OCS 2007 R2: Microsoft’s Supreme Arrogance
Am I the only one who finds it surpremely arrogant that OCS 2007 R1 did not work on Windows 2008 or 64 bit Windows Server, but OCS 2007 R2 requires 64 bit Windows Server?
And to ”upgrade”, you either need to build out completely new servers, add them in, and remove the old ones (only an option for users of Enterprise Edition), or to backup the config, uninstall, upgrade the servers, reinstall, and reload the config. What kind of upgrade path is that? Does Microsoft want people to do this upgrade? They make me wish I had waited 4 months on the OCS deployment, and just gone straight to R2, especially since R2 has a feature that we’ve been dying for (the Web-based client to be able to participate in conferences/desktop sharing).
Overall, I use the Microsoft “enterprise stack” for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that, as certified partners, we get most of it for free. I’d also rather deal with a single, integrated stack than to cobble together things from various “best of breed” solutions, which often end up to rarely be “best” or “solutions” anyways. But stuff like this is just rediculous. It isn’t like they jumped a version number, like SQL Server 2005 to SQL Server 2008 (or Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007). Maybe I’m just being mad because they are calling it “OCS 2007 R2″ instead of “OCS 2009″. But honestly, there is no good reason why R1 could not have shipped in a 64 bit version from where I sit, and R2 really does not have enough new functionality to be called “2009″.
J.Ja