I originally wrote this for my company’s blog but wanted to re-post here as I get quite a few hits from my articles on XMPP.

While working with a client, it was made known they were using an OpenFire Jabber server for IM. Since we have Lync along with the XMPP gateway in order to communicate with GTalk users, it seemed fitting to make it work with OpenFire. That is where the fun began.

We setup our XMPP server with their info and after the clients network folks had gotten the firewalls all setup, we were able to successfully test the connection from the XMPP gateway. However, whenever we tried to actually IM each other it would always fail. On our side I just saw a Response Time Out. On the client’s side we were seeing messages like this:

Error creating secured outgoing session to remote server: domain.com(DNS lookup: xmpp.domain.com:5269)

After doing some investigation and Googling, it was determined that they were running OpenFire 3.6.4 and that we might have better success with 3.7. A quick upgrade later and we were in business. At the end of the day three things helped us:

1. Upgrade OpenFire to 3.7
2. Set OpenFire to not use TLS. This meant setting it from “Optional” to “Not Available”
3. Having the latest OCS 2007 R2 XMPP Gateway patch installed.

Hope this helps others who might be trying to setup this type of interoperability.