One feature with CUPS and CUPC is the ability to consume and aggregate presence information from Microsoft Exchange.  CUPS uses this information to (a) present meeting information to the IP Phone Messenger application on CiscoIP phone and (b) to provide status information to presence consumers (like CUPC) based on Calendar events.  There are some gotchas to consider.

 Before laying out some of the gotchas, the basic integration requirements overview is provided here:

1. You need to have a user configured in AD for the CUPS server.  This is a service account for authenticating to AD and opening the Exchange calendar for the CUPS user.

2. This CUPS user needs to be configured in Exchange, have a valid mailbox, and part of the Exchange View Only Administrators group (that's how it can open the user's Exchange calendar).

3. The CUPS server actually uses WebDav to do its business.  Cisco is working on moving away from this API and using EWS, but this is not committed on the roadmap.  The move is a necessary one as Microsoft is pushing people away from WebDav.

4. CUPS uses OWA to connect to the Exchange services.  This should be running on the client access servers (CAS) in Exchange 2007 or the Exchange Front End servers in Exchange 2000/2003.

Important note: CUPS does not support forms based authentication (FBA) on Exchange 2007 (only version tested) (I will test 2003 in the lab later)

5. Since CUPS is using OWA, HTTPs is required, and CUPS has no way of dynamically accepting/storing certificates, IOW you have to upload the certificates to the CUPS server

So, some interesting tidbits:

CUPS 7.0 seems to only care about the root certificate for the Presence Engine trust.  At one of our customers I uploaded the root certificate and then the server/application certificate from the OWA server.  After refreshing services, the OWA server certificate disappears.

This behavior is different then loading the certificate for a local application service.  For instance, if you wanted to use a 3rd party certificate for the Tomcat service (web server) you must load the root certificate first and then load the application certificate.  Makes sense when you think about it.

Another interesting note is that when configuring the Presence gateway for the OWA server.  The gateway host should be the Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN).  Further, the FQDN must either be the CN of the certs Subject field or X.509 subject alternative name field of the OWA server certificate (the one you don't need to install).

To determine the CN (or alternative name) use a web browser to open a SSL session to the OWA server.  Once connected to the server, use your browser to view the certificate properties.  This is also a good way to find the root authority if you don't know it.

The final tidbit for today is related to DNS domain names and AD forst domains.  For CUPS, when you configure a user ID field in the Exchange presence gateway, it will attempt to authenticate with that user name as configured. So, cups is simply "cups". However,  Exchange OWA wants some indication of the domain.  So, you have to specify the domain you are authenticating against in the logon request.  Further, CUPS won't take the pre-2000 convention (e.g. netcraftsmencups). So, you have to use the format: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (if you were one of those companies that configured your AD tree to use the SAME domain as your public DNS record, another can of worms). 

That is all for now.  There is plenty of info on Exchange and CUPS integration but that will be for another day.

Comments (4)

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authentication failure on integration Outlouk Calendar with CUPS
written by pamela, May 05, 2010

Hi,



I try to integrate CUPS with Outlouk calendar.



I have read in the SRND 7.X that :



The exchange ID that is used to retrieve calendar information is taken from the email ID of the LDAP structure for that user. If the email ID does not exist or if LDAP is not being used, then the Cisco Unified Presence user ID is mapped as the exchange ID.



In our case we use User ID of ldap structure to connect to our email box, windows session, cupc, ....



in the log, there is an authentication failure because CUP try to use email account not the user id. In owa access, we use user id. It works perfectly.



Do you have any idea ?





pamela

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Re: authentication failure on integration Outlouk Calendar with CUPS
written by William Bell, May 13, 2010

Pamela,

Not sure I follow 100% here, but have you checked to ensure that the account you are using for the CUPS service account has the appropriate permissions in your AD/Exchange environment? The account should be a member of the "Exchange View-Only Administrators" group and have "Receive-As" permissions on all end-user mailboxes. CUPS also needs to have its own Exchange mailbox.

HTH.

Regards,
Bill

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CUP 7.x communicate to FE 2007 and BE 2010
written by Paul_13, November 08, 2012

Hi,

Is it possible to keep exchange 2007 which is communicate with CUP and upgrade the other Exchange servers (which are back-ends) to version 2010.

Thanks,

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Re: CUP 7.x communicate to FE 2007 and BE 2010
written by William Bell, November 10, 2012

From a CUPS perspective? Yes, this should work. CUPS 7 requires WebDav on front-end. Latest versions of CUPS support EWS. We have ran hybrid 2007/2010 Exchange environments. Usually the context of those engagements is that the hybrid environment is temporary while the customer is transitioning.

HTH

-Bill (@ucguerrilla)

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