How to troubleshoot Office Communicator authentication issues

When you try to sign in to Microsoft Office Communicator, you receive one or more of the following error messages:

• Cannot sign in to Communicator because the Sign-in address was not found. Please verify the sign-in address and try again. If the problem persists, contact your system administrator.
• Cannot sign in to Communicator. You may have entered your sign-in address, user name, or password incorrectly, or the authentication service may be incompatible with this version of the program. If your sign-in information is correct and the problem persists, please contact your system administrator.
• Cannot sign in because the server is temporarily unavailable. If the problem persists, contact your system administrator.
• There was a problem verifying the certificate from the server. Please contact your system administrator.

Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

To help troubleshoot Office Communicator Authentication issues, you can use one or more of the following methods as appropriate for your situation.

Method 1

When you try to sign in to Office Communicator, you receive the following error message:

Note Newly provisioned OCO accounts can take from 24 to 72 hours to replicate to the OCS Servers, and the accounts are unavailable during that time. If the account was provisioned less than 72 hours ago, wait until replication is complete and try again.

If 72 hours have elapsed, and the issue is not resolved, follow these steps:

1. Sign to the Sign In application.
2. Click Reconfigure Desktop applications from the Sign In application, and make sure that Office Communicator option is available. Also, make sure that all applications are selected, and this includes Office Outlook, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communicator.
   • If Office Communicator is not an option, for more information about how to troubleshoot Office Communicator installation and configuration issues, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:
     2373747  (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2373747/ ) How to troubleshoot Office Communicator installation and configuration issues
   • Start Instant Messaging from the Sign In application.

If the problem still occurs, this may be because the user name was changed. Use your sip address as your sign-in address for the Office Communicator option. To determine your SIP address, follow these steps:

1. In Outlook, open your Address Book.
2. Locate your name, and view your properties.
3. Click the E-mail Addresses tab.
4. Your SIP address is listed as sip:email_address.

Method 2

When you try to sign in to Office Communicator, you receive the following error message:
This issue occurs when the Communicator version is out of date.

To resolve this error message, log on to the Microsoft Online Customer Portal (MOCP) and then download the Office Communicator 2007 R2 client that is listed under Downloads.

Method 3

When you try to sign in to Office Communications Online, you receive one of the following error messages:

Message 1:


Message 2:

To resolve this issue, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to the Sign In application.
2. Click Reconfigure Desktop applications from the Sign In application, and make sure that the Office Communicator option is available, and make sure that all applications are selected, and this includes Office Outlook, Office Live Meeting, and Office Communicator.
3. Start Instant Messaging from the Sign In application.

If the problem still occurs, follow these steps:

1. On the Office Communicator Title bar, click Menu, click Tools, and then click Options.
2. Click the Personal tab, and then click Advanced.
3. Make sure that Manual configuration is selected and the following address is entered for both Internal Server Name and External Server Name:
   pool1.oconline.microsoftonline.com:443
4. Under Connect Using, make sure that TLS is selected.

Also make sure that Office Communicator is allowed access in the client's firewall settings, and check the registry for the following subkey: To do this, follow these steps:

1. Open Registry Editor. To do this, click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then press ENTER.
2. Locate the following registry subkey:
   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Communicator.
3. Make sure that the AddToFirewallExceptionList is set to 1.
4. Exit Registry Editor, and then restart the computer.

If the problem still occurs, follow these steps:

1. Run Data Collection and Network Diagnostics in MOSDAL.
2. Make sure that the following protocols and ports are open. To do this, examine the Network_Diagnostics\PortQry folder in the MOSDAL results.
   Collapse this tableExpand this table

   Port	Protocol	Notes
   5060	TCP (SIP)	Used internally by Office Communicator for SIP communications.
   5061	TCP (SIP)	Used internally by Office Communicator for SIP communications and for SIP/MTLS authentication of A/V users. Communications flow that is outgoing through the internal firewall.
   443	TCP (HTTP)	Used by Communicator clients that connect from outside the intranet for SIP communications.
   1024-65535	UDP/TCP	Port range that is used for incoming and outgoing media transfer through the external firewall.
   6891-6901	TCP	Port ranged that is used by Office Communicator for file transfer.