Office Communication Server 2007 and Cisco Unified Presence Server (CUPS)

UPDATED WITH NEW LINK to CISCO DOC

I’ve just finished up a CUPS-to-OCS 2007 integration. We are using CUPS 6.0, Cisco CallManager 5.1, and OCS 2007 RTM. We have implemented Remote Call Control (RCC) and presence.

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This lets you do a few really, really, cool things:

• Look up any user in your corporate directory and dial them from your OCS client
• Click on a contact in OCS and have it direct your Cisco IP phone to call their Cisco IP phone
• See a user’s status as "in a call" when they are on their Cisco IP phone
• See a log of "recent contacts" in your OCS client that tracks your calls made from your IP phone

I’ve also implemented a direct SIP trunk between Cisco CallManager 5.1 and OCS – this lets you use your OCS client as a softphone instead of the cisco softphone. This is nice, but it doesn’t allow for the Remote Call Control functionality or the presence integration.

My take on the CUPS to OCS integration: if you follow the documentation very carefully you will only get about 80% of the way there (it’s not very complete). Get OCS up and running perfectly, get CUPS up and running perfectly, then integrate the two.

I’ve heard through the grapevine that Cisco won’t officially support OCS until later in 2008. I’ll update this post if I hear differently.

It’s really cool when integrations work out the way they are supposed to. While the MS and Cisco partnership might still need to be strengthened, this integration shows that they are playing well together at certain levels.