Exchange Unified Messaging integrated with OCS 2007

I’ve had this pop up twice on me now, so I’m thinking that it’s worth blogging about… When you create a dialplan in Exchange 2007 Unified Messaging, don’t use a dot or space (e.g. "dialplan1.exum" or "Chicago
Dial Plan for UM Users") While spaces or dots will work just fine for normal UM usage, you will run into problems when you try to integrate with Office Communications Server 2007.

As most people know by now, you need to do a few things to be able to send missed OCS calls to Exchange UM:

1. Service Pack 1 on Exchange 2007
2. Use something other than the self-signed cert on your Exchange UM server
3. Make sure that your location profile in OCS matches the FQDN of your Exchange UM dialplan
4. Run the Powershell scripts for Exchange and OCS integration

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So a couple months ago, I gave it a try in the lab and everything worked great. Then I tried it out for a customer, where the dialplan name was "UMDialPlan.customer". Nada. I tried deleting everything, recreating. Rebooting, service restarts. New Location Profiles, you name it. And then it dawned on me: the UM dialplan had a dot in it! When the PS scripts created the new UM gateway, it was creating it as "UMDialPlan" without the .customer at the end of it. After several hours of wrangling, I decided to just create a new dialplan with no odd characters. And of course, that did the trick.

I think the main confusion was because of the [silly] requirement that you must name your OCS Location Profile the FQDN of your dial plan. That gets people thinking all kinds of crazy things about what to name the location profile and the dial plan. But really, all it needs to be is:

• Customer’s DNS domain: customer.com
• DialPlan name: UMDialPlan
• Location profile: UMDialPlan.customer.com

If you have multiple location profiles, you’d want it to be something more like this:

• Customer’s DNS domain: customer.com
• DialPlan name: ChicagoUMDialPlan
• DialPlan name: DallasUMDialPlan
• Location profile: UMDialPlan.customer.com
• Location profile: DallasUMDialPlan

I talked to a few of the MS folks on the OCS product team and let them know about this and they are thinking that it is a bug. I haven’t heard back yet, but I’m hoping this is something that either the PowerShell scripts can fix (seems like a case where a variable in the shell script isn’t equipped to handle special characters) or maybe it really is a problem with UM.