Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 plugin for Quick dialling from any application like Skype

I always wanted the functionality of select and call a number with Office Communicator from any window. I found an application that exactly does that. It is similar to Skype plugin for Internet Explorer and Firefox as shown here.

The German company ESTOS has developed this ‘helper’ for Office Communicator.

After you install this application, it assigns a default Windows Hotkey F8 for all applications. So when you are reading a mail in your Outlook, and you want to call a number that was listed in there, just select/highlight the number and press F8. The number will be dialled with Office Communicator. You can customise this Hotkey at anytime from Options window.

If the selected text contains a phone number, a phone conversation is started. If the text contains a Sip address (an @ in the text), an instant message conversation is started.

Download this useful application from ESTOS website in your localised language.

Download a free copy of ESTOS PhoneTools

Communicator Add In for Outlook 2007

 Michael Dunn, a Senior Consultant for Microsoft developed an Add-In for Outlook 2007 which allows you to view and interact with your entire contact list from Office Communicator 2007.

This Add-In allows users to keep working in Outlook as well as view presence, call or instant message thier contacts. Outlook already gives you presence and functionality to communicate with the people for the currently selected email, but if you want to communicate with some one that isn’t included on the original email, you’d have to switch to Communicator. The idea behind this Add-In is that a lot of people spend the majority of their day in Outlook, so why do should you have to switch to another program to get presence and communicate with them?

The application with source code is available at http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/Communicator4Outlook

An other intresting Add-in for Outlook is Xobni. Xobni (Inbox spelled in reverse) is the Outlook plug-in that saves you time finding email conversations, contacts and attachments. It provides threaded conversations, Email analytics, personal assistant (for those who cant afford one) etc… Here is my outlook with both the plug-ins in action.

Communicator & Xobni for Outlook 2007

Backup user information for Office Communications Server

If you are un-installing the trial version of OCS 2007 and are upgrading to RTM, you can export all the user information and then import back to the RTM version using DBImpExp.exe tool.

Office Communications Server 2007 DBImpExp.exe tool is required for this operation. Do not use the LCS 2005 version of this tool. The Office Communications Server 2007 User Services database (the RTC database) must be available when you perform this procedure, but users should not sign in while you are running the DBImpExp tool. To prevent users from signing in, stop the Communications Server service on the Office Communications Server 2007 server.

The default location for the DBImpExp.exe tool is located in the <drive>:Program Files\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007\Server\Support folder of a server on which Office Communications Server 2007 is installed.

In order to export user information of every user hosted on the pool or server, run following command on the OCS Front End Server.

 

Standard Edition Server: dbimpexp.exe /hrxmlfile:”%temp%\SavedUserData.xml”

Enterprise Pool: dbimpexp.exe /hrxmlfile:”%temp%\SavedUserData.xml” /sqlserver:<SQL_Hostname>

 

Run the following command(s) to import the backed-up user information on the target server.

 

Standard Edition Server: dbimpexp.exe /import /hrxmlfile:”%temp%\SavedUserData.xml”

Enterprise Pool: dbimpexp.exe /import /hrxmlfile:”%temp%\SavedUserData.xml” /sqlserver:<SQL_Hostname>
 

If you just want to export and import contact list of one or few particular user(s):

add another parameter /user:<sip URL> to the above commands.

 

Dbimpexp.exe tool is case sensitive when using /user: parameter. If the text in the /user:switch does not match the case sensitivity exactly as it is stored in the database, an error occurs. The user portion of the URI must be exactly the same as the user portion of the SIP URI stored in Active Directory and the host portion of the URI must be entirely in lowercase.