UPDATED 03.18.09: This does not work correct with Office Communicator 2007 R2 RTM. The workaround for this can be found here. Also, the list of MS domains has expanded to include live.com and its variants. See the KB article referenced below for the full list.
I'm not sure if the subject on this post even makes sense, but it's the best I could come up with. Essentially the issue is that even though you have LCS or OCS set up with Public IM Connectivity (PIC) you can't add contacts that use MSN/Live Messenger unless they have a Microsoft SMTP domain for their account. The valid MS domains (as of the latest update on the KB article) are:
- hotmail.co.jp
- hotmail.co.th
- hotmail.co.uk
- hotmail.com
- hotmail.com.ar
- hotmail.com.tr
- hotmail.de
- hotmail.it
- hotmail.fr
- messengeruser.com
- msn.com
- simpatico.ca
- passport.com
- passporthotmail.com
- webtv.com
I think it's safe to assume the live.com and all the country specific variations of it are on that list as well, but I haven't tested those.
But, you can set up a Messenger account with any SMTP domain you want. If you add them in to the LCS/OCS client, they simply don't work. I may be an idiot, but for the longest time I thought that's just the way it was. Then today I stumbled across a KB article that describes how to do it. It's a matter of manipulating the IM address of the contact you want to add. It's not very obvious, and it would be nice to see the OCS client/server catch these and fix them for you, or at least tell you the proper format.
So I know user@gmail.com is a Messenger user, and I want to add them to my OCS client, the address should be entered in the following format:
user(gmail.com)@msn.com
Odd, but hey it works. Check out the full KB article here.
