Author: Rob Pittfield

Publication date: January 2009

Product version: Office Communications Server 2007 R2

Another reason clients can have problems downloading the OCS Address Book is because the external download URL wasn’t set on initial installation.  It’s an optional setting during the initial deployment of OCS 2007 Standard Edition or the Web Components portion of an Expanded Enterprise Edition deployment.  This is a likely reason for the issue if the download is only failing for your external users and you have a Reverse Proxy deployed.

To ensure the path is set properly, open the OCS 2007 management console and select the server in a Standard Edition Deployment (or the pool name in an Enterprise Edition Deployment) and then expand the Address Book Server Settings:

If the line that’s called “File share URL for external connections:” is missing an HTTPS URL, this information wasn’t set during the initial deployment of OCS.  This must be set for external users to download the Address Book properly.  This address must resolve externally to the reverse proxy you have configured. 

If you don’t have access to the OCS 2007 Server Management console and want to find out if you have set the appropriate URL for external Address Book downloads, you can enable logging in the communicator client by selecting the “Turn on logging in Communicator” checkbox under Tools -> Options and then selecting the General tab.

Once you’ve enabled logging, sign into Office Communicator and then search for the string absExternalServerUrl in the Communicator-uccp log file. The log is located in %userprofile%\tracing\ on the client machine.  You can open it in Notepad or download the Snooper tool (part of the OCS 2007 Resource Kit). 

Example of this line in the uccp log file:
<absExternalServerUrl>https://ocswebext.domain.com/Abs/Ext/Handler</absExternalServerUrl>

If the information is not set on the OCS pool, this line will not contain a URL:
<absExternalServerUrl></absExternalServerUrl>

If this information is not set (or set incorrectly), the recommended method to update it is to use the LCSCmd.exe tool to update it - From the link:

To configure the external Web farm FQDN:

  1. Log on to the Standard Edition server or Enterprise Edition server in the pool with an account that is a member of RTCUniversalServerAdmins group or has equivalent permissions.
  2. Open a command prompt.
  3. Navigate to the \Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 directory.
  4. To set the external URL for the Web farm, type the following command:
    Lcscmd /web /action:updatepoolurls /externalwebfqdn:<WebfarmFQDN> /poolname:<poolname>
     

          For example:
Lcscmd /web /action:updatepoolurls /externalwebfqdn:ocswebext.contoso.com /poolname:ocspool


Once you’ve set the URL you should be able to see it in the “File share URL for external connections:” in the OCS 2007 MMC and in the <absExternalServerUrl> line in the client log file.  And hopefully the client will download the Address Book.

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