In a follow-up to some of the features I briefly mentioned in a previous article here is a more in-depth look at some additional new features currently in the CS ‘14’ beta software which have been covered in various presentations throughout TechEd 2010 this month.
Enterprise Voice Features
Site Resiliency
With the addition of a ‘Site’ component in Communications Server user services can now be balanced and protected against device and site failures by associating users with more than one location. Data Center and main office locations with full CS server deployments are defined as a Central Site while small and medium remote offices where a Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) is installed is deemed a Branch Site. Each Enterprise Voice enabled user is then associated with a primary site and secondary, backup site automatically by virtue or simply registering with the primary site under normal conditions.
One of the new server components found in the Front-End server role is the Registrar. The Registrar service handles Communicator end-point login and connections to CS. This component lives on both a Front-End server role (both Standard Edition and Enterprise Edition) and on an SBA.
For clients located in a branch office with the SBA configured as their primary registrar those users can be serviced by another pool in a central site in the event that the SBA fails. In the case of a WAN outage or loss of connection to the primary pool in the central site the branch office users are still signed-in to their Communicator client, but only Enterprise Voice features are available along with peer-to-peer communications between users in that ‘orphaned’ office location.
Call Admission Control
Call Admission Control (CAC) is basically a fancy name for bandwidth management of voice call routing, which determines whether or not an audio or video session can (and should) be established based on taking real-time measurements of the network conditions. It is applied to media flow traversing LAN/WAN network segments but does not extend out to communications across the Internet or PSTN.
Mediation Server Bypass
This feature (also referred to simply as media bypass) offers bandwidth savings and can help improve call quality by reducing latency, removing transcoding, and minimizing the potential for additional packet routing problems to impact the communications.
Multiple Gateway Support
Unlike previous in versions of OCS where a mediation server could only be configured to communicate with a single gateway the Mediation Server role can now configured to handle multiple routes so many media gateways can be configured to route calls to the same Mediation Server. This can greatly reduce the amount of on-site hardware required in some distributed deployment scenarios.
Private Telephone Lines
A user can now be configured with a second private telephone number which would not be listed anywhere in the directory for other users to browse and identify it. A special ring is associated with incoming calls directed to the private line number, and none of the advanced features (call forwarding, team ring, RGS, etc) are available.
Common Area Phones
Because the Polycom CX700 (Tanjay) device has always required a user to sign-in it has never been a good solution for open areas and shared workspaces to provide telephony services. With CS 14 come a host of new telephony end-points from various partners including Polycom and Aastra.
These devices can register directly to Communications Server using a dedicated AD object and provide for, at minimum, voice services at all times. Additionally CS Enterprise Voice enabled users can log into some devices using a PIN, brining their number and presence over to the device until they either sign-out or a time-out period is reached in which the phone reverts back to the standard number.