OC R2 hyperlinks converted to lowercase

<Edits

<April 19, 2010>

The more content I put up here the harder it becomes to monitor any updates so thanks to Ariel for checking and following up with the solution documented in https://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/976046/?p=1 

<May 15, 2009 >

There is a reason that I shouldn't allow my testing to cross from one day to the next, I forgot what I was supposed to testing. The subject was about converting the case of the url and sure enough in my repro this was confirmed. While it appears to be a bug, it will require a customer/partner to report it and request a hotfix with business justfication.

<End Edits

One of our partners reported that hyperlinks were being converted to lowercase and when I investigated the problem I did find an old bug for Communicator 2007 during the beta but nothing for 2007 or R2 released clients. This issue is dependant on the Intelligent Instant Message Filter and by default the settings look like this -

image

The 2007 R2 client receives a url with mixed case pre-pended by an underscore from both the 2007 client (Nick) and R2 client (OC2007R2). I will note that while the account used is called R2CWA, I am using the Communicator client and not CWA for this test.

image

I will first try to changing the options to Allow instant messages that contain hyperlinks, the 3rd radio button in the image above. The first attempt did not result in changed behavior. Because I would like to see the progression of urls in my client, I am choosing to restart the services of the Front-End in the pool, which is easy enough due to it being a small lab. This changed the behavior of receiving the url without the pre-pended underscore however you should notice that I can’t click on these urls so they are not actually a hyperlink.

image

I have now disabled the URL Filtering for the pool and I still get a mixed case url of plain text. Using the product documentation I am now going to investigate my client registry (I don’t use Group Policy in my lab setup) for EnableURL. I did some searching on the web to find online documentation to share but Group Policy data is always something you download. I did find this forum post which had a cool command syntax to add the regkey:

c:\> reg add HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator /v EnableURL /t REG_DWORD /d 1 

 

 

 

This of course does mean I have to exit my client in order to apply the registry key.

Ok so unless I overlooked something in my testing the solution is a combination of both the server settings for IIMF as well as the client side registry for enabling the url.

Here is the client without the registry setting

image

and the client with the registry setting

image

If you are still encountering issues with this feature feel free to use the contact form on the page and I will follow up with you and confirm my testing.

TomL LCSKid