Best Practices for Your Core Infrastructure

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.

You have probably already taken steps to design fault tolerance in your system, using practices such as ensuring hardware redundancy, guarding against power loss, routinely installing security updates and antivirus measures, and monitoring server activity. These practices benefit not only your Office Communications Server 2007 R2 infrastructure, but also your entire network. If you have not implemented these practices, we recommend that you do so before deploying Office Communications Server 2007 R2.

To help protect the servers in your Office Communications Server 2007 R2 organization from accidental or purposeful harm that might result in downtime, take the following precautions:

• Keep your servers up-to-date with security updates. Subscribing to the Microsoft Security Notification Service helps ensure that you receive immediate notification of security bulletin releases for any Microsoft product. To subscribe, go to the Microsoft Technical Security Notifications Web site at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=145202.

• Ensure that access permissions are set up correctly.

• Keep your servers in a physical environment that prevents unauthorized access. Ensure that adequate antivirus software is installed on all your servers. Keep the software up-to-date with the latest virus signature files. Use the automatic update feature of your antivirus application to keep the virus signatures current.

• We recommend that you disable the Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008 operating system services that are not required on the computers where you install Office Communications Server.