PIC: How one simple underscore can throw everything into a fit

We recently had 2 customers encounter a very painful and labor intesive process working through issues with failed PIC configurations. Turns out they had an underscore in their pool names, you know something like - lcs_pool.domain.com.

So there shouldn't be a problem right? I mean the OS didn't stop me, the LCS setup didn't stop me, my remote users work and now 2 of 3 (MSN and Yahoo) can't work?

Turns out that the underscore is a character that we don't support. In some brief discussions it was mentioned that it was a non SIP compliant character but in my quick glances and searches through RFC's I don't know if that is true or not. So at this time let me say that it won't work.

Now I have to give credit to the team that always comes through on this for us - JB, CW and JU. For any customer who has ever been to a Microsoft event where the product group presents JB is the one talking about LCS and Certs and CW and JU have presented on our tools and troubleshooting. I say all this because I am fortunate enough to be able to email, im or call any of them for questions and they will always help if they have the time. JB of course had already entered a bug for the next product version to either support the underscore or block it during setup. Please recognize that this is for tracking and due to priority could be "punted" so this is not a post making any promises.

Have a great one,