OCS Ethical Walls

I do a lot of work with OCS 2007 and its R2 friend.  One of the challenges that I’ve come in contact with is the prevention of certain users from contacting other users (perhaps those higher up the food chain).  Contrary to some beliefs, not everyone should be able to just IM the CEO of a Fortune 100 company!  There was a great posting today that came across my Google Reader about ethical walls for school districts which can be found here from the UC Amigos.  Check it out, download the sample API tool and let me know if you have success!

The cousin of OCS, Exchange, just recently went 2010 flavor as I am sure you already know.  Ethical walls were introduced in EX 07 and have been GREATLY enhanced in 2010.  These walls can be set up for a variety of reasons, regulatory coming to mind quickly.  One good example of combining these EX walls with OCS walls gets into using your AD containers and OUs to match up with the walls you need to define.  That assumes, of course, that your AD is laid out well…another several blog posts later 🙂