Part of the setup procedure for Microsoft Office Communication Server (OCS) is to create an SSL certificate and install it on the server.  The typical procedure to do this is to create a CSR (Certificate Service Request) first on the server, then copy and paste that into the web form (or upload as a text file to) your Certificate Authority of choice.  Your CA then issues your SSL certificate as a text file (usually with a .cer or .crt extension).   Pretty straigh forward process.  But if you use the text file created by MS OCS, chances you your Certificate Authority (CA) didn’t like that file and may have presented you with an error like “invalid CSR”.  If you have encountered this the good news is that the solution for getting around the error is very simple.  It is telling you that the CSR is invalid because it is missing the “START” and “END” tags.

So simply insert the following line at the BEGINING of your CSR data:

—–BEGIN NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST—–

And append a carriage return plus the following line to the END of your CSR:

—–END NEW CERTIFICATE REQUEST—–

Save your file or select all and copy and paste your CSR with the above two lines and you should be good to go!