OCS 2007 R2 XMPP and GTalk
phyler
First, I’ll be honest, I love OCS. I have pitched it as a consultant up against GTalk. It is a superior product. It does way more but at times, I just want to be able to chat with a client that doesn’t have OCS yet. Almost everyone has a Gmail account. Well, thanks to the new XMPP Gateway for OCS I can achieve my wish.
Now, I’m not going to go into all the details on how to set this up. The OCS Team has already done a great job on that here. I did however end up having to do things a bit differently. We had run out of IP’s on the Internet connection on which our Edge server lives therefore I had to go with a dual-homed approach. I placed external interface on a different Internet circuit which had available external IP’s and I put the internal interface on the same DMZ as our Edge server (we are NAT’ing our Edge server).
Now, the OCS Team blog does a great job describing what happens with a single IP but when you have two IP’s you really need to know what you are editing.
First, the config file ("%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2\XMPP Gateway\TGWConsoleGUI.dll.config") has two spots where you need to enter an IP. In a single IP solution, the IP is the same in both spots. If you are using a dual-homed box like me, then you need to put the IP that will communicate with your Edge server in the SipIP and the IP that will communicate with Gmail (outside world) in the XmppIP value. Here’s an example:
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="yes"?>
<configuration>
<appSettings>
<add key= "cultureName" value = "en-US"/>
<add key= "SipIP" value= "Internal IP"/>
<add key= "XmppIP" value="External IP(actual IP on the NIC if you are NAT'ing)"/>
</appSettings>
</configuration>
Now, my second issue was that I originally placed my internal interface on the same “internal DMZ” that the Edge servers internal interface was on. The XMPP gateway has to be able to communicate with the Access Edge interface. I switched my internal interface over to the “External DMZ” and reconfigured the file above and was able to successfully test.
At this point I had it partially working. I could send IM’s from my Gmail account and receive them but I could not send messages from my MOC to Gmail, nor could I see presence in MOC. It took me a bit on this one but I finally figured out that the cert that you attach to the internal interface on the XMPP has to have the CN be the same as the FQDN of the computer name. I had placed the FQDN of the computer name into the SAN field and the XMPP software must just ignore the SAN field. Once I re-issued my cert with the FQDN of the computer as the CN, everything just “fell into place”.
Anyways, I hope this helps anyone else out there who might be trying to set this up with dual IP’s. I highly encourage you if you are GTalk user to check out OCS. It is a fantastic product. Especially when you can utilize it for Enterprise Voice.