Troubleshooting Microsoft Office Communicator Issues 101

Much has been written about troubleshooting Microsoft Office Communicator issues. In this blog entry I wanted to highlight and simplify two steps that will help you catch most problems without having to do more time consuming troubleshooting.

1) Know Which DNS Records are Being Used by Communicator

Communicator relies heavily on DNS to figure out which OCS server to connect to.  Knowing how Communicator uses DNS, and what DNS records are being returned with the client DNS settings, is the key to debugging most issues.

My previous post, DNS Records and Office Communicator Automatic Client Sign-In, summarizes how Communicator uses DNS to connect to the server.

My Automatic Sign-In Troubleshooting Tool will query the local client DNS for all the DNS records Communicator might use, and display which ones match.

Knowing what DNS records are being used and which server Communicator is connecting to will help you understand the logging files in the next step.

2) Turn on and Use Communicator Logging

a) Turn on Communicator Event Logging (Options | General | Turn on Windows Event logging for Communicator)

This will produce explicit Application event log entries for any issues Communicator is experiencing.  For example: “Communicator could not connect securely to server sip.example.com because the certificate presented by the server did not match the expected hostname (sip.example.com)”.  There may be additional Informational or Warning log entries that provide additional context.

b) Turn on regular Communicator Logging (Options | General | Turn on logging in Communicator)

This generates a debugging log file in %userprofile%/Tracing (e.g. the filename will look something like “Communicator-uccapi-0.iccapilog”).  This log file will give specific details about what Communicator is doing internally. For example, we can clearly see in this log file there is a DNS hostname lookup failure:

• 06/05/2009|10:26:45.553 700:EE8 INFO  :: QueryDNSSrv – DNS Name[_sipinternaltls._tcp.example.com]
• 06/05/2009|10:26:45.563 700:FAC INFO  :: domainName:quest.com: serviceName:sip: transportName:tls:
• 06/05/2009|10:26:45.563 700:EE8 ERROR :: QueryDNSSrv GetDnsResults query: _sipinternaltls._tcp.example.com failed 9
• 06/05/2009|10:26:45.563 700:EE8 ERROR :: DNS_RESOLUTION_WORKITEM::ProcessWorkItem ResolveHostName failed 8007232b

(Note this file can be opened in Notepad even though it does not have a .txt file extension).

Taking these first steps will go a long way in understanding how Communicator is behaving.

The Microsoft TechNet Library has a more good information on troubleshooting specific Communicator R2 Features: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb963945.aspx.

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Office Communicator 2007 and Outlook 2007 Integration Error – An Update

Further to my previous posting on Office Communicator 2007 and Outlook 2007 Integration Errors, after recently trouble-shooting this problem, I have provided a check-list of situations that can cause this error, and what to do about it:

1) Make sure that the default Outlook profile, or the Outlook profile that was last used (if set to prompt), contains an SMTP Email Address that matches the users’ primary SIP address. If the default profile in the “Mail” Control Applet is unclear, you can always check it by looking in the registry at the “DefaultProfile” value in “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles”.

2) Check if the Microsoft Exchange Administrator tool(s) are installed the client machine. The Exchange Admin tools install a another version of MAPI (for use by the admin tool), and this can cause issues for Office Communicator 2007 integration.  The resolution is to run fixmapi.exe (in C:\WINDOWS\system32\fixmapi.exe). This resolution has worked on 32-bit XP machines with SP2 and Sp3.

3) Make sure that Office 2007 is up-to-date (i.e. in terms of hotfixes) on the client machine. Specifically make sure the hotfix described in KB 936864 is installed.  It is my understanding that this hotfix is rolled-up in Microsoft Office 2007 SP1 and SP2.

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