Lync 2013 Client Update to Skype for Business – April 2015

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IT’S HERE! Today marks the release of the new Skype for Business Client update to Windows Update. Much has been written in anticipation of this of late and there are plenty of references I’ve captured below.

Until Office 2016 is released, THIS is your client-side update path to Skype for Business: Install Lync 2013 from Office 2013 and then patch it with this (or a later) update & the necessary pre-req’s. You will also use this patch to turn your “Lync Basic” client into a “Skype for Business Basic”. (Read more of the free Basic client here).

If you want to manage the rollout of this internally via SCCM or WSUS, the two KBs you’re interested in are these:

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Mucking with MWI – Part I

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In the process of migrating a customer to Lync recently we inherited an obligation to provide a *BIG* Message Waiting Indicator (MWI) light when-ever a voicemail message arrived in a particular high-priority mailbox.

We figured there were a number of ways we could do this:

  • Optically couple to the MWI LED on an LPE or 3PIP phone. This obvious (albeit a bit clunky) solution was dismissed following our inability to find a commercial sensor and solid state relay or similar combo that could do this. (We didn’t want to be supplying or supporting a home-brew solution)
  • Electrically couple to the MWI LED on an LPE or 3PIP phone. This would obviously void the phone’s warranty and was dismissed due to similar shortcomings as above re home-brew & supportability
  • Perhaps we could get one of the programmable I/O pins in the Snom PA1 to go high on MWI? Alas, nope, not in the current firmware anyway
  • Some custom EWS application? (None were found to exist, and the budget didn’t extend to creating one)
  • Use Exchange’s MWI messages? (Possibly do-able. Tested but ended up somewhere between too messy and too hard).

And thus it was that I embarked on a bit of a campaign to see how many ways I could bring an external MWI light to reality.

Mucking with MWI – Part I is this post. It uses a scheduled PowerShell script to query MWI and light a Blynclight.
Mucking with MWI – Part II opto-couples to the MWI LED in a CX600 to drive a mains-powered light.

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Skype for Business 2015 client technical preview

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IT’S ALIVE!

The excitement’s been building since the announcement last November, and now you can download a technical preview of the new Skype for Business client.

Download it here. (You’ll need a Microsoft login). I’ve captured the process for you below BTW.

Read the announcement on the Office Blog site.

What’s new.

Matt Landis’ evolving post on Skype for Business is also a great read.
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Lync 2013 Client Update – March 2015

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Here’s an update that seems largely for the benefit of the meeting junkies out there. This update (KB2956174) takes the Lync 2013 Client to 15.0.4701.1000.

I’m also pleased to report that it drops another of the pre-req’s we’ve been used to seeing, now down to 2 – and if you’re running with the February update there’s no change needed there.

What’s Fixed?

  • KB 3040496 Lync 2013 does not show who changes content in a shared whiteboard in an online meeting
  • KB 3040495 Cannot scroll down text that is more than two pages in whiteboard in Lync 2013
  • KB 3040494 “We couldn’t connect to the presentation” error occurs when an anonymous user shares a desktop in a meeting in Lync 2013
  • KB 3040493 Lync Online users cannot search contacts in Lync 2013 in an environment that has a proxy server deployed
  • KB 3040491 Meeting does not start if you click a meeting URL in a meeting invitation email message when Lync 2013 is signing in
  • KB 3040489 Text labels for toll and toll-free numbers disappear in a meeting invitation when you create the meeting in Lync 2013
  • KB 3040488 Outlook 2010 freezes, and then crashes when it runs together with Lync 2013
  • KB 3040487 “We found a problem with you Lync Meeting. Please leave Lync client running for 15 mins” error occurs in Lync 2013

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Sonus Partial Import Work-Around

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New to the Sonus SBC 1000 and SBC 2000 is the ability to perform a Partial Import of another gateway’s configuration. As it says on-screen “Existing Logical Interfaces, Ethernet Ports, VLANs, MST Instances, ACLs, Static Routes, ASM Networking, Link Monitor, NAT, IPsec Tunnels, Node-Level Settings and Certificate configurations won’t be modified. All other configurations will be over written.”

PartialImport

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Lync Server 2013 Update – February 2015

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This rather juicy update takes Lync Server 2013 from 5.0.8308.866 to 5.0.8308.871 – or 5.0.8308.872 depending upon where you look.

What’s Fixed?

LOTS!!

  • KB 3037071 Location monitoring report does not show regions and site names in a Lync Server 2013 environment
  • KB 3034784 Lync Server 2013-based client crashes or disconnects from a meeting when an anonymous user ends audio lines of a call
  • KB 3034783 LS Storage Service event 32054 after you enable Lync 2013 Mobility in an Exchange 2010 environment
  • KB 3034782 Non-clickable hyperlinks setting does not work in a conversation with external users in a Lync Server 2013-based client
  • KB 3034779 Lync Monitoring report does not show names under “Sites and Subnet” column
  • KB 3034778 Rtcsrv.exe crashes when invalid address book normalization rules are defined in Lync Server 2013
  • KB 3034780 Lync Server 2013 Control Panel crashes when you access the Route tab under the Voice Routing tab
  • KB 3034776 Memory leak occurs in w3wp.exe, MediationServerSvc.exe, and sqlservr.exe in a Lync Server 2013 environment
  • KB 3034781 Central Management Store file replication is slow or incomplete in a Lync Server 2013 environment
  • KB 3034777 Lync Server 2013-based RGS agent receives a toast for a second waiting call after agent accepts the first waiting call

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ZCC Lync Call Router config file

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If you’re adding a Zeacom Contact Centre to your Lync deployment one component you don’t want to overlook is the “ZCC Lync Call Router”. You run this .msi on your FEs and SBAs and it rigs a safety net under your call centre: if it senses your Zeacom server is offline it will re-route calls bound for Zeacom’s endpoints to a backup RGS.

When you first install the MSI it puts a basic copy of “zcclynccallrouter.xml” in C:\Program Files\Telephony\ZCC Lync Call Router\.

Zeacom *should* auto-populate the file with the failover entries but I’ve seen instances where it doesn’t. The install guide has the correct syntax for the bits you need but only includes a screen-grab of the required config so you can’t scrape it.

Here’s a version you can copy and paste. Hopefully you’ll never need to. I don’t know why, but the app creates two entries for each endpoint. (I would have thought one for its SIP URI would be sufficient).

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Lync 2013 Client Update – February 2015

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Our first client update for 2015 isn’t a major one, but *I* benefit from one of the two fixes in it, so naturally I’m excited! This update (kb2920744) takes the Lync 2013 Client to 15.0.4693.1000/1001.

What’s Fixed?

  • KB3032399 Update improves users’ ability to select partial instant messages from conversation history windows in Lync 2013
  • KB3032396 Incorrect conversation window opens when you double-click a contact in Lync 2013

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Using Sonus SBC1k/2k AD Lookup to Block Outbound CallerID

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The AD lookup feature in the Sonus SBC is an incredibly powerful and often under-utilised feature. I’ve written of it before, and my peer Luca Vitali has posted another example of its usefulness this week. That led to a Twitter conversation and what might yet turn into a bit of a competition to see who can come up with the “best” use of the feature. ;-) For my contribution I’ve figured for some time that it should be possible to use the AD lookup outbound, as Luca has done, to change the call handling and in this case suppress CallerID for certain users. Continue reading ‘Using Sonus SBC1k/2k AD Lookup to Block Outbound CallerID’ »

Quickly Generating Test E-mails

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I needed to mock-up a full Outlook inbox for a document I’m writing, and of course I figured there’d have to be a way to do this using PowerShell.

Turns out it’s really simple. Here’s the quick and dirty script I lashed up that will dump as many messages as you like into a given mailbox, with a randomly-selected sender, subject and mail domain.

I ran this script on my Windows 8.1 PC, targeting another mail user on the local system.

Run it from the PowerShell command line and simply tell it how many messages you want to send.

Note that in this script I’ve hard-coded the recipient and the mail server, but you can of course build on this script to pass it from the command line. If Exchange rejects you, it might be a permissions issue (anonymous / mail relay).

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