Troubleshoot IM in OWA – #Lync #Office365

This is a great article with some troubleshooting steps and instructions on how to check your settings for the Lync instant messaging feature in Exchange Online OWA.

Some of these steps can also be applied to the on-premises versions since its basically the same PowerShell commands.

View the Outlook Web App policies available to your organization

Run the following command:

Get-OwaMailboxPolicy | Format-Table Identity

The command returns a list of the Outlook Web App policies that you can change. In the list of results, notice that each mailbox plan has an associated Outlook Web App policy. This means that users who are assigned different mailbox plans can also have different Outlook Web App settings. For example, you can disable instant messaging for users assigned the GalDisabledMailboxPlan, and enable instant messaging for the default mailbox plan.

View or verify instant messaging settings

Run the following command:

Get-OwaMailboxPolicy OwaMailboxPolicy-DefaultMailboxPlan | Format-List *instant*

Using the wildcard character * returns all settings that contain the term “instant“.

Lessons learned: Faxes… (f#”&!g faxes) – Lync

Ok this will be the short version, the longer version will follow as soon as I have time to write a longer more in detail post on how we actually solved the fax problem.

The thing is that Lync does in fact support faxes the problem is that it doesn’t work. Great huh? Open-mouthed smile

Ok so you can set up a analog gateway and then create a analog device and set it to Set-CsAnalogDevice -Identity <UserIdParameter> -AnalogFax $true and the benefit from this is that you will actually get statistics of your faxes in your monitoring server and just stop….

Save yourself the trouble and time and just route the fax outside of Lync. Route it directly to the analog gateway without passing Lync. There is just to much that needs to fit for the fax to work good through Lync and lets not start talking on remote sites and how to get this working over WAN and with SBA´s

So the lesson learned, Leave the faxes outside of Lync, even better host them on a online faxing service and have it sent by email, its 2012 already Winking smile (ok I know it might be requirements that forces organizations to keep them)

Whats your experiences with FAX´s? Have you gotten it to work via Lync or did you rout it outside of Lync directly to the gw? Post a comment and tell us.

Googlightning

Personally I think this is hilarious. But judging from the comments people are as always protecting the good old Google that never does anything wrong and when the big bad Microsoft kicks on that poor puppy….

Ok back to regular programming. I we got some more lessons learned coming up to post…

Swedish #Office365 user group meeting this Friday

Hi, just a quick reminder that we will host a Office365 user group meeting this Friday (09-13) at Microsoft in Akalla. We will also set up a Lync online session for the folks that cant join us Live.

Please see the LinkedIn group for the details http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Office-365-Sweden-Microsoft-Cloud-3732942?gid=3732942&trk=hb_side_g

Todays lesson learned–Exchange 2010 upgrade with Active Sync and MobileIron

Ok just a short post on this topic.

When upgrading from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010 you can let your E2010CAS redirect your users that are still hosted on the 2007 server to a legacy record. This will enable you to migrate over time and take it easy and just have a great and good time with your upgrade.

Well to make it short, IF you are using mobileiron or any other mobile device management system that takes over the active sync part. DO NOT, I repeat DON’T  run Set-ActiveSyncVirtualDirectory –ExternalURL legacy.domain.com or change the external EAS record in the ECP.

This is because the phones are so smart now days that they actually updates the server record to legacy.domain.com and tries to logon to that server. And guess what, well since they are managed by another system they will not be able to logon and you will loose them.

So if you did set your external url to something just run:
Get-ActiveSyncVirtualDirectory -Server Exchange2007CAS | Set-ActiveSyncVirtualDirectory -ExternalURL:$null

This will reset the automagically forward thing and just proxy the EAS instead. see this post for more info http://www.stevieg.org/2010/01/solving-iphone-and-exchange-20102007-coexistance-issues/

And then reset their EAS server record via the MobileIron profile. And its all good again.

And one more thing, read through http://blogs.technet.com/b/exchange/archive/2009/12/08/3408985.aspx for some great info on EAS upgrades.

Exam 74-322 – Microsoft Lync Server 2010 — Advanced Design and Deployment

Okay here are my thoughts on the Beta Exam 74-322 – Microsoft Lync Server 2010 — Advanced Design and Deployment
80 questions in 2 hours = very little time.
I managed to answer 79 of the questions and did not even read the 80th because the text was way too long, it would have taken like 5 minutes just to read through it.
Those of you who did the old OCS voice exam and thought it was difficult. Think back of that and add a crazy time pressure, on an average of 1.5 minutes per question?!

The questions themselves are both amazingly good, I sat and thought to myself, “woaw can you really do like that in Lync – why have I never thought about that in the past” and some minor good ones with typos and simply technically wrong answers.

But on average it was a very good test, In fact I think it´s in line with the new Office 365 exams and these 3 exams are probably the best written MS exams I’ve taken so far.

It will really sort out those who know Lync fluently from those who know Google-fuu and how to next next finish Lync. I don’t think that the skills needed for this is something you can read up to in a few days’ time like the other Lync exams.
Because of the time pressure, you won’t even have time to finish reading the question before you MUST answer it and move on to the next question. This demands that you speak fluent Lync to just know the correct answer and move on to the next question.

Good luck and tell us about your experiences with the 74-322.

Lync 2010 Bandwidth Calculator – #Lync

The Lync 2010 bandwidth calculator is really a great tool to use when designing large and actually deployments of any size since it tells you so much great information, and this is great to put in the it-pro documentation that are later handed over to the customer.

It follows a flow chart where its divided into logical parts kind of the same way as we implement Lync and has hyperlinks to the next chapter so its just really easy to fill in.

image

But as you can see its really thought through and some steps to walkthrough before you get a good looking end result looking something like this

imageimage

The tool can be downloaded from here http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=19011 and I really recommend you to read through the included document with the instructions before you get down to business.

Troubleshooting dirsync and UPN #Office 365

One of my customers added a new group of users that used their own domain suffix which was not intended to be used in Office 365 from the start. And when we first enabled dirsync it was probably not even possible to have multiple domains but now we wanted these users enabled for Office 365 as well.

And it worked just fine for all but two users and I think that these two users was probably syned before we enabled –SupportMulitpleDomain ( to enable support for multiple domains after you have already enabled dirsync see: http://community.office365.com/en-us/w/sso/support-for-multiple-top-level-domains.aspx?Sort=MostRecent&PageIndex=1 )

So when we looked at the user object one had the .onmicrosoft.com domain and the other had adfsdomain.com. But they both really should be on the domain2.se suffix.
image

And yes of course, we had double and triple checked the AD and ran through manual synchronizations and forced a full re-syncs by changing the registry as seen below.

Open the Registry Editor and browse to the key:
HKEY_LOCALMACHINE\Software\Microsoft\MSOLCoExistence
Search for the FullSyncNeeded value and set it to 1

And then launch the:
%programfiles%\Microsoft Online Directory Sync\DirSyncConfigShell.psc1

And run the following command to start a full resync:
Start-OnlineCoexistenceSync

So after a quick chat with the support in a service request we decided to stop dirsync and remove the account from the Office 365 tenant manually and then do a full resync.

So to disable dirsync follow these steps from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2619062

  1. Install the local Windows PowerShell cmdlets. To do this, visit the following Microsoft website:Use Windows PowerShell to manage Office 365
  2. Start the Microsoft Office Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell.
  3. Disable directory synchronization. To do this, type the following cmdlet, and then press Enter:Set-MsolDirSyncEnabled -EnableDirSync $false
  4. Verify that directory synchronization is fully disabled by using Windows PowerShell. To do this, run the following cmdlet periodically:(Get-MSOLCompanyInformation).DirectorySynchronizationEnabled

    This command will return True or False. Continue to run this cmdlet periodically until it returns False, and then go to step 5.
    Note It may take 72 hours for the deactivation to be completed. The actual time depends on the number of objects that are in your Office 365 subscription account.

     

  5. Try to update an object to verify that you can delete the object.
  6. Delete the object by using Windows PowerShell or by using the Office 365 portal. To view the cmdlet documentation, visit the following Microsoft website:Windows PowerShell cmdlets for Office 365 (http://onlinehelp.microsoft.com/en-us/office365-enterprises/hh125002.aspx)
  7. To re-enable directory synchronization, run the following cmdlet:Set-MsolDirSyncEnabled -EnableDirSync $true

But I actually had some troubles with step 7.So I had to enable dirsync manually from the admin portal and wait for some time and after that all was fine again.

 

image

 

When I deactivated dirsync I was able to run the following command on the user that was in the domain.onmicrosoft.com:

Set-MsolUserPrincipalName -UserPrincipalName PIZ01@domain.onmicrosoft.com -NewUserPrincipalName pia.z@domain2.se

And that command changed the upn on the first user.

But I when I tried on a user that was in a ADFS federated domain I was not able to run the same command on her account? So what I did was to simply delete it and when I later turned Dirsync back on it was synced back up as a “new” account and all is now back to normal operations again.

 

EDIT:20120829

Just a reminder to myself, if you just want to change the UPN name, you always have to go via the onmicrosoft.com domain first, you cant just change from one Federated domain to the other. So try to remember this next time ok…

:D

Ok it’s time to break radio silence with a short announcement.

Over at download.microsoft.com there is some new documents for your reading pleasure.

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Support for Large Meetings

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 can support large meetings with up to 1000 participants using audio/video (A/V) conferencing, including sharing PowerPoint presentations. This support requires a dedicated pool configured to support large meetings and managed in a way that ensures hosting of only a single large meeting at a time.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28775

There is also a new hotfix for the Lync for mac client and one for the PC Lync.
edit: sorry i meant Communicator for mac, info here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=28784&WT.mc_id=rss_office_allproducts

Well it’s time for some more work…