Microsoft Lync

When designing your Lync 2013 topology it is easy to overcomplicate the topology with Enterprise Pools in each datacenter. Spanning pools is not supported across metropolitan datacenters in Lync 2013 which means as a minimum recommendation you would require 3 Front End servers in each datacenter pool. Then on top of that you require SQL backend servers, Edge Servers, Reverse Proxies, Office Web App Servers, File Servers, Load Balancers and Persistent Chat servers! Not to mention you require Active Directory, a Certificate Authority and Exchange UM if you want Voicemail! ...

After deploying a Lync 2013 pool alongside an existing Lync 2010 deployment, users were unable to join conferences created by users registered on the 2013 pool. They would get the error “Conference Error”. This affected users who were moved from the 2010 pool and new users created on the 2013 pool. When trying to change the Lync meeting options in Outlook or trying to reset the Assigned Conference Information via the Dial-in conference settings page it would generate an error. ...

I recently started building a Lync 2013 Pilot Pool alongside my Lync 2010 deployment. When publishing the topology I got the following errors: _Publishing in progress _ _Failed adding “AccessWrite” permissions for “RTCComponentUniversalServices” Failed adding “AccessRead” permissions for “RTCComponentUniversalServices” Failed adding “AccessWrite” permissions for “RTCHSUniversalServices” Failed adding “AccessRead” permissions for “RTCHSUniversalServices” Failed adding “AccessWrite” permissions for “RTCUniversalServerAdmins” Failed adding “AccessRead” permissions for “RTCUniversalServerAdmins” _ _Access control list (ACL) might fail on UNIX file shares. Refer to the deployment guide to manually set the ACLs in the file share. _ ...

In this post I will cover how to deploy the Lync 2010 client with a CU (Cumulative Update) and MUI (Multilingual User Interface) pack. I used this method to deploy Lync 2010 with Microsoft SCCM. Create a package source folder (e.g. Lync_2010_MUI_CU7, then download the following files place them into two subfolders named “32bit” and “64bit”: 32bit Folder: LyncSetup.exe (Lync 2010 32bit setup file) Lync.msp (Lync 2010 32bit CU - Download CU 7) LyncMUI_32bit.exe (Lync 2010 32bit MUI setup file - Download) ...

In this post I will cover how to hide Response Groups from the Lync Address Book. You can hide users by setting the msExchHideFromAddressLists value to TRUE either by using the Exchange Management Console or Exchange Management Shell (If you have MS Exchange). You can also hide contacts (e.g. Common Area Phones/Analogue Devices) by setting the same value to TRUE using adsiedit. Microsoft also provide a tool in the Lync Resource Kit called ABSConfig that lets you configure who to include in the Address Book files. ...

It is important to backup your Lync environment so that you can restore service in the event of a disaster. The following Microsoft TechNet articles explain how to backup Lync Server 2010: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh202170 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh202171 In this article I would just like to share how I have simplified this process. Ben Lye at onesimplescript.com has written an excellent script that enumerates your Lync Topology and backs up your Topology Configuration data, Location Information Service data, Response Group configuration data from all pools and persistent user data from all registrars. The script can be found here: http://www.onesimplescript.com/2012/05/automating-backups-of-lync-2010.html ...

This neat little tool will scan your Outlook contacts and suggested contacts and tell you who you may be able to federate with! Download the tool from here: http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Who-Can-Federate-Tool-a9e00d23

Using the Get-CsUser cmdlet you can get information about Lync users in your organization. The below powershell command exports Lync users, sip address, Enterprise Voice Enabled and Line URI to a CSV file. Get-Csuser | Select-Object DisplayName, SipAddress, EnterpriseVoiceEnabled, LineUri | Export-Csv -Path c:LyncUsers.csv

Whilst signed into Microsoft Lync, you may notice an error at the bottom of the client “Cannot synchronize address book”. You are also unable to find new Lync users. To resolve this issue, you can force address book updates on the client: Sign out of the Lync client and close the application from the system tray Browse to %USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalMicrosoftCommunicatorsip_username@sipdomain (Windows Vista/7) or %userprofile%Local SettingsApplication DataMicrosoftCommunicatorsip_ (Windows XP) Delete files named GalContacts.db and GalContacts.db.idx (you may notice the date stamp on these to be out of date) Add the following entry to the clients registry: 32bit Clients: ...

After moving Lync Server 2010 backend databases to a different location on your SQL servers drives you may encounter an error where the Lync client shows an error “Limited functionality is available due to outage”. This occurs because after dettaching and attaching the databases in a new location you need to enable cross database chainging on the RTC and RTCDYN databases. sp_dboption '<dbname>', 'db chaining', TRUE If you check the event logs on your Lync Front End servers you will notice the following errors and warnings: ...