Troubleshoot Missing Conferencing Settings Information in the 2007 R2 Release of Communicator Web Access
Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 will reach end of support on January 9, 2018. To stay supported, you will need to upgrade. For more information, see Resources to help you upgrade your Office 2007 servers and clients.
One day the dial-in conferencing feature for Office Communications Server 2007 R2 is working great, but the next day while trying to reset your PIN, you discover that the PIN information that usually appears in the Assigned Conference Information box is missing, and you get the message, "The server is currently unavailable. If the problem persists, contact your system administrator." What is going on here?
Author: Greg Anthony
Publication date: January 2010
Product version: 2007 R2 release of Communicator Web Access and Office Communications Server 2007 R2
Problem: Dial-In Conferencing Settings Are Blank
Sometimes the information given in an error message, doesn’t lead you to the actual problem, and I encountered this one day when trying to reset my Personal Identification Number (PIN). I configured the dial-in conferencing feature for Office Communications Server 2007 R2, and it was working well. One day I forgot my PIN, so I opened the Dial-in Conferencing Settings page in the 2007 R2 release of Communicator Web Access and signed in to reset my PIN. The PIN information that usually appears in the Assigned Conference Information box was missing. When I tried to reset my PIN, I got the error message shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Dial-in Conferencing Settings page with error message
.jpg "Dial-in Conferencing Settings Error Page")
So, What Caused This?
I decided to go back through the steps to configure dial-in conferencing, and I discovered that the meetings policy that was assigned to the forest or user was not configured to enable dial-in conferencing from a PSTN as shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. The policy on the Meetings tab not configured for PSTN conference dial-in
.jpg "Meetings tab not configured")
Resolution
I resolved the issue by enabling PSTN conference dial-in.
To enable PSTN conference dial-in
In Office Communications Server 2007 R2 management console, right-click the forest that you want to configure, click Properties, and then click Global Properties (see Figure 3).
Figure 3. Forest level Global Properties
.jpg "Forest Level Global Properties")
Click the Meetings tab (see Figure 4).
Figure 4. Select a meeting policy from the Meeting tab in Global Properties
.jpg "Global Properties Dialog Meetings Tab")
If you have a global policy, select the policy on the Global policy drop-down menu, select that named policy under Policy Definition, and then click Edit. If you are using per-user meeting policy settings, you will have to edit the policies for the affected users.
In the Edit Policy box, select Enable PSTN conference dial-in, and then select PSTN conference dial-in requires passcode if you want to require a passcode (see Figure 5).
Figure 5. Configure settings on the Edit Policy dialog box
.jpg "Configure settings on the Edit Policy dialog box")
You may have to wait up to 15 minutes for Active Directory replication or you can restart the front end services for the change to take effect immediately.
Now when I access the Dial-in Conferencing Settings page, I can reset my pin as shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6. Dial-in Conferencing Settings page without error message
.jpg "Dial-in Conferencing Settings")
Summary
Reading the actual error message seemed to indicate that there was a problem with the Communicator Web Access server, when, in reality, the problem was that the option to allow a PSTN dial-in wasn’t enabled. Sometimes, the cause is not easy to figure out based on the error information that you are given.
Additional Information
To learn more, check out the following article:
- Dial-in Conference Support at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=178458.
Office Communications Server Resources
Visit the Office Communications Server main page at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=132607.
View the complete Office Communications Server documentation library at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=132106.
Follow tweets from the Office Communications Server team at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=167909.
Download all the Office Communications Server content as a Word document at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=133609.
Download all the Office Communications Server content as a compiled help file at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=160355. (Make sure you scroll down to the Additional Information section to download OCSDocumentation.chm.)