MX-ONE Usergroup annual meeting

I had the privilege to get invited as a speaker to the MX-ONE Usergroup's annual meeting this year.It was my first time at the Swedish MX-ONE usergroup, I have been presenting at a Brum meeting, the Norwegian usergroup before.

Here is a link to my presentation please contact me if you have any questions around it.

The meeting was held in Nynäshamn just South of Stockholm in a beautiful place called Utsikten - "The view" - built originally as conference center for Telia. Around 100 persons attended.

Aastra started on Day 1 talking about how MX-ONE is doing, MX-ONE 5.0 and BluStar which will be released to partners shortly. 1,7 million lines of MX-ONE were shipped in 2011, and the server-based version of MX-ONE stands for 60% of this figure. MX-ONE 5.0 will support virtualization on VMware, and BluStar which is a "collaboration eco-system". Video calling is one of the main features and clients on PC and Apple iOs will be released to start with, there will also be a plug-in into Lync to make BluStar IM, audio or video calls.

After Aastra I entered the scene and talked about integration between MX-ONE and Lync. I described why organizations are deploying Lync even though they currently have a communication system from another vendor; some features of Lync were discussed such as the clients, mobile clients, federation and dial-in networking. I described the SIP trunk / Direct SIP connection that is certified and gave examples on what you can build using this integration.

I handed off to Jason Andersson who talked about trends and BOYD before we went to lunch, and after lunch Bo Martinsson from PTS talked about a new national numbering plan and Pär Ljunggren about education. After this the day continued with mini-seminars where you could select different seminars in smaller groups. I started out listening to Cygate talking about MX-ONE Lync integration, then Tele2 talking about MX-ONE Lync integration, and finally Relacom talking about MX-ONE Lync integration. And in between I held my seminar talking about - guess what? - MX-ONE Lync integration!

The organizations persenting are all selling MX-ONE systems and licenses, so it was not a big surprise that they praised the use of plugins into the Lync client. I was the only one saying that I do not like this approach, primarily based on the experience I had with plugins into OCS and Lync. It seems to be a hot topic for Aastra and the distributors while the end customers and members of the MX-ONE usergroup more silently followed the debate. About half of the people listening to my main seminar raised their hands at the question if they have MX-ONE and Lync deployed, but not too many claimed to have the two systems connected.

The event continued with dinner, some entertainment and indoor golfing, and day 2 started with Aastra showing some more of BluStar and the usergroup held its formal annual meeting. Basically I had a great time, learnt some now things about MX-ONE and met with a lot of nice people, thanks for inviting me!

MX-ONE Usergroup

How to Lync enable a Domain Admin

Perhaps you have seen the error message below when trying to Lync enable a Domain Admin in the Lync control panel.

Active Directory operation failed on DomainController.se. You cannot retry this operation:
"Insufficient access rights to perform the operation
00002098: SecErr: DSID-03150BB9, problem 4003 (INSUFF_ACCESS_RIGHTS), data 0
".You do not have the appropriate permissions to perform this operation in Active Directory. One
possible cause is that the Lync Server Control Panel and Remote Windows PowerShell cannot modify
users who belong to protected scurity groups (for example, the Domain Admins group). To manage
users in the Domain Admins group, use the Lync Server Management Shell and log on using a Domain
Admins account. There are other possible causes. For details, see Lync Server 2010 Help.

(The comment "You cannot retry this operation" is kind of fun - "Yes I can...")

It is pretty much as harsh as it is described here - you cannot use the Control Panel to fiddle with users who belong to protected security groups. So your options are to either use Powershell as suggested in the error message or you could try this:

1. Open active directory users and computers
2. Enable the advanced features in the view menu
3. Search for the account which is in a protected security group
4. Go to Properties / Security / Advanced
5. Check the following box: Include inheritable permissions
6. Retry what you were doing in the Lync Control Panel

Now this might not be the best "securest" way of solving this issue, but for my lab environments I do not care too much about that, but think twice before doing this in a production system. Probably you should not Lync enable your domain admin accounts at all if you want to stay secure.

40 minutes and 17 seconds of Lync Videos

These videos might be a litte more geared towards North American circumstances, but with a little imagination you will have good use of the examples. Enjoy!

• Deploy Enterprise Voice: Part 1
  (5 min 08 seconds)
• Deploy Enterprise Voice: Part 2
  (5 min 21 seconds)
   
• Simple User Provisioning with Microsoft Lync 2010
  (7 min 23 seconds)
• Flexible Dial Plans with Lync Server 2010
  (5 min 23 seconds)
• Using SIP Trunks with Lync Server 2010
  (5 min 36 seconds)
• Lync Server 2010, more than a PBX
  (5 min 45 seconds)
• Voice Resiliency with Lync Server
  (5 min 41 seconds)

Removing Policies & Warnings

In some cases when listing users in the Lync Control Panel you will see the following annoying message:

"ClientPolicy" with identity "1" assigned to "sip:mattias@kressmark.se" has been removed from configuration store.


This message is caused by deleting a policy which is assigned to one or more users, like this:

Remove-CsClientPolicy -Identity Stockholm

The policy "Stockholm" is currently assigned to one or more users. Assign a different policy to the users before removing this one. The policy is in use.
[Y] Yes  [N] No  [S] Suspend  [?] Help (default is "Y"): Y

If you do not have another Client policy configured the only option when editing the user is "Automatic". One solution to the problem would be to remove the user from Lync server and then add the user again. But better yet - to reset the Global policy to the user avoiding the annoying message in CSCP you can use the following command:

Grant-CsClientPolicy -Identity mattias@kressmark.se -PolicyName $null

This example used the Client Policy, but I assume this would work the same way for any policy giving the annoying message.

State of Blog and Lync Anno Domini 2012

I have been blogging for about a year now, and it has been fun, so I am going at it for another year. The blog had 33 posts and some 10,000 page views the past year, thanks for the comments, mails and feedback so far!

So let's start off 2012 with some news around Lync!

The biggest news is of course the Lync 2010 Mobile Clients.
It is now possible to run Lync 2010 clients on Windows Phone, iPhone, iPad, Android​ and Nokia Symbian​.

What I hope we will see more of in 2012 is Office 365 and especially Lync voice services through this cloud. Sometime in a distant future my guess is that we will call some VoIP (or other technology) network "PSTN". This might be one of the first little steps: Cloud based Lync Voice Services with BT

Something I been missing for quite some time now - a complete virtual Lync test environment: VHD Test Drive - Lync Server 2010 VHD (Dev)

Another interesting document and technology for the future:
Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Multitenant Pack for Partner Hosting Deployment Guide

For my Swedish readers I can recommend to read in Telekomidag about how
Telia have integrated Lync and MX-ONE with mobile extensions for their customers.

Lync CU4 - one step closer to mobile integration

Lync Server 2010 Hotfix KB 2493736, aka Lync CU4 is now available for download.
It contains quite a few new commands - aimed at configuring mobile clients.
Now we are just missing the clients, minor detail... :-)

A list of the new commands:

Get-CsAutodiscoverConfiguration
New-CsAutodiscoverConfiguration
Remove-CsAutodiscoverConfiguration
Set-CsAutodiscoverConfiguration
New-CsWebLink
Test-CsMcxPushNotification
Get-CsMobilityPolicy
Grant-CsMobilityPolicy
New-CsMobilityPolicy
Remove-CsMobilityPolicy
Set-CsMobilityPolicy
Get-CsMcxConfiguration
New-CsMcxConfiguration
Remove-CsMcxConfiguration
Set-CsMcxConfiguration
Get-CsPushNotificationConfiguration
New-CsPushNotificationConfiguration
Remove-CsPushNotificationConfiguration
Set-CsPushNotificationConfiguration

More details here...

More telephony plugins for Lync?

While I am not a big fan of plugins in the Lync client it seems as more and more traditional voice providers  develop such plugins. To be a bit cynical, I believe that these organizations are trying to "help" their customers to avoid the costly Lync voice licenses (Lync Plus CAL) and instead get voice and such licenses from them. It could be a valid reason for an organization sitting with an existing voice platform wanting to wait before going all-in into Lync or wanting to save a few $.

When it comes to functionality these plugin solutions always becomes a bit messy.
Seriously, would you like to install a little plugin phone into an existing deskphone so that you could... call? or what about a Rebtel plugin into Skype?

Anyhow, here is some new stuff from Avaya:
Avaya Agile Communication Environment (ACE) version 3.0 for Microsoft Lync
that will be out soon, and here is a new blog from VOX covering a lot of Avaya stuff.

It will be interesting to see how popular this Avaya plugin product might become further on.

So far, I only had some experiences with Cisco's Cuci-Moc and Cuci-Lync plugin products, and I do agree with the opinions of Luis Ramos and Justin Morris.