One of the big beefs with using OCS as a VoIP PBX is the lack of any QoS or synthetic transactions to ensure the end user QoE is up to par. Microsoft addresses that issue with the QMS server, short for Microsoft Office Communications 2007 Quality of Experience Monitoring Server.
This is another “server role” for OCS 2007. Sure it’s another server, but can be combined on similiar hardware with other roles. It requires a SQL database for issue tracking and aggregation and offers some great features. Because of the SQL backend, custom reports from SQL RS should be easy. From the [url=http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2007/10/31/23.aspx]OCS team blog[/url]:
“Unlike traditional approaches to voice quality which start and end at the quality of the network, QMS represents a whole new way of thinking about voice quality. The QMS is a pure software-based solution that monitors voice quality using all the information collected by the endpoints, MOS (mean opinion score), loss, jitter, delay, device quality and over a dozen other parameters that are used to determine quality. All this great data allows administrators to not only monitor the quality of the calls but also gives them the ability to slice and dice call data to diagnose issues at their source.”
[url=http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=09115944-625f-460b-b09c-51e3c96e9f7e&displaylang=en]You can download the QMS server software for free here.[/url]
