Up until now, RIM/BlackBerry has not released a client that works with OCS 2007 (although they’ve had an LCS 2005 client for some time). But quite recently, RIM have posted a BlackBerry client for OCS and it’s available on the RIM site. Out at a customer, we downloaded the client, installed on their BB devices and tested things out. And it works really well. No major kinks really. But I did learn a few things on the way.
What I learned about OCS and BlackBerry
- You need CWA. I had never worked with BlackBerry / LCS integrations before so I didn’t really understand how the whole process worked. I assumed that RIM had a client like Communicator Mobile: install it on the device, configure it to point to your edge server (sip.company.com:443) and away you go. But that’s not how the BlackBerry client works. The BlackBerry client only makes a connection to the BES server, which then proxies the requests to OCS Communicator Web Access server.
- BES talks to CWA via internal connection. You don’t need to publish CWA to the outside at all for this to work. The connection the BES server makes is internal. So the BlackBerry’s only external connection is to the BES server. No ISA, no Edge Server, no firewall rules needed.
- CWA needs to be configured with Windows Authentication. I had the CWA server set for forms-based authentication, because I was planning on using CWA for external users @ kiosks. Well, because of point #2, I realized that this wasn’t going to fly. The BES server would be passing through Windows Authentication creds, not auto-magically filling out a form for Forms-Based authentication. Because I didn’t realize this, the integration with BES didn’t work at first. Changing CWA to be an "internal" server and checking Windows Authentication did the trick, though.
- You may need to sign in with "my.domain.localusername" on the BlackBerry client. This is something that is plaguing me lately, I guess, having to type in the full FQDN for your internal domain where you are prompted for DOMAINUSER. I’m pretty sure that there is a way to configure your BES connection to OCS to eliminate the need for this, but by default, it will only work if you sign into the client with a user name of "my.company.comjuser" rather than "companyjuser".
- You need BES SP 6. This is required by RIM…
All in all, it’s a big relief to be able to offer BlackBerry users a client for OCS.
UPDATE: If you are looking for information related to the configuration of the BES server itself, please see Joachim Farla’s excellent blog entry.
