Asterisk 1.6 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2

In our office we have integrated Asterisk with Microsoft OCS 2007 R2 to provide our staff members with the ability to seamlessly make and receive phone calls from their desk phone or their computer (including from home not on VPN).  Our current software stack looks like this:

• Asterisk 1.6.1.11
• Microsoft OCS 2007 R2
• Front End server
• Edge server (remote user connectivity)
• Mediation server (OCS connectivity)

We originally started this project in July of 2009 using Asterisk 1.6.0, and OCS 2007.  At the time there were bugs in several releases of Asterisk which broke TCP SIP compatibility that made our deployment take longer than I had originally anticipated.  Considering this I would recommend sticking to the latest builds of 1.6.0 or move up to 1.6.1/1.6.2, additionally we upgraded from OCS 2007 to R2 earlier this year.   I originally got help from gclark and his blog post here which I would recommend as a good starting point for anybody interested in */OCS integration.

What I'm going to post about over the next few weeks:

1. Basic integration steps (I'll skip some of the stuff that's already been covered in gclark's blog)
2. Dialplan I've used to integrate Asterisk & OCS
3. Using LDAP to auto configure your users for OCS (Posted 11/9/2010)
4. OCS R2 teleconferencing
5. Problems I have come across
6. Realtime Asterisk
7. anything else I can think of