OfficeMaster Card/Gate gateway for Office Communications Server 2007
For the past few days - I've installed a demo system to the show enterprise voice capabilities of Office Communications Server 2007.
We've found a reasonably attractive solution for a small enterprise like ours to install the components and connect a mediation server to ISDN.
Ferrari electronic AG - a Germany based producer of office integration systems - both hardware and software - offers a small box (you can get it as an internal card as well) which serves as a voip/isdn gateway for Exchange 2007 unified messaging (Exchange 2007 UM) and Office Communications Server 2007.
We acquired the version which offers 4 S0 ports - with a simple ethernet port on the other side.
First of all, OCS2007 seems far more complex than most other Microsoft server backend products that I've come accross - basically because it doesn't offer out of the box functionality for what we wanted to achieve - enterprise voice.
You do need to install at least 2 servers for a pure internal use - at least 3 if you want to access OCS features over the internet.
And don't forget you do need a SQL backend server if you want to use the enterprise version of OCS.
Anyway, getting the OfficeMaster Card/Gate to run is quite simple - the only tricky part is to create normalization rules for incoming and outgoing phone numbers - as OCS 2007 internally speaks the E.164 format (+countrycodeareacodenumber) without any spaces or dots or zeros at the beginning. And ISDN (at least over here in Stuttgart, Germany) uses a single 0 to signal in country and 00 for out of country calls - and no 0 for in city calls.
On the mediation server settings, just set the IP of the box under PSTN Gateway next hop - port 5060 is fine.
Cheers
Frank
Appendix - incoming and outgoing rules in the OfficeMaster Card/Gate configuration utiliy
These rules work for our demo environment - using 2 of our external ISDN S0 ports.
Incoming rules
Set your mediation server IP (or probably your Exchange 2007 UM IP if only using Exchange 2007 UM (I haven't verified functionality yet)) in all incoming rules
1- foreign
Called Party Number: (.*) - replace with: +49711\1
Calling Party Number: (00)(.*) - replace with: +\3
Calling Party Number 2: (.*) - replace with: \4
Redirected Number: (.*) - replace with: \5
do not use other rules
2- same country
Called Party Number: (.*) - replace with: +49711\1
Calling Party Number: 0(.*) - replace with: +49\2
Calling Party Number 2: (.*) - replace with: \3
Redirected Number: (.*) - replace with: \4
do not use other rules
3- rest
Called Party Number: (.*) - replace with: +49711\1
Calling Party Number: (.*) - replace with: +49711\2
Calling Party Number 2: (.*) - replace with: \3
Redirected Number: (.*) - replace with: \4
do not use other rules
outgoing rules
1- same country
Called Party Number: (\+49)(.*) - replace with: 0\2
Calling Party Number: (\+49711)(.*) - replace with: \4
Redirected Number: (.*) - replace with: \5
do not use other rules
2- foreign
Called Party Number: (\+)(.*) - replace with: 00\2
Calling Party Number: (\+49711)(.*) - replace with: \4
Redirected Number: (.*) - replace with: \5
do not use other rules
3- rest
Called Party Number: (.*) - replace with: \1
Calling Party Number: (\+49711)(.*) - replace with: \3
Redirected Number: (.*) - replace with: \4
do not use other rules