TANDBERG V 11.8 manual Impacts on the Exchange server, Logging

Technical Description

Both TMS and Exchange have their own database for booking information. For Exchange the database contains resource availability based on free/busy information for resource accounts. This information is stored in Exchange mail- boxes and public folders.

TMS knows the resource availability based on its SQL Server database. That means that there are two different systems that are separate, but must show the same resource availability.

Two Exchange terms are important in the Exchange Integration; sinks and syn- chronization. A sink is a Microsoft concept in Exchange where the sink is a ‘hook’ which allows another process to be ran when calendar data is written. This is used for intercepting meeting reservations in Exchange, making sure that the meeting is validated and stored in TMS before the meeting is stored in Exchange. A result from a sink is either true or false, so if true is returned the meeting is booked in Exchange as well. If it is false, an e-mail is sent to the requester describing why the meeting could not be booked on the TMS server, and the meeting booking is aborted.

A synchronizer is used to ‘sync’ the data between the TMS server and Ex- change. Meetings that are booked in TMS will be duplicated in the Exchange database by the synchronizer. This syncronizer is run every 5 minutes, making sure that meetings created in TMS are also copied to Exchange. In addition, each time a meeting is booked in TMS, an e-mail is sent to the TMS-service account. The TMS-Service mailbox has a sink installed that triggers the syn- cronizer when it receives e-mails.

Impacts on the Exchange server

In order for the Exchange Integration to function, the installer must make some changes to the Exchange environment and server. The following changes are made by the installer:

•Creates a Windows service for the synchronizer to run as – runs as LocalSystem

•Creates a tms-service account in the current Windows domain

–Uses a strong password, can be changed via Configuration Tool

•Creates mailbox for the tms-service account and configures the required settings and sinks

•Adds 6 role-restricted COM+ components. These run as tms-service

•Creates an address book in Exchange that will automatically list all TMS integrated rooms

–Can be safely removed

•Creates a new local Windows user account named tmsconfuser on the TMS Server (Normal Windows User privileges only)

–Alternatively the installer can use a pre-defined account on the TMS server

–Assigns the tmsconfuser a special Exchange Integration Account permission in TMS

•Creates some registry values, among others, an encrypted representation of the password of the TMS server user

•Creates 2 Security Groups

–One for users who can book, and one for ‘admins’ who can access other people’s bookings in resource calendars

Logging

TANDEBERG log files are available at the installation directory of the integra-