Notification Emails are not sent to organizer after Resource Central and RealTime Service are connected to Office365

 

Symptom

Once Resource Central (RC) and RealTime Service (RTS) were hooked up to Office365 and everything appearing to work well, you shortly discovered that the e-mail notification that Resource Central sends out to the meeting organizer was not being sent: Even though you do not see any updates inside Resource Central but you do get the confirmation email from Exchange, and if you check the database you can see that the reservation is NOT inserted.

 

Cause

The system was unable to communicate with the Office365 server, therefore notification emails are not sent. This is because in our environment the RealTime Service (RTS) application is located behind or inside the corporate firewall so it was not possible for the Exchange Server to contact the RC/RTS server.

 

Resolution

• Firstly, the firewall on the server, where RTS is installed, blocks incoming connections. To resolve this, the inbound TCP port needs to be opened to the server running RTS.
• Secondly, by default RTS sends the host name to Exchange Server (if the custom host for push notifications option isn’t set for the Exchange server) and it is possible that this host name cannot be resolved to IP address from the system that Exchange CAS is running on. To resolve this, turn on the Custom Host for Push Notifications option and enter the IP address of the RTS server manually.

This configuration will have a public facing server in your environment NATed (Network Address Translation) to the internal server that is running RC/RTS on the default port of 10002. For example, if the server 1.2.3.4 shown above is a public facing server, simply add a rule on your firewall so that inbound TCP activity on port 10002 would be internally routed (NATed) to the server running RC/RTS.

 

Properties

Applies to: 3.7.10+

Reference: TFS #11010

Knowledge base ID: 0095

Last updated: Feb 23, 2016