I recently learnt to my combined irritation and eventual delight that even if your phone numbers are perfectly formatted as E.164 in AD, you still need a rule in “Company_Phone_Number_Normalization_Rules.txt” that (effectively) normalises them – even though they already are. (Read that saga here). But it dawned on me shortly thereafter that if Lync’s filtering …

Continue reading ‘Tweaking “Company_Phone_Number_Normalization_Rules.txt” for fun and profit’ »

Down here in the Banana Republic we sometimes fall into traps when localising foreign products (in this context those of Microsoft) to our regional preferences. OCS and Lync are no exception. (I have some vague recollection of being unable to install the first release of OCS on an original Server 2008 machine if you’d dared …

Continue reading ‘Adventures with the Lync Address Book (ABS). Or “When E.164 just isn’t E.164 enough for Lync!”’ »

I’ve never really hit it off with the OCS and Lync Address Book. I don’t know I did, but the ABS took a dislike to me long ago that remains to this day. In the process of chasing some Lync ABS strangeness (like where a contact and their details are present in an “Abserver.exe –dumpfile”, …

Continue reading ‘Lync 2010 Standard Edition & the SQL Management Studio’ »

I recently had a hard time getting the Lync Monitoring Server reports deployed. The deployment process looked good, but I kept getting an error “Exception calling “Create” with “0” argument(s)”.

Here’s a cute bug in Lync – evident in CU2. When you create a new Dial Plan, the Lync Control Panel creates a “simple name” from your original name. This Simple Name has invalid characters like spaces removed and replaced with underscores.

I’ve noticed a few of my Lync installations are intermittently having problems generating an Address Book, reporting Event ID 21022 on the Front-End.