Testing Office Communicator remote connectivity against Access Edge server - tip #1

Recently I was working with a customer, where we had to deploy Office Communications Server 2007 (Release Candidate at the time) to their production environment. As it turned out when setting up Access Edge-role in their DMZ, remote Office Communicator (MOC) clients couldn't connect to it. At first we thought it was a certificate issue because of all the hassle you have with setting up MTLS, TLS and SSL-certificates to get OCS 2007 fully deployed.

Finally we tried tweaking with the client - by default, MOC is configured to contact OCS via TLS, so it should use port 443/TCP. This is something you can specify on the Access Edge (5061/TCP or 443/TCP) for clients. As it turned out, due to a feature, bug or position of the stars: if the MOC client is unmanaged, you need to manually specify the port in the External Address. Thus, you need to manually specify the port also (the radio button for TLS/TCP is not enough). This is the correct value then: ocs-edge-server.domain.com:443.

I'll keep you posted with additional OCS 2007 tips from the field.