Dial In Conferencing was a feature added in OCS R2 and has been modified since the initial release by the Patches released in April and July.
The purpose of this post is to cover off the changes in the July Patch.
The first change is to the Announcements made during the login phase. “Authenticated User” has been replaced for “Leader” and a Leader is now required to login to conferences protected by a PIN.
Previously if a conference was protected by a PIN the Leader or any Authenticate users did not need to login, this has now changed.
It should be noted that while the prompt says Leader, anyone who has an Extension and PIN on the OCS System can login. Microsoft have purely just changed Authenticated to Leader.
The main thing I wanted to comment on though is that a user can now enter their Extension rather than their full DDI to login as an authenticated user.
So if my Extension is 1234 and my DDI is +44201231234. I can now enter 1234 or 44201231234, being able to enter the Extension does make life a bit easier.
So now that I can save a second or two when logging into conference calls I became interested in how OCS or more specifically the Conference Attendant translates 1234 to +44201231234 in order to look up my User in Active Directory and check that my PIN is valid.
In order to translate the Extension number into the E.164 number it uses the Location Profile assigned to the Pool. For many organisation this would not be an issue but for Organisation who assign different Location Profiles to each user, using an Extension would result in failures.
Using multiple Location Profiles are common in situations were Companies are using OCS to replace multiple independent PBXs with overlapping Dial Plans. Something which is made easier in R2 (R1 required Group Policy Settings).
So while for the majority of OCS Users using the Extension may be possible for some organisations it will cause issues. Personally I would prefer to have an option to turn this off and for Voice Prompts to just say enter your Full Phone Number.
I am also unsure how this will work in OCS Deployments that have multiple Pools as I am assuming OCS will use the Location Profile in the Pool that the Conference is Hosted on, which again will create issues were extensions overlap.
The last area of confusion for me is Communicator Web Access (CWA). The July CWA update adds in an Extension field as shown below:
I am unsure how the Phone Extension is worked out, since it does not appear to come from active directory as for all instances it appears to be calculated as detailed above and Normalisation Rules are one way.
I might get a surprise tomorrow when I login, some overnight process might run and populate the field and get rid of the error.
Or I am missing something in Active Directory, if I do find out there is an AD field I will update the post.
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