Johann's Unified Communications : federation

OCS Federation updates

jkruse — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:04:24 GMT

Some great news announced overnight…

Starting October 1, 2009, a PIC License will no longer be required for federation with American Online (AOL). Customers qualify for federation with AOL if they have Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Standard CAL or active Software Assurance on their current LCS/OCS license.
Microsoft is also releasing the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 XMPP Gateway at no additional licensing cost that allows basic Presence sharing and instant messaging (IM) with XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) networks Jabber and Google Talk. For Office Communications Server customers, this means Jabber and GoogleTalk users can now be part of Office Communications Server IM contacts.

Starting today, the Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 XMPP Gateway can be downloaded here, while a video that explains how the Gateway works can be viewed here.

Read the press release and an interview with Eric Swift at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2009/oct09/10-01ucinterop.mspx

Changes in OCS Public IM Federation

jkruse — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:54:13 GMT

From the OCS Team Blog….

Federation is an important goal for the Office Communications Server team and we are excited to announce several changes to public IM federation between Office Communications Server and public IM networks, effective July 1, 2009:

The Live Communications Sever Public IM Connectivity (LCS PIC) license will be renamed Office Communications Server Public IM Connectivity (OCS PIC) license.
Customers with Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Standard CAL or Office Communications Server 2007/Live Communications Server 2005 SP1 Standard CAL with Software Assurance will no longer require an additional license to federate with Windows Live. (A license will still be required for federation with AOL & Yahoo!.)
With Windows Live federation, customers will be able to add Windows Live contacts to their Office Communicator contact list, view presence and send and receive instant messages.

We will continue to work with our partners to enable more options that allow you to communicate seamlessly with customers, partners, friends and family on different networks. For more information on public IM connectivity with Office Communications Server, please go to http://www.microsoft.com/communicationsserver/en/us/public-im-connectivity.aspx

Microsoft, IBM Announce Inter-Domain Presence Federation

jkruse — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 05:39:08 GMT

News from VoiceCon San Francisco, over at No Jitter…

http://www.nojitter.com/blog/archives/2008/11/microsoft_ibm_a.html

Creating OCS Access Edge DNS SRV records in BIND

jkruse — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 11:25:00 GMT

The OCS deployment guides have step-by-step instructions on creating the necessary DNS SRV records in Windows DNS Server, but what if you're using BIND as your external Internet-facing DNS server?

First you'll need an A record for the external IP address of your Access Edge:

e.g. sip.contoso.com -> 192.168.0.1

And you'll need the relevant SRV records for federation and remote user access:

e.g. _sipfederationtls._tcp.contoso.com and _sip._tls.contoso.com

So what should these look like in BIND?

_sipfederationtls._tcp.contoso.com. 86400 IN SRV 0 0 5061 sip.contoso.com.

_sip._tls.contoso.com. 86400 IN SRV 0 0 443 sip.contoso.com.

If we break that down:

_sipfederationtls._tcp.contoso.com. - that is the SRV record name. Notice the '.' on the end.

86400 - that is the TTL, in seconds.

IN - class

SRV - the record type

0 - priority

0 - weight

5061 - port number

sip.contoso.com. - the A record of the Access Edge. Notice the '.' on the end.

More information on this at http://www.zytrax.com/books/dns/ch8/srv.html

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