Live communications Server

The task was simple, "install a live-communications server". Me beeing a Microsoft-avoider I found out most things the hard way.

To install live communications server, you gotta have a windows 2004 and up server. Had to install one.

Do not try out live-communications server 2003, as it either fails, or lacks much of the configuration ease that 2005 offers.

If you want live communications server, you need a domain-controller that manages the active directory ( required to manage rights and users, for what it's worth ).

Here's where the trouble starts. In a demo-environment you'll never get rights to the produktive domain ( if any ). Since some of the stuff required for communications server requires you to make changes to what the Microsoft guys call schema, which is inter-domain stuff ( nono, no subdomain either ).

You gotta have a standalone domain, or any other domain admin of a produktive domain's very likely to kill you.

However, that means that you can't enjoy the benefit of having user of the other domain automatically beeing authenticated in yours, because trusts between domains include resources, not however the live-communications stuff.

Having that learned, I tried out connecting to the live-communications server with windows-messenger. That was easy enough, and you actually do not have to be part of the domain the live-communications server sits in in order for this to work ( as long as you can adress the machine somehow, that's enough )

Next up: Installing Sharepoint portal. That'll get a little difficult, as on our cached select site we've only got a very old sharepoint portal ( 2001 ), and this won't even install on a windows 2003 server. So I gotta have to have a Sharepoint 2005 sp1, just don't know from where.