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).