Creating OCS Address Book Entries for Polycom RMX Meeting Rooms

In case you’re not familiar with the Polycom RMX, it’s a platform of audio/video MCUs that can integrate with everything from voice PRIs to legacy video devices to the newest 1080p endpoints.  Starting with version 4.1 (current version as of this writing is 5.0), it also supports integration with OCS.  Specifically, OCS users can call into the RMX via audio or video by simply making a Communicator call to an RMX meeting room or entry point.  The RMX can bridge those MOC users with other non-OCS SIP endpoints as well as H.323 endpoints.  For more information on the RMX check out Polycom’s website.  While it’s fairly easy to call a meeting room from Communicator by dialing it manually, for folks that use MOC in conjunction with RMX meeting rooms consistently it is desirable to have quick dial access to the rooms.  An easy way to do this is using contact objects in Active Directory.

First, create a regular contact object in Active Directory.  You can enter any information you’d like in the required fields, just be sure to make the Display Name match what you’d like your users to see in the OCS address book.

Next, use adsiedit to assign a SIP address to the contact.  If you do not have adsiedit installed, just download the appropriate Windows Support Tools for the system you are using.  Once they are installed you can launch adsiedit via Start –> Run –> adsiedit.msc:

Next, navigate the Domain context to the location of your contact object and open its properties.  Scroll down to msRTCSIP-PrimaryUserAddress.  You’ll notice that it currently has no value set:

Enter the address in the format sip:<MeetingRoomID>@<RMXRoutingAddress>.  For example: sip:1000@rmx.domain.com.

Because you’ve defined a SIP address for the contact, OCS will automatically add it to the address book.  However, be aware that the address book only synchronizes every 24 hours at 1:30am local time (by default).  You can force the address book to regenerate faster using the abserver –syncnow command.  Be sure to allow time for AD replication before you run the address book synchronization.  For more details on the address book see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee323612(office.13).aspx.

Once the address book has synchronized and your client has downloaded the updated address book file, you will be able to find the room by name in MOC.  Since the RMX is not registering to OCS the presence will show as unknown, but assuming that your environment is configured correctly you will be able to make audio and video calls to that contact from the address book just like you can by manually typing in the SIP address.

Comments

[Andy]

Hi Mike,

I can dial the RMX and i get a display that has create a conference or join and conference and then any conference that is going on at that time. I cannot however dial directly into a conference. I have followed your steps above precisley. Any thoughts here

Thanks,

Andy

[Mike Stacy]

Andy,

From what you described you are being routed to the default entry queue, which happens when you dial a non-existent meeting room. If you copy the address that you entered into the MSRTCSIP-PrimaryUserAddress field into Communicator (take off the sip: from the front) do you get the same experience? You can also try manually dialing one of the default rooms if they still exist on the RMX, such as 1001@.

Mike

[Pete]

Hi there,

I'm trying to do as you instruct above, however OCS is not picking up the contact record. Could you perhaps share the full LDIF of one of your working contacts so that I might compare? It seems pretty simple, which is why i'm surprised this is not working.

Steps:
1) created a contact with a first name, last name, and display name filled out.
2) Fired up adsiedit and set the msRTCSIP-PrimaryUserAddress to sip:1000@rmx2000.domain.name
3) ran abserver -syncnow
4) Restarted MOC client to re-download address book.

Am I missing something here? Is there some other magic necessary, like a phone number in the phone field that maps to a normalization rule?

Thanks in advance,
Pete

[Pete]

Spoke too soon -- had to wait for the new address book to install. Deleted galcontacts to accelerate the process, and all is now well. Thank you!