No Name Appears When Callings from OC to Cisco or vice versa

One of the frustrating drawbacks when Implementing OCS enterprise voice integrating with Cisco Call Manager or other PBX is that No name would appear in Communicator 2007 when a telephone user calls a Communications Server 2007 user or vice versa .

The only solution by then was to place a media gateway in the middle between mediation and IP-PBX and use a translation feature built in the media gateway to edit the packet header and add Caller Name before sending it to the PBX.

But Finally Microsoft has listened to my prayers and they have released July fix for OCS 2007 R2, once they were released our team started to do the testing in our LABs. At the beginning things didn’t work fine but in the end it worked and it appeared that we only applied the server side updates while the KB 971844 includes Office Communicator update too.

However, even with these fixes, this don’t send display name by default. So, this configuration in KB 972721 will be also necessary. Below are the snapshots taken by our Engineer Amr Nassar who has worked on this and successfully made it work after applying those Fixes.

Calling from Office Communicator R2 with ext 6000 to Cisco IP Phone with ext 10000

Calling from  Cisco IP Phone with ext 10000 to Office Communicator R2 with ext 6000 

But let me also share Microsoft explanation on why this problem happens in the first place and what these updates fix?

Problem Explanation:

When a Private Branch Exchange (PBX) telephone user calls a Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2 user, the calling party name that exists in PBX is stripped at the OCS 2007 R2 Mediation Server. Because the PBX telephone user does not exist in Active Directory, no name appears in Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 R2

This problem occurs because the OCS 2007 R2 Mediation Server does not forward the display name information from the Unified Communications (UC) side to the gateway side. Therefore, the Communicator 2007 R2 client does not receive the display name information.

Update 970679 introduces functionality for the Mediation Server role of Communications Server 2007 R2 to forward Display Name information that is part of the From header between its gateway side and its proxy side.

A file called MediationServerSvc.exe.config should be created in the Mediation Installation Directory which be default is at  %programfiles%\Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007\Mediation Server

This file should contain.

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″ ?>
<configuration>
                 <appSettings>
                                <add key=”forwardDisplayName” value=”True” />
                 </appSettings>
</configuration>