Gripes and praise about Communicator Web Access

I am working on an LCS design for a customer and saw that LCS’ Communicator Web Access shipped in December.  I read the docs and discovered that it works a lot like Outlook Web Access (OWA) because it uses forms based authentication.  I was surprised at this because I assumed that we would have created a web client as an ActiveX control that behaved like Office Communicator.

Office Communicator accesses the corporate LCS environment through an Access Proxy server in the DMZ, which in turn connects to a Director in your Corporate network.  I believe the Office Communicator uses SIP for signaling and talks to the Access Proxy using this protocol.

So, why wouldn’t Communicator Web Access use the same type of protocols to connect to LCS?  I hate it when we make products that have 6 different ways to connect to it, it makes us infrastructure guy’s life hell.  After all, we had to implement this weird, Access Proxy to Director to LCS Pool to LCS Backed infrastructure.

I can think of three main reasons:

1) There are much better packet filters for HTTP/HTTPS than there are for SIP

2) Most people that have LCS have OWA, so this fits that model

3)   Allow people with other platforms to use LCS

I have also posted an example below of our High Availability Infrastructure, right click and save to your PC for a better picture.  Since we haven’t implemented it yet, I can’t vouch for its entire accuracy, but you can get the idea.