Sharepoint 2007 and Instant Messaging

After installing Office Communications Server 2007 last week, I have now integrated it with our Sharepoint Learning Platform.

To do this, I first activated web access for the communications server as described here > http://www.ocspedia.com/CWA/Activate_CWA.htm This basically meant that users can simply browse to a web page and then launch a pop up window that allows them to instant message people from there, it also means users don't have to have a client such as MSN Messenger or Office Communicator installed.

I then created a new site in our portal and within that I added a 'Page Viewer' web part and pointed it to https://OurServerAddress/quicksignin . Now as soon as you browse to this page of our portal, Instant Messaging pops up and your are automatically signed in, hurrah!

Installing Office Communications Server 2007

Teachers at our school were beginning to ask about the possibility of adding Instant Messaging functionality to our Learning Platform, so I turned to Office Communications Server 2007. Today I got it all installed and working.

The installation wasn't as smooth as I'd hoped, this was due to some remnants of an old Live Communication Server 2005 installation we had messed around with a few years ago. Our Active Directory was a little confused to say the least and when trying to activate the new OCS 2007 server I was confronted with an error; 0xC3EC7814 Pool is not ready. When I first installed OCS2007 it seemed to be tying itself to the wrong location in AD, opening up ADSIEdit confirmed this.

In ADSIEdit, when I expanded the Domain > System > Policies > GUID of the Default Domain Policy, the RTC information was residing there. The correct location is Domain > System > Microsoft > RTC Service > Pools. I'm guessing if yours doesn't look like the screenshot below, you'll get the same error:




The solution for me was to run the following commands to unprep both our domains, then unprep our forest.

LCSCmd.exe /Domain[:] /Action:DomainUnPrep


LCSCmd.exe /Forest[:] /Action:ForestUnprep


Then from the OCS setup, prep the domain and forest again from scratch, installation was then successful.

Now it's all working, i'm very impressed. From within Sharepoint or Outlook (anywhere you see a person's name basically!) you can see their online presence (green dot for online, red dot for offline etc) and if you want, start an instant messaging session with them or transfer files etc.

You Tube within Sharepoint

It is possible to display videos from You Tube within any of your MOSS 2007 sites. Simple go to http://www.youtube.com/ and find a video you want to display. To the right of the video you'll see a section 'titled' embed with a load of code next to it. You need to highlight this code and copy it.

Next, navigate to your Sharepoint site, and add a 'Content Editor' web part. In the settings of this web part, click on 'source editor' and paste in the code you copied. It will look something like this:

Click 'save' and the editor will close, click 'ok' in the web part settings and you'll be taken back to your page. You're new You Tube video should be displayed there.

Learning Platform on my PS3

Over the course of this Summer I have installed Microsoft ISA Server 2006 as our firewall, this has given me the means to secure our Learning Platform with certificates and an 'https' address. The cool part though, is how simple it has been to get Forms Based Authentication (FBA) working, thus doing away with the pop up password prompt. This now allows access to our Learning Platform from a multitude of devices our students may have, Wii's, PS3's XBox 360's, PDA's etc. meaning they're never too far away from being able to access their homework!

See below for some images of my Playstation 3 accessing our school portal.

Podcasting Webpart

The Podcasting Kit for Sharepoint is now available for download here > http://www.codeplex.com/pks

It allows you to have a library of Podcasts hosted on your Sharepoint site and for other users to rate them YouTube style. Over the next few days i'll be integrating it with our Learning Platform. I shall post my findings here...