Wednesday, May 27, 2009

How to add a MSN contact to your communicator contactlist

If your company had an OCS edge server deployed, one of the possible options is use Public Instant Messaging Connectivity (PIC).

PIC enables your company to chat with MSN, Yahoo & AOL users. I don't have contacts using Yahoo or AOL, but I do have msn-contacts.

When you add a contact outside your domain (MSN or federated) OCS will see this address as a federated contact and start a search for the according domain. This works fine if the contact uses federation or when you MSN-contact is registered with a hotmail.com, Live.com or MSN.com domain. But it will fail if the contact is registered with another (mail)address.

In order to fix this, you need to change the address, i.e.:
Pietje.puk@thenetherlands.com has to be changed into Pietje.puk(thenetherlands.com)@msn.com

The domain MSN.COM will translate this back into the original address and warns the msn-contact that somebody wants to chat.

By default, the contact you add will get Access Level 'Public'.

Completing the list:
Pietje.puk@thenetherlands.com --->> Pietje.puk(thenetherlands.com)@msn.com
Pietje.puk@hotmail.com --->> Pietje.puk@hotmail.com
Pietje.puk@live.com --->> Pietje.puk@live.com
Pietje.puk@msn.com --->> Pietje.puk@msn.com

Suc6