Back to Day 1
Wednesday
Keynote (Terry Myerson)
In my opinion, this keynote was better than Tuesday’s keynote, which is an odd thing to say considering that Gurdeep overall did a better job of presenting. I think what I liked about this presentation were the number of times that I felt that Microsoft made themselves truly vulnerable. No big company is perfect, and when you ship the amount of code that Microsoft ships, you probably ship significantly more bugs than the average company. Terry was straightforward about a number of problems that have happened in the past year (they even showed the code that shipped that caused the leap year bug), but he also said that they were lessons learned for the Exchange team. The overall feeling that I had walking out of the keynote was that the Exchange team treated me very much like an old friend: they were affable, and comfortable talking frankly about very sensitive matters.
Microsoft’s Quality of Experience: Defending, Deploying, and Succeeding (Neil Deason; Sam Chon)
Neil Deason has been involved in a number of the sessions I’ve attended, and I’ve been very impressed with him every time he speaks. In contrast to my previous comment about an argument relating to ports on firewalls, Neil’s presentation today was very solid (the same argument re: ports notwitholding). The emphasis of this session was not conveyed well by the title; the real thing we learned here was how to ensure that we have a consistent and good QoE. There was at least one interesting discussion about why audio conferences use the Siren codec rather than the typical RTAudio codec. The response was that computing power isn’t yet at the point where RTAudio streams can be decoded and encoded in scale amounts. When computing power reaches that point, Microsoft will definitely look at using the RTAudio codec in favor of Siren. Until then, those of us who use audio conferencing and have a discerning ear will notice a drop in call quality when shifting to using Siren.
Probably the thing that I found most interesting was something anecdotal. There was a conversation about ambient noise on the voice conversation, and Mu Han related that they had received so much feedback from customers stating that the ambient noise level was so low that they couldn’t tell whether or not the person was still on the other end of the line. His statement, and I’m not at all qualified to rate the degree to which he was being facetious, was that they were seriously thinking about reintroducing a higher level of ambient noise in future versions of OCS. I’ve never heard of a product purposefully introducing more noise – that speaks pretty highly for call quality and their existing noise filtering mechanisms.
Planning and Deploying Voice Routes in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 using Enterprise Voice Route Helper (Byron Spurlock)
This was another excellent session with Byron, this time about using the Enterprise Voice Route Helper. The Route Helper tool is designed to help configure dial plans and other facets of outbound routing. My development background has involved a fairly significant amount of experience with regular expressions, which was what Byron emphasized several times as one of the most important features of this tool. If you have regular expressions experience (even if it’s only a little experience), you might find other facets of the tool more helpful. I especially liked the ability to set up and save test cases, which may help to validate that changes to the outbound routing achieve the expected result. Another tidbit from this session is the best practice of setting up your phone usages to align with actual phone usages. Microsoft’s recommended best practice is to create a local, national, and international usage at a minimum. Routes, on the other hand, should align with their “break-out point”, the physical location where a media gateway connects to the PSTN. There should be at least one route for each distinct break-out point.
Diagnose and Solve Voice Quality Issues with Microsoft OCS 2007 Quality of Experience Monitoring Server (Wajih Yahyaoui; Jisun Park)
I sat and had lunch with Ji Sun before this session. We talked about what he had done before coming to Microsoft (he had just finished his PhD in Texas) and what he was doing now. My impression overall, which was only reinforced during the session, is that Ji Sun is profoundly intelligent but very quiet. This session was primarily a further exposition on Microsoft’s philosophy of QoE, and an introduction to one of the tools available to diagnose QoE: the Monitoring Server. The QoE Monitoring Server shipped after OCS was released to manufacturing. At the most fundamental level, the QoE Monitoring Server is a database which collects metrics sent in by OCS endpoints. These metrics primarily revolve around MOS scores. In most cases, MOS scores are subjective opinions (hence the name) of call quality. Microsoft made an attempt at a more objective score, but maintained the legacy name “MOS”. Furthermore, Microsoft breaks MOS down into distinct categories of sending, receiving, network, et cetera. Some basic analytics are run on the metrics after they are collected, but for the most part the OCS administrator should expect to spend some time deciphering MOS scores, dropped packets, and jitter by looking at lots of numbers. The top layer for the QoE Monitoring Server consists of a report pack for SQL Server Reporting Services that give a nicer visual indicator of overall QoE health. As a personal anecdote, I’ll add that developing reports in SSRS is a headache, but once they are developed, the reports support e-mail based subscriptions so that a user may receive a report in his/her inbox every hour, day, etc.
Advanced Troubleshooting for Voice in Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 (Byron Spurlock; Roy Kuntz)
This session was really a wrap-up of Byron’s other two sessions re: tools for managing and troubleshooting OCS problems. We reviewed and went into more depth on Snooper, we looked more at the Enterprise Voice Route Helper, and we talked about the Office Communications Server 2007 VoIP Troubleshooting Guide. The VoIP Troubleshooting Guide was authored in large part by Roy Kuntz and is an excellent document for identifying available tools for troubleshooting VoIP issues.
Birds of a Feather
Birds of a feather was designed to be a small roundtable discussion that ran from six to nine. David and I spent most of our time at the QoE vs. QoS discussion. Most of the people at the table noted that the session was pretty poorly named. Microsoft as an entity does not see QoE as an alternative to QoS, but they do embrace the philosophy that you should only implement QoS if necessary. In an ideal world, QoE and proactive monitoring will preempt the need for QoS. The discussion at the table was largely driven by us – there were four or five Microsoft personnel, a Psytechnics representative, and an occasional conference attendee. We were able to go through some of our concerns in detail and have a large amount of time for Microsoft to specifically address our concerns.
Overall, a great second day, but there was so much information and so little time.
