OCS 2007 Client Version Filter

The OCS 2007 Client Version filter can be a bit confusing as to how to filter clients. I’ve run into this issue twice now, so I thought I’d share my experience and dive into this a little deeper. TechNet has an explanation of how to configure the Client Version filter, but there are quite a few things they left out.http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb936607.aspx

Communicator Mobile 2007 (Como) – Default Client Version filter for Como filters the RTM version of Como 2007. How does this make any sense? Microsoft wants to only allow the next version of Como to work with OCS 2007? CPE filter blocks COMO by default. NOT the “COMO” User Agent.

Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 (MOC2005) – This is another strange one that I ran into today. As the MS article above describes, there is a User-Agent Header called LCC that is used to filter MOC2005 traffic. Where it becomes confusing is how MOC2005 reports itself to OCS in SIP traffic. Judging by the value or version filter set for User-Agent Header “OC” you might assume that the version of the MOC clients are in the client themselves. (i.e. Help – About…) The version of MOC2005 that most of my companies clients run is 1.0.599.0. However when running OCS Logger and analyzing the traffic of a MOC2005 client you will see User-Agent: LCC/1.3. Therefore it appears that the version filter needs to be LCC = 1.3 to filter all MOC2005 clients.

Doing a random search for User-Agent: LCC/1.3 I found the following entries:User-Agent: LCC/1.3.5371 (Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 1.0.559.121)User-Agent: LCC/1.3.5371 (Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 1.0.559.110)User-Agent: LCC/1.3.5371 (Microsoft Office Communicator 2005 1.0.559.0)

I’ll continue to research and test this, but for now it appears that this is the setting to filter all MOC2005 clients.

LCC 1.3.* = blocked