I haven’t done a blog entry for awhile on InsideOCS because I have spent a lot of my extra time developing a small free tool called: The Remote UC Troubleshooting Tool (RUCT).
The tool was born out of my former MOCLogin troubleshooting tool, but I decided to rename it because of the expanded features and all [...]
A major upgrade is now available to my popular OCS and Lync Sign-In Troubleshooting Tool. This is a small free tool to help troubleshoot client-side Communicator, and now Lync, sign-in issues (see The OCS 2007 Automatic Sign-In Troubleshooting Tool V2.0 for more information on previous releases).
A major upgrade is now available to my popular [...]
Microsoft has recently made available a Beta version of a web tool that can be used to test the external connectivty of your OCS Edge deployment: https://www.testocsconnectivity.com/.
You can choose to manually enter your Edge Access hostname and port (normally 443), or by using auto-discovery (via DNS records). The auto-discovery option is good because it inherently [...]
I released a small free troubleshooting tool back in October 2008 to help diagnose Communicator automatic sign-in issues. It queries all the possible DNS records that Communicator could use to connect to the OCS server, and displays all the associated matches on the client computer.
I have made some significant improvements based on feedback and rolled [...]
Much has been written about troubleshooting Microsoft Office Communicator issues. In this blog entry I wanted to highlight and simplify two steps that will help you catch most problems without having to do more time consuming troubleshooting.
1) Know Which DNS Records are Being Used by Communicator
Communicator relies heavily on DNS to figure out which OCS [...]
For all those using my OCS 2007 Automatic Sign-In Troubleshooting Tool, I’ve made a couple of minor improvements. The latest version can be downloaded here: http://www.insideocs.com/tools/MOCLogin.htm There are some usability improvements including the ability to copy the results to the clipboard.
Thanks to all those providing feedback.
A crucial setting to make automatic Office Communicator sign-in work is ensuring that the correct Subject Name (and possibly Subject Alternative Name) is specified on the certificate which resides on the OCS server where the Communicator client connects (e.g. on the Front-End or Director role). When you look at the Certificate details, the Subject Name [...]
Three items are key for automatic Office Communicator sign-in to work in an OCS 2007 environment:
Specifying the correct FQDN in DNS for the SRV record used for automatic sign-in.
Ensuring the correct Subject Name (and possibly Subject Alternative Names) are specified on the OCS certificate where the client connects (e.g. the certificate on the [...]
Office Communicator client signs into OCS in one of two ways:
1) The OCS server hostname is manually specified in Communicator, or,
2) “Automatic Sign-In” via a DNS query on the SIP domain (the domain portion of the user’s SIP address) which returns the OCS server (or pool).
This is true for clients running both inside and outside [...]