Review: Lync LED Shootout

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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 review in this circumstance. The usual outcome is that you’re unnecessarily harsh on your “own” product so as to offset any unintended or perceived bias. Feel free to comment below if you feel I’ve done either product wrong or overlooked a feature.

IMG_3361

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We’ve Upgraded to Hyper-V Server 2012

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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 the hosts. (The other needs some new HDDs, etc, but it’s on the “will happen” list).

To that end, I’m pleased to announce that Greiginsydney is now hosted by a server running Hyper-V Server 2012 (up from the 2008 R2 vintage).

The Dell downloads site doesn’t offer Server 2012 as a choice when you’re shopping for the components to download, but other pages on their site provided the reassurance I was after:

Dell BIOS Support for Windows Server 2012 (you’re fine on 2.7.0)

Windows Server 2012 Inbox Driver Support on Dell PowerEdge Servers

… and here’s the migration process in case you’re curious.

 

G.

How To Install An Un-Signed 3rd Party Driver in Windows 8

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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 Lync. To do that I needed to load the latest Arduino IDE. And I couldn’t get the driver to install.

Clipsal USB drivers fail to install

Same problem with the latest C-Bus Toolkit software: despite me choosing to force the install of the USB driver, the process failed.

The fix

Here’s the fix. You basically reboot Windows 8 into what looks remarkably much like safe mode, and “disable driver signature enforcement”, then repeat your above install attempts. Sweet. Thanks Kent!

– G.

MAdCaP.ps1 – A GUI for Lync Analog Devices & Common Area Phones

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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 of both. I give you “MAdCaP.ps1” – short for “Manage Analog Devices & Common Area Phones”.

MAdCaP-1.7-New MAdCaP-1.8-Existing

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A Christmas 2012 update for Lync 2010 & 2013 Phone Edition

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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 restarted, and banishes the strange white lines on the CX500 and CX600 displays.

For bonus points, we also have confirmation that “The software works with both Lync 2010 and Lync 2013”.

These are the highlights:

2703325 MOH!

After the update is applied, neither the administrator nor users can configure or customize the audio file that is used for the “Music on Hold” feature. This is because the audio file is embedded in the update.
After the update is applied, if more than one call is on hold at the same time, music is played only for the first call. This occurs because the processing power of the telephone is limited.

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Changing the Lync Address Book’s “–KeepDuration” breaks ABS Downloads!

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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 Lync client doesn’t keep downloading Delta files forever though – every so often it discards its constructed mash of Full and Deltas and downloads a fresh Full file and the process restarts. The timing of this cycle is dictated by the Address Book’s “KeepDuration”:

PS C:\Lync2010-Updates\Scripts> Get-CsAddressBookConfiguration

Identity                   : Global
RunTimeOfDay               : 1:30 AM
KeepDuration               : 30
SynchronizePollingInterval : 00:05:00
MaxDeltaFileSizePercentage : 20
UseNormalizationRules      : True
IgnoreGenericRules         : True
EnableFileGeneration       : True

Job Title Changes Aren’t in the Delta files

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Viewing Truncated PowerShell Output

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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 the width parameter.
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Lync Server 2013 Topology Builder & Snooper pre-req’s for Win 7

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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:

G.

More Public Address (Paging) Options for Lync

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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:

Here are another couple of options…

SIP Paging – Extension-Side (with SIP registration)

There are a few SIP-to-Paging interfaces getting around. These all take an Ethernet connection in, talk SIP over it, and output either a line level audio (to feed to your existing PA amp), or have an in-built amplifier to drive a speaker (which may also be provided in the same ceiling-mount box).

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The Mk-II Safety Net for Lync Gateway AD-Lookups

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My August “Safety Net for Lync Gateway AD-Lookups” plugged a sometimes embarrassing hole in the AD-lookup process, but it still left a smaller one. Whilst it ensured a user was EnterpriseVoiceEnabled before the UX would send a call to them, it didn’t cater for those deployments where the user’s msRTCSIP-Line number was in the “;ext=” format. The fix (for those who twigged to this) were duplicate transformation tables and routing table entries for both the AD lookup and the Safety Net.

I wanted to do this all in one entry, but the UX firmware at the time wouldn’t permit it. Enter v2.2, and its new feature that permits multiple AD lookups in the same Transformation Table.

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