Creating all your OCS Certs? Few hundred dollars....Completing all your DNS entries? Couple hours....Getting your Networking Team to do your firewall NATS? Priceless.

OCS R2 Consolidated Edge design

After a lot of dns, certificate and design questions, I ended up deploying a consolidated R2 Edge server and ISA server. Here is what the final configuration looks like, including protocols/ports that need to be opened, what certificates where. Hope someone finds this helpful. Please note: the names and IP's have been changed to protect the innocent.

OCS R2 Communicator Web Access

Web Access URL different than host name of your web access server...Server 2008 x64 OCS R2 CWA. I had a gotchya, had to edit the SPN of the service account being used for CWA to include the url for CWA.

In ADSI Edit, default naming context (2k8 domain), locate service account, properties, locate servicePrincipalName > add value http/%url% of cwa site if different than host name.

For example:
SPN was http/$hostname$
added
http/cwa.domain.com

Manually sync OCS Address Book

Useful for name changes, account changes. Be careful of the overhead on the server. Normally this is scheduled by default once a day at 1:00am. If you need to manually sync the address book run:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2\Server\Core>ABServer.exe -syncnow
Triggering Address Book Server synchronization pass - successful.
You might have to wait up to 5 minutes for it to actually complete.

Users may need to exit communicator and log back in order to affect changes. I've had mixed results with this actually working.

First post

New site dedicated to Unified Messaging OCS, OCS R2 migration, 2008 x64 OCS issues and resolutions - I will be posting here as I migrate from production OCS R1 to OCS R2.