Remember Mattias Kressmark? He posted two weeks ago and are now back with this post.

Nortel uses a piece of software called MCM – Multimedia Convergence Manager – to connect the CS1000 PBX with OCS. This software is mandatory if we want to run what Nortel call “Converged office “.

MCM can be installed in either a 64 bit or 32 bit OS and require the OCS proxy role to be installed first. I am however unsure if the OCS 2007 R2 proxy would install in 32 bit Windows; I used 64 bits Windows 2008.

MCM has two main components – the MCM Service and the MCM Management Console, which interfaces with the MCM Service component for configuration.

Before coming to the interesting part a lot of pre-reqs needed to be installed and all of them can be found in the setup\amd64 folder of the OCS install media. (On the Nortel side you will also need to check that certain PEP-packages are installed in your CS1000 version 5.5 (or better) and that you have licenses for the integration) So I installed:

• The VC++ Redistributable package (vcredist_x64.exe)
• The .NET Framework 3.5. (dotnetfx35.exe)
• A SQL client (sqlncli_x64.msi)
• The UCMA Redistributable package (ucmaredist.msi)
• And OCS R2 core components (ocscore.msi)

and then… I could run…

• server.msi SERVER=PROXY SKU=SE

Which started the actual OCS proxy installation GUI (and do not forget to open the cmd window as administrator if you are on a Windows 2008 box, as I did at first.)

At this point you have an installation of an OCS proxy, which could be described as an OCS front end without any scripts/applications running. You do not need to install the OCS administrative tools to manage the proxy, instead you will find it under Computer Management / Services and Applications:

The first thing to configure in the OCS proxy were the certificates, so I let the certificates wizard do it’s job, and next I ran the command:

lcscmd /server /action:activate /role:proxy /user:RTCproxyuser /password:xxxxxxxx

This activates the OCS Proxy for the domain (for a workgroup the command will be somewhat different.) The user specified in this command will be the service account for the OCS Proxy service. I had to create the domain user first and then I added the account to the “RTCProxyUniversalServices” group. Running the command will produce a lot of messages in the cmd window and also a nice html log when done just as we are used to from other OCS installation tasks.

Before starting the service I configured the “Host Authorization” tab in my OCS proxy with the IP addresses of my mediation server and several Nortel PBX IP addresses.

Now it was finally time to run setup.exe for MCM and the version I had was 4.00.00.19.

Not much to configure really, path and a user account to run the service, that’s it.

So now I could take a look at the GUI for the first time:

The GUI works, but you sure can tell that Nortel is better at building PBX infrastructure that at designing fancy GUIs. There is a little help file that will explain some basic terms but it is brief and leaves a lot to your imagination.

At first start only the MCM and OCS proxy will be running since we have not configured the connection to the PBX. Through Tools / Configuration you will find a window with tons of settings, and I guess some basic Nortel network design knowledge and terminology would help here.

You would have to configure the IP addresses to the SRS (SIP Redirect Server) or the NRS (Network Routing Server) if you have such a component. I also configured a registration ID, changed the codec to G711 A-Law, an IP address to my mediation server, selected TCP over port 5060 and stated my phone context. And now everything turned blue:

And at this point only the usual interesting Location Profile / Normalization / Route settings in OCS remained before I could pass my first calls through the system. There is a handy logging function in the tool which will give you a text log file which you can compare with OCS debug logging and / or Wireshark SIP logging.

I am no Nortel expert and I can only compare this integration with the integration of MX-ONE which I am quite familiar with, so I am biased. But, this setup requires one more server than the MX-ONE version and one more OCS component (the OCS proxy) with configuring and certificates and all, so the setup definitely seems more complex than the one for MX-ONE. Hopefully it will result in a stable system with many options to integrate, but it is too early for me to give an opinion about that just yet.

Happy dialing and let me know about your experiences with MCM, Nortel and telephony in OCS!

/ Mattias Kressmark