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.
Matt Landis’ evolving post on Skype for Business is also a great read.
Continue reading ‘Skype for Business 2015 client technical preview’ »
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.
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.”
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.
LOTS!!
Continue reading ‘Lync Server 2013 Update – February 2015’ »
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).
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.
Continue reading ‘Lync 2013 Client Update – February 2015’ »
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’ »
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).
Complaints regarding a slow meeting join process in Lync aren’t at all uncommon, and in many cases are actually as a result of IIS’s automatic recycling process, itself intended to improve reliability of the IIS websites.
Drago Totev has published a fantastic process by which you can ensure your Lync IIS application pools are always sitting there idling away, ready for a user to join.
In his post, Drago walks you through how to create a scheduled task on your FE’s that waits for the Event that’s logged each time IIS recycles the Application Pools. When that trigger is seen, the scheduler fires a script that sends a dummy meeting join request through to IIS which then “warms them up” ready for a real user to join.
I recently followed his setup to add the Schedule to four Front-Ends, and decided by #2 that it would be great if you could just run a PowerShell script to do it all for you automatically. And now you can.
This (our second December update) takes Lync Server 2013 from 5.0.8308.857 to 5.0.8308.866.
This update appears to only address the recent meeting join issue for users of Google Chrome (as per the earlier December release), with a token mystery fix for good luck:
Continue reading ‘Lync Server 2013 Update #2 – December 2014’ »