LCS PIC: How to determine if you are having a provisioning problem with MSN

  • Article

The following issue may occur with a customer using the Public Instant Messaging Connectivity (PIC) feature of LCS 2005, enabling federation with MSN, Yahoo and AOL. Once the customer receives email stating that the provisioning process is complete, Yahoo and AOL contacts work correctly in both directions, and internal clients using Office Communicator are able to successfully add MSN contacts and send instant messages to MSN users.

However, MSN users using the Windows Messenger or MSN Messenger clients are not able to add contacts from the LCS PIC federated domain or initiate instant messages with the PIC customer. External users running Office Communicator do not experience this problem.

When attempting to add a new contact to the .NET service client (Windows Messenger or MSN Messenger) the following error is displayed -

  • Using Windows Messenger 5.1

"Operation could not be completed. Your search failed for an unknown reason. Please try again later."

  • Using MSN Messenger

"We cannot update your address book at this time. Please try making this change later."

or

"(sip-uri) could not be added. Please try again later. "

One other way to validate that this is a provisioning issue is to test adding a known good account to the .NET service client and a known bad. The known bad should be some really odd domain name. The one I test with (which someone will undoubtly steal once put here) is Jenny@jennyjenjen.com. Known (or assumed) bad accounts should result in a dialog box stating: jenny@jennyjenjen.com could not be added to your contact list because its owner has not signed up for a Microsoft Passport account. MSN can automatially send this person an e-mail message with information and instructions for installing MSN Messenger, and an option message from you.

So I hope this helps you diagnose just one of the many PIC issues we see. Most issues we get do require a lot of troubleshooting. I will even put a post up for the information we like (hey great idea lcskid)

TomL LCSKid