What's going on to group expansion in HMC 4.5 Office Communications Server (OCS)?

When you are using Office Communicator, one of the nicest features (in my opinion) is the capability to add a group and expand it in the contact list. This feature really makes organization and group of contacts more consistent throughout the company. Unfortunately, this feature didn’t make it into HMC 4.5. As a result, while you still can add group, when you try to expand it, you will see the following message,

Use of this group is restricted. Contact your system administrator to request the required permissions.

I did a bit of investigation and found that the primary reason is because the logon user does not have the appropriate AD permission on the Group object, hence it failed to expand the group and resulting in the error shown above.

In my investigation, I also found a quick work around; however, you will have to manually do it. Of course, knowing how smart some of you are, you can probably and easily whip out some clever scripts or to enable the group to be allowed for group expansion in OCS.

This is what you can do,

a. Go to the Group object that you want to expand
b. Open up the security
c. Go to the Advance
d. Add AllUsers@<company domain>
e. Just add "Read Permission"

Once added, voila, any logon user in that organization will be able to expand the group object.