Exchange 2007 Roll-up 5 Released

Exchange 2007 RU5 was released yesterday approximately 6 weeks after RU4 was released. The current release corrects numerous bugs with the complete list found athttp://support.microsoft.com/kb/941421. The roll-up does not require a reboot but may take a considerable amount of time to install so be prepared. In testing I have not encountered any issues installing the roll-up and unlike RU4 all services did start as expected. Expect to see the RU released via Microsoft Update the first half of December. Until then, you can download the update directly from Microsoft Download at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=652ed33a-11a1-459c-8ffe-90b9cbfe7903&displaylang=en&tm.


Changing the External OCS ABS/Web Conferencing URL

It is not uncommon that I am asked "How do I change the external URL for conferencing within OCS?" There are multiple reasons for a user needing/wanting to change the URL, most often it being either they skipped the entry during setup (it does say <optional>) or the have decided to change the name. Whatever the reason is, the actual update is simple.

The update it self is updating the SQL or MSDE database with the new information. While it is possible to manually 'hack' the database and edit the tables directly, the UC team has made the process much easier using LCSCMD. LCSCMD is a command line application that may be found on the OCS server CD under setup or on your C drive of an OCS server located at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007.

To execute the command, simply type:

Lcscmd /web /action:updatepoolurls /externalwebfqdn:externalserver.dnsname.com /poolname:poolname

The externalserver.dnsname.com is the DNS name that is resolvable from the outside and is your 'reverse proxy' role as defined in the documentation. the poolname is only the short name of the pool. For SE this would be your server name (server.contoso.com would be server) and for EE it is the common pool name (pool01.contoso.com would be pool01).