I have been overseeing the deployment of certain ip telephony technology over the past year. There are many things out there that are very dependant on using either analog gateways (FXS/ATA) or might talk sip natively, but are capable of encrypting the sip and rtp communications, or they are not able to authenticate against a kerberos realm.
I think I just gave it up, many devices out there will not interoperate too well with OCS. In my experience, many manufacturing sites still have the following type of requirements which are not addressed by the MS OCS platform:
- intercom, door openers
- Personnel Address systems (PA, loudspeakers)
- factory bells
- DECT or other cordless phones
- and perhaps others
These devices all typically interface with an FXS gateway, which must be able to convert rtp protocols to the rta used by OCS, and they must be able to do sip over TCP and encrypt using TLS. Another sticky point is which Active Directory user should these devices be logged in as and what mechanisms should be put in place to ensure their ‘presence’ information is always ‘available’. This also means that each of these devices need a UC CAL but it should a ‘restricted’ CAL to ensure the pricing is fair.
I trust that gateway manufacturers are collaborating with Microsoft to produce this type of interface.
Tags: ip telephony, LinkedIn, OCS, uc
