BES 5.0.3 and Lync 2010 Integration

With the release of Service Pack 3 for Blackberry Enterprise Server RIM now supports Lync 2010. After searching online i found that there was very little documentation for getting this working properly so i decided to post some information on the steps that worked for me.

I am working with a BES 5.0.3 MR4 (Bundle 107) on Windows 2003 x64Bit server and Lync 2010 is running on Windows 2008 R2 SP1. The Enterprise Messenger client we tried was 2.5.56. Our BES environment was already pointing to a OCS 2007 server and i just needed to point it to the Lync 2010 frontend server. To accomplish this task use the original install files for BES and rerun the setup,but before running the setup a few prerequisites need to be performed. First add the Blackberry Service account to the "RTCUniversalServerAdmins" group. Next install the OCS Core Components on the BES Server. Finally install Unified Communications Managed API 2.0 Download Here. Now run the install and on the "Instant Messaging Settings" screen select "Microsoft Lync Server 2010" and i accepted the default ports as 5061 & 443. Once the setup is finished reboot the BES server.

Now we must create the certificate for the BES to use to communicate with the Lync server. The instructions provided by Blackberry are for Windows 2008 Server Link. To create the certificate on Windows 2003 server we must first create an .inf file similar to the one below.

FileName: request.inf

[Version] 

Signature="$Windows NT$"

[NewRequest]

Subject = "CN=lync-pool.domain.com" 

Exportable = TRUE

KeyLength = 1024  

KeySpec = 1

KeyUsage = 0xA0

MachineKeySet = True

ProviderName = "Microsoft RSA SChannel Cryptographic Provider"

ProviderType = 12

RequestType = CMC

[EnhancedKeyUsageExtension]

OID=1.3.6.1.5.5.7.3.1

[RequestAttributes]

CertificateTemplate = WebServer

SAN="dns=lync-server.domain.com&dns=bes-server.domain.com"

Now from the command line issue the following command to create the certificate request.

certreq -new request.inf cert.req

Next login to the certificate authority and submit the cert.req file and save the output file as NewCert.cer.

On the BES copy the NewCert.cer file and issue the following command.

certreq -accept NewCert.cer

Open the local personal certificate store and click open the new certificate and change the friendly name to OCSConnector.

Now Restart the Blackberry Collaboration Service and have your blackberry users login to Enterprise Messenger on the phone. If the users have problems logging in check the BBIM log file for errors and start googling.


Update: After completing these steps i have noticed that users are able to login to Enterprise IM on the phone and can send an IM but cannot recieve any responses. The receipient of the messages sees "<UserName> is not active on an IM Device" error message and each response has a Red X next to it. This is an outstanding issue that i have created a ticket with Blackberry to resolve. The following link has an issue that is very similar to the problem i am seeing. Link