My Digital Life

I’ve just been reading over on Johann Kruse’s blog that Messenger for Mac 7 has been released.  I guess for most people the big news for most people will be the usual Live Messenger support, but if you’re an Enterprise IT guy like me its the Office Communication Server (OCS)support that’s interesting.

One of the challenges I’ve got at work at the moment is how best to integrate Macs into our (mostly) Windows environment.  Before we tackle the big problems we’re focusing on providing access to our basic services - email, file and IM. 

At the the moment we’re using Live Communication Server rather than OCS, but hopefully we’ll be moving to OCS over the next year or so.  One of the big drivers for that migration is OCS’s multi-party audio and video conferencing.  Having a Mac client that supports this is a huge bonus.

Maybe it’s time I got myself a Mac of my own.

Here at work we’ve just setup Public IM Connectivity (PIC) on our Live Communications Server setup.  Although it’s not my project I’ve been slightly involved as I designed the original setup here a few years ago.

The good news is that it all seems to work quite well, you can’t quite do everything you could if you had a full MSN client but its ok.  One problem we did notice was that we couldn’t add external MSN contacts that were using EASI passport domains - i.e. a personal domain ‘xyz.com’ rather than the default ‘msn.com’, ‘hotmail.com’ etc.

Doing some digging showed that these weren’t originally supported, but then I turned up this KB article that shows you can do it, you just need to use a specific address format. 

So if you want to add ‘joe@xyz.com’ to your PIC enabled Communicator contacts, you’ll need to add him as:

‘joe(xyz.com)@msn.com

An easy fix to find, but I thought I’d post it up in case anyone has the same problem.