Federation With GoogleTalk Not Out of the Box?

[Susan McEvilly]

We're attempting to have Connect users (on our domain)  IM with GoogleTalk users (on another, non-Connect domain) without success. What are we doing wrong?.

• When the Connect user IMs the GoogleTalk user, we get a Connect onscreen error saying "Failed to send the message”
• When the GoogleTalk user IMs the Connect user, the GoogleTalk user gets an onscreen error saying :XXXX@XX.com is offline and can't receive messages right now. That Connect user is actually online.
• The GoogleTalk client sent the new Connect contact an e-mail, telling the Connect contact that they have to click a link in the e-mail to IM with a GoogleTalk user. The Connect user clicked the link and received a ‘success’ message but the conversation between the two clients hasn't changed.

In Connect Org Admin, there are no blocked URL's and the flag is ON to allow use of non-Connect XMPP IM client.

WebEx Tech Support says Connect will not speak to a GoogleTalk user until the instructions in Connect Org Admin under Additional Services/IM Federation are followed, requiring an update of the DNS SRV records at our website. 

Our website is hosted on Yahoo Small Business and they say they don't use DNS SRV, and to ask Cisco for alternate instructions for an MX, A or CNAME record.

Before we spend any more time going down this path, isn't this federation supposed to be out of the box?   It feels like there should be a more simple solution.

Any ideas?

Susan

[tmullenaux]

Don't know if this helps, but in addition to what WebEx Tech Support told you, a similar thing needs to happen on the Google Apps Admin side. In order to allow their GApps domain IM to domains outside the Google infrastructure, here's an article explaining what to do on the GApps side (probably similar to the instructions WebEx gave you):

http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=34143

[bjames]

Sorry Susan,

You do need those external SRV records. We had to move to an DNS provider that did support this feature as the one we had did not.

Good luck.

Bob James

[Eric Knudson]

Susan,

You know, I'm working on a similar thing with a customer of ours. Haven't found the solution yet, but I'm having issues federating with gmail.com from a webexconnect xxxx.com domain as well. I just registered a new account at jabber.org (another xmpp provider) to see if I can federate from webexconnect to jabber.org and I was! Must be something specific to webex connect<->gmail. Note: my existing webex connect account _can_ talk to my gmail.com account, but nothing new, it appears. Will update if I can find a fix.

I echo Bob, by the way. You need those DNS records in place in order to federate.