Live Communication Server (LCS): at last secured by ISA

As many of us know, ISA Server’s biggest selling point is being a terrific security/caching/reverse-caching/vpn/application level firewall/(did I forget anything) solution. So what’s the main tough job we regularly fight here at ISA? Where should be further investing. Each investment carries a high degree of risks like unknown development time, stabilization, etc. But the biggest one is the uncertainty whether we’re missing big time the right direction.

What all of these gotta do with LCS? Well, one of the great aides we got in our arsenal, is our 3rd party ecosystem built on ISA’s extensibility. These span from content filtering (AV, SOAP, …) to different analysis and reporting functionalities. It’s really great to see all of these vendors supporting us and making a living out of it. Today, with your permission, I’d like to introduce to you Collective Software. Collective have been totally focused on ISA extensibility and they have quite a few cool add-ons today.

Collective’s latest investment was around ISA and LCS and I was just informed that their LCS-Bridge was officially released this week (it has been in Beta for a few months) – the eval version is available at http://www.collectivesoftware.com/. What can this do for you? Mainly support LCS’s Audio/Video (this will not work over ISA out of the box, because Office Communicator have the NAT Limitation and sends internal IP Addresses to the invitation, instead of the external IP of ISA)

Hope LCS-Bridge will make some of you happier, showing off LCS’s great functionality in a secure manner.

Your comments appreciated as always,

Adar Greenshpon, ISA Server Product Team

adarg at microsoft dot you know what