3.6 Enable Audio/Video Conferencing and Web Conferencing

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 will reach end of support on January 9, 2018. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.

Note

Instant messaging and presence are enabled by default when you deploy Office Communications Server. If your organization plans to support only instant messaging and presence features, you can skip to the next deployment task.

In Office Communications Server, conferencing enables Office Communications Server users to organize and invite other users to Web conferences that are hosted on your own on-premise servers. The default meeting policy, which all users are initially configured to use , prevents users from organizing conferences that use the Web conferencing or audio/video (A/V) conferencing features. To allow access to these features, you must configure a policy that enables Web conferencing and A/V conferencing and then assign this policy to your users. You can define the policy to as a global policy so that it applies to all users, or you can apply the policy on a per-user basis.

The meeting policy that applies to a meeting organizer also applies to all attendees of the meeting. For example, if Bob organizes a meeting with IP audio enabled and the meeting policy for Sue does not allow her to use IP audio, as an attendee of Bobs meeting Sue will be able to use IP audio. If, however, Sue organizes a meeting, all attendees of this meeting will use her meeting policy and so no IP audio will be available.

To configure Audio/Video and Web conferencing

  1. Log on as a member of the RTCUniversalServerAdmins group to an Office Communications Server or to any computer that is joined to an internal domain and that has the Office Communications Server administrative tools installed.

  2. Click Start, click Control Panel, click Administrative Tools, and then click Office Communications Server 2007.

  3. Right-click the Forest node, click Properties, and then click Global Properties.

  4. Click Meetings, and then do one of the following:

    • To allow all users to organize Web conferences that include anonymous participants, click Anonymous participants, and then click Allow users to invite anonymous participants.

    • To prevent all users from organizing Web conferences that include anonymous participants, click Anonymous participants, and then click Disallow users from inviting anonymous participants.

    • To allow only some users to organize Web conferences that include anonymous participants, click Anonymous participants, and then click Enforce per user. By default, all users are allowed to organize Web conferences that include anonymous participants unless you disallow them individually as described in 4.3 Configure Users in this document.

  5. In the Policy Definition list, click the name of a policy, and then click Edit.

  6. In the Edit Policy dialog box, select the Enable Web conferencing check box.

  7. To enable audio, select the Enable IP audio.

  8. To enable video, select Enable IP video.

  9. Click OK.

  10. Click Apply.

  11. After you finish editing the features that are enabled by each policy, decide which policy to apply to Web conferences organized by users. Do one of the following:

    • To apply the same policy to all users, click Global policy, and then click the name of the policy that defines the features that you want to enable for all users.

    • To apply different policies to different users, click Global policy, and then click Use per user policy. Ensure that you follow the procedures in 4.3 Configure Users in this document to configure the Web conferencing policy for individual users.

  12. When you are finished, click OK.

For more information about administering Web and A/V conferencing features, refer to the Introduction to Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Administration Guide.

If you expect heavy audio/video traffic in your environment, you can optimize your network adapter settings to accommodate this volume. See Appendix B: Optimizing Your Network Adapter for High Audio/Video Traffic in this document for more information.