LCS Public IM Connectivity is a licensed service Microsoft provides that allows a company's Live Communication Server implementation to federate with the 3 public IM vendors - MSN, Yahoo, and AOL. Company's must purchase licenses from Microsoft and then go through a provisioning process.
At the end of December after we had submitted our online provisioning form we were notified that there was a hiatus in new provisioning through early January. Interestingly, we received an email in mid-January stating that provisioning had been approved. We configured LCS to allow Public IM connectivity. However, our Communicator clients could not add PIC contacts.
Our users who had MSN passport accounts using their corporate email address were sent warning emails that their MSN accounts would no longer work after a specified date. There is a process to convert these passport accounts that allow users to continue to use MSN Messenger with their existing contact lists.
In short, Public IM connectivity began working the day after the email stated the change would take place. This date was not in the provisioning approval email. I am curious to see if anyone else has experienced this scenario.
What this means is that somebody in the IT department may want to create an MSN passport account for messenger using a corporate email address before provisioning so they receive the true enablement date!
