If you have a Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2 environment and want to use the Blackberry Client for OCS, you need to install the OCS Communicator Web Access (CWA) R1 role. This is due to some changes made by Microsoft between R1 and R2 (removing UC AJAX), see here

Unfortunately, from a BES-integrated aspect, there isn’t much else and I believe RIM haven’t announced an updated version of the client and probably won’t as there will no doubt instead be a release pending for a Lync 2010 client instead. I believe the current version, 2.5.46, still only supports CWA R1 via BES.

As an alternative, I’ve recently tried Fuze Messenger which is an all-purpose messaging client, supporting AIM, MSN, ICQ, Google Talk, Yahoo but also supports OCS 2007 R2. The application must be downloaded via Blackberry App World which perhaps makes it a little more difficult for Administrators to control and manage. Current version at time of writing is 3.2 (0505)

Technically, the installation and setup was simple – the application doesn’t request it, but I needed to reboot my device to get it to successfully connect to OCS first time round. To use the app, you must first create a Fuze Messenger login. Once created, you then setup IM Networks.

From an OCS perspective, the client connects similar to the way a remote Communicator client would connect, via the Access Edge server. Therefore, the user needs to have the ‘Enable remote user access’ setting enabled under Other Settings in their Communications Server properties. Once logged in to Fuze and you’ve selected OCS as an IM Network, the settings required are just your OCS sign-in name (i.e. SIP address) and your OCS User Name and Password (domain credentials) – note that the User Name is in the format <domain>\\<username>. You then just choose whether you want to import your existing contact list and if so how, then hit Finish and you should be logged in and your contacts displayed if you chose to import them.

The IM experience using Fuze isn’t as good as what I expect the RIM client to be, however it is functional and the application does run nicely in the background alerting you to new IM conversations and has plenty of options for configuring how you want to be alerted and how you want messages to be displayed, etc.

Popularity: 87% [?]