OK, so you just got your shiny new Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 (R1 or R2) implementation up and running, and whoa!, you start receiving complaints that users are unable to initiate multiparty instant messaging (IM) sessions, or multi-party conferences.

The setup:

OCS 2007 R1 and R2 (Standard)

Cisco Unified Presence Server v7.0.2

Cisco Call Manager v7.0.1.11000-2

In OCS 2007, the error reads as:

“Your attempt to start a conference was unsuccessful. If you need further assistance, contact your system administrator.”

According to Microsoft when you click on Help, or search the forums, this is caused when you try to initiate a conference before your Microsoft Office Communicator (MOC) is fully operational.  In other words, you didn’t wait long enough before trying the conference.

Looking in the system logs, you will see an error as below:

A SIP request made by Communicator failed in an unexpected manner (status code 80ef0198). More information is contained in the following technical data:

RequestUri:   sip:username@FQDN;gruu;opaque=app:conf:chat:id:84~A809A

From: sip:username@FQDN;tag=bb3c283862

To:           sip:username@FQDN;gruu;opaque=app:conf:chat:id:XXX;tag=XX

Call-ID:      a53e7e1d5c404843b8bc7e557951ced9

Content-type: application/sdp;call-type=im

v=0

o=- 0 0 IN IP4 10.0.0.24

s=session

c=IN IP4 10.0.0.24

t=0 0

m=message 5060 sip null

a=accept-types:text/plain multipart/alternative image/gif text/rtf text/html application/x-ms-ink application/ms-imdn+xml text/x-msmsgsinvite

Response Data:

408  Request Timeout

ms-diagnostics:  1011;reason="Ms-Diagnostics header not provided by previous hop";source="OCS-Server FQDN";Domain="yourdomain.com";PeerServer="CUPS IP"

Resolution:

If this error continues to occur, please contact your network administrator. The network administrator can use a tool like winerror.exe from the Windows Resource Kit or lcserror.exe from the Office Communications Server Resource Kit in order to interpret any error codes listed above.

Yup, not much help there.

So you check the configuration, run the Best Practice Analyzer for OCS, and pull trace logs.

What’s that you say, all services are running, no ports are blocked, all required DNS entries exist and are accessible.  SIP URIs all check out…well, what could it be.

It’s a bug!  That’s correct ladies and gentleman, there’s a bug in OCS 2007 R1 and R2.

After working with MS Support for roughly 24 hours, we discovered that the catch all SIP route, configured on the front-end server properties dialogue, under the routing tab:

Now, just stop and start the Front End service:

Have the users log out of MOC, then back in, and you should be good to go!