Coming back from holidays and finding your Inbox with hundreds of new messages is something I think we all dread, especially when you KNOW many of them are no longer relevant because the sender received your OOF message and took their issue elsewhere. (Thankfully Outlook 2010’s “MailTips” have helped to reduce that figure). If you’re …
Continue reading ‘Hey, UM, Don’t Record Messages – I’m on Holidays!’ »
With two USB peripherals in the market providing an external LED that mimics your Lync presence status, I thought it’d be good to compare the two. First off: the disclaimer. My employer [when I wrote this review in 2013] is the supplier of the Blynclight. It’s always difficult to write a completely fair and impartial …
The Christmas / New Year break is when the host servers here (a pair of Dell PE-2950s) get their annual updates of BIOS & firmware, etc. This year the downtime might have been all that little bit more noticeable to you (sorry) as I also took the opportunity to upgrade the o/s on one of …
Here’s a shameless re-post of someone else’s great work. I’m just adding some references to Arduino and Clipsal C-Gate, Toolkit and PACA in the hope that a search engine will help guide others in similar circumstances to the fix. Arduino Driver I’m tinkering with a little Lync project to add a real-world “telemetry-style” interface to …
Continue reading ‘How To Install An Un-Signed 3rd Party Driver in Windows 8’ »
Creating and administering Analog Devices and Common Area Phones in Lync is sometimes a little tedious. I have a terrible record for forgetting to assign a PIN to Common Area Phones… Inspired by a customer (and to the horror of a purist peer) I’ve created a PowerShell script that provides a GUI for the administration …
Continue reading ‘MAdCaP.ps1 – A GUI for Lync Analog Devices & Common Area Phones’ »
Clearly we’ve made Santa’s “nice” list this year, as he’s bestowed upon us an early Christmas present (or, for the cynics/realists, a belated CU7 for the “Phone Edition”). This update delivers MOH to the Aries family of phones, addresses a sometimes strange problem where Common Area Phones won’t log back in after the FE has …
Continue reading ‘A Christmas 2012 update for Lync 2010 & 2013 Phone Edition’ »
Much has been written about Lync’s Address Book service. We know that Lync generates a Full address book file nightly at 1:30am by default, and also creates daily update files (Delta and Compact) that clients download daily in an incremental backup sorta way. (Here’s a good description of how ABS does what it does). The …
Continue reading ‘Changing the Lync Address Book’s “–KeepDuration” breaks ABS Downloads!’ »
Sometimes PowerShell truncates output, and if you don’t realise what’s going on, you’ll never get it to show. Where you’re expecting potentially lots more text, PowerShell replaces it with a single lousy ellipsis, cruelly taunting you. Column Width If it’s just a column width problem, the fix is simple enough: just pipe to out-string and add …
If you want to load the latest Lync Server 2013 “Reskit” (which contains Snooper) and Topology Builder (from the install CD) on your x64 Windows 7 machine, you’ll need a few pre-requisites: Visual C++ Redist for Visual Studio 2012 .NET 4.5 (it’ll want a reboot after) PowerShell 3.0 (part of the Windows Management Framework 3.0) …
Continue reading ‘Lync Server 2013 Topology Builder & Snooper pre-req’s for Win 7’ »
Inspired by a recent customer’s request to interface Lync to a paging / public address / PA system, I thought I’d check some of the options. This is Part 2 of (so far) a 3-part series: Public Address (Paging) Options for Lync More Public Address (Paging) Options for Lync – this post Public Address (Paging) …
Continue reading ‘More Public Address (Paging) Options for Lync’ »