So i dilligently installed the latest round of patches from patch tuesday (patch wednesday in australia) and found my OCS 2007 R2 on 2008 x64 had an issue with the front end service not starting.

The logs displayed the following message:

“The evaluation period for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 has expired. Please upgrade from the evaluation version to the full released version of the product.”

My first thought was “When have we ever used eval software?”, so i double checked our media…. all good – no eval stuff here.

A quick web search yielded the article below, which identifies KB974571 as the culprit – and sure enough, after an uninstall of that patch, all was good again.

Thanks to Lukas and his blog entry – http://projectdream.org/wordpress/2009/10/13/kb974571-crypto-api-update-may-break-office-communications-server-2007-r2-installations/

* Update * – Looks like the OCS team blog has acknowledged this issue and is claimed a fix is in the works… – http://communicationsserverteam.com/archive/2009/10/14/632.aspx

* Update 12/11/09 * – Looks like last night patches contained an OCS patch which fixes this issue.