I recently had to assist a customer with public IM provisioning for OCS 2007 R2, and while there are some relatively good guides on how to perform this on the internet, I haven’t found any that actually show you the provisioning form itself. Here are the steps to take in order to provision your SIP Domain(s) for public instant messaging connectivity.
1. Navigate to the Microsoft PIC provisioning website at the following URL: https://ocspic.livemeeting.com/ and sign in with your Windows Live ID.
2. Once logged in with your Windows Live ID you will be presented with the following screen:
On this screen you will need to select your organisations Microsoft Licensing Agreement type, and hopefully you have already purchased the public IM CAL’s you need to federate with Yahoo!, MSN and AOL. Select the appropriate agreement radio button for your organisation, check to agree to the terms of service and you will then be asked for your Microsoft Agreement Number. If you do not supply this number, you will be unable to proceed with the provisioning process.
3. On entering your agreement number you will also see a small area of information that will be required later on in the provisioning process as shown below:
In our case, we need to pay particular attention to the information listed under the “Initiation of new service” section. Once you agreement number is entered click Submit, and you will then be asked for your contact details. Please ensure these are correct, as Microsoft uses these details to send you information on the status of the provisioning process. Once you have filled in your contact details click Next.
4. Select the “Initiation of new service” link and you should then find yourself at the most important screen of the process, this is the area where you specify the FDQN of your Access Edge server and the SIP Domain names you wish to utilise. It is very important both of these values are correct, if the FQDN you specify in the provisioning form is different to that of the subject name specified in your public SSL certificate for your Access Edge service, federation with public IM providers will fail. Likewise this will also occur if you specify the wrong SIP domain names.
For example, if my Access Edge SSL certificate had been generated with the subject name of sip.mycompany.com, the FQDN I would enter in the form would be sip.mycompany.com. In turn, my SIP domain would then be mycompany.com, this is assuming you had configured this external domain name as an additional SIP domain on your Front-End and Consolidated Edge servers.
5. Once you have completed all the required information, click Next and your all done. The lead time on completing public IM provisioning is 30 days, as Microsoft will need to submit this information to both AOL and Yahoo! if you have chosen to federate with the providers as well.
More information on the prerequisites for public IM and completing the provisioning process can be found at the following URL: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=155970
