Prepare the OCS Server
Even though I'm not discussing how to actually install OCS here, you need to take some steps to prepare the server that OCS will be running on. More specifically, this means installing Windows onto the Server, and meeting a few other prerequisites.
OCS 2007 was released before Windows Server 2008, so this means that your OCS server is going to have to run Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition with SP1 or higher or Server 2003 R2. That’s just the beginning though. There is a whole laundry list of other software requirements for your OCS 2007 server.
You also need SQL Server 2005 with SP2 or higher. Generally speaking, your OCS deployment will perform better if SQL is installed onto a separate server, but for lab deployments or for small scale production deployments, you can get away with installing SQL server directly on your OCS server.
Although it isn’t going to be a problem for most organizations, you must also make sure that any Active Directory domains in which OCS servers will be present are running Windows 2000 Native Mode or higher.
One component that must be installed onto your OCS server is IIS 6.0. When you install IIS, you must make sure to install the Active Server Pages component.
The last prerequisite component that you need to have in place is an enterprise certificate authority. In most cases, an enterprise certificate authority should be installed on a dedicated server for performance and security reasons. In a lab environment or in a small company it is sometimes a common practice to install the certificate services onto a domain controller. If you need assistance with this step, then I recommend checking out this article by Robert McIntosh. Although the article pertains to Windows 2000, the steps involved in setting up an enterprise root certificate authority really haven't changed very much since the days of Windows 2000.
Create UNC Shares
Once the necessary DNS records are in place, create a few UNC shares on your OCS server. You can call these shares anything that you want, but it's important that you keep track of the names that you use, and that you create four separate shares. OCS can't use a single share for multiple purposes. The four shares that you will have to create are going to be used for meeting content, meeting metadata, meeting archives, and address book information.
The first three of these shares will be used to store data related to collaborative sessions. The Address book Information share will be used to store contact information for the OCS users. For our purposes, a default share will work fine. You don’t have to worry about applying any type of security to the shares right now, because you'll take care of that later in the configuration process.
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