Office Communicator clients cannot communicate with contacts homed on AOL

Office Communicator clients cannot communicate with AOL Contacts Problem Solved

VoIP & Gadgets Blog — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 21:47:23 GMT

Scott Oseychik over on the MSDN blogs has a good post today about federation issues between OCS 2005/2007 and AOL. Apparently, American Online changed their root certificates on their SIP Access Gateway at approximately 12/2/2008, 4:00 AM EST.Via Scott's

re: Office Communicator clients cannot communicate with contacts homed on AOL

Bill Winters — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 17:42:56 GMT

Thanks very much for posting this info!

re: Office Communicator clients cannot communicate with contacts homed on AOL

jelkadri — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 22:41:07 GMT

Thanks for posting this, we've been trying to fix this all day!

Office Communicator Clients cannot communicate with contacts homed on AOL

Office Communications Server Team Blog — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:00:18 GMT

Scott Oseychik blogged about the AOL update for the root authority and where to get the update for your...

re: Office Communicator clients cannot communicate with contacts homed on AOL

Sabel9579 — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 02:22:02 GMT

It would have been nice for AOL to have communicate d this to MSFT and in turn communicate it to its customer base. A simple email would have caused us a lot less aggrevation

re: Office Communicator clients cannot communicate with contacts homed on AOL

Scott Oseychik — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 17:06:49 GMT

I agree we could have done a much better job handling this, and am all ears in terms of what customers would find useful in the future. Regarding your specific point, we've already ruled out maintaining a mailing list, as there are simply too many variables for this to work effectively (e.g. how do we keep such a list up-to-date, how do we ensure 'mailing list mail' doesn't get junk mailed, etc). While we don't have the answer yet, I can tell you that it is being looked at internally with much greater focus and intensity now. We caught a large amount of heat from our customers over this one (rightfully so), and upset customers is simply bad for business. Stay tuned. :)

Scott

AOL Root Certificate Update causing Presence Unknown in PIC

Unified Communications — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 13:45:25 GMT

For those that subscribe to the Public Internet Connector (PIC) feature in Office Communication Server

re: Office Communicator clients cannot communicate with contacts homed on AOL

Rob — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:30:02 GMT

Thanks Scott! Very valuable information. Nice you could do AOL's job for them...

Did your AOL AIM connectivity with LCS/OCS stop working in December of 2008? Update your trusted root list to include the new America Online Root CA 1 certificate.

Aaron Tiensivu's Blog — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 04:06:34 GMT

I haven't run into this one personally but I noticed it linked off of LCSKid's site, pointing to an escalation engineer blog entry here. Long story short, AOL changed their certificate signer, and you'll need to grab/import the updated authority from

re: Office Communicator clients cannot communicate with contacts homed on AOL

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 07:45:23 GMT

Lifesaver... Awesome blog. You...complete...me.... Well, my AOL connectivity that is... You da man!

re: Office Communicator clients cannot communicate with contacts homed on AOL

Kyriakos — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 23:37:13 GMT

Thanks for the info.

Do you of a similar solution for Yahoo?

re: Office Communicator clients cannot communicate with contacts homed on AOL

Brent Knipfer — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 12:16:22 GMT

Does this explain an aolanonymoususer@aol.com trying to connect to my Communicator? Sound like a virus, spam or malicious attack method to me. knipferb@gmail.com

re: Office Communicator clients cannot communicate with contacts homed on AOL

Scott Oseychik — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:38:29 GMT

Unfortunately, no.

What you can do, however, is on the properties of the Edge server, select the "IM Provider" tab, click AOL, click Edit, and select "Allow communications only from users on recipient's contact list."

Hope this helps,

Scott Osecyhik