the feature set that the current 2007 version of Office Communicator and Office Communicator Phone Edition provide.
Important
Voicemail functionality is another key functionality for information workers. In Office Communications Server 2007 environments, this functionality is provided by Microsoft Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging (UM) SP1. Exchange UM will be covered in this and the following chapter only from the Office Communications Server perspective. If Microsoft Exchange 2007 is not implemented in your infrastructure, you need to start planning for this by using the planning guidance available with Microsoft Exchange 2007.
Contoso management realizes that by enabling Enterprise Voice for a subset of users those users have to get used to it by exploring its features and discovering the benefits of Unified Communications, such as secure, seamless, multimodal communications. These benefits will outweigh, for Contoso, the potential regression experienced because some previously used telephone feature is no longer available. In addition, Contoso wants to equip about 100 users in the Chicago headquarters with the Enterprise Voice Scenario as a pilot project used in conjunction with the existing PBX system.
IM, Presence, Conferencing, and VoIP Scenarios have been identified by Contoso as business-critical applications. The importance of these features needs to be factored into the planning process for the Office Communications Server 2007 deployment. Whenever possible, single-point-of-failure situations should be eliminated to achieve high availability of the system and fault tolerance for the most common failure situations.
Remote access scenarios are seen as business critical only for the Chicago and Paris sites, because a larger number of users are frequently working from home and therefore need to have reliable access from remote sites to the Office Communications Server 2007 infrastructure. For the Madrid and Singapore offices, the Remote Access Scenario is not seen as business critical.