Lately, I have found myself in situations where I don’t have full domain admin rights while working on Lync. This isn’t a bad thing but one area that I consistently run into issues with is the Lync Management Shell. If you are on a Lync Front-end and you don’t have Administrator rights, the local Lync Management Shell doesn’t actually do Role Based Access Control (RBAC). Therefore, I’ll try to execute a command (say, set-csuser, grant-csdialplan, etc) and get a permission denied. Yet, I can go into the Lync Control Panel and change a setting on the user just fine.

The way around this is remote PowerShell. Since I work on many different clients, I wrote a nice little script that will prompt me for my credentials and the remote server or pool.

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Connect-LyncRemotePoSH.ps1

Written By: Adam Ball

Version History:

1.0 - 12/12/2013 - Initial Script

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#You can pass a server or pool name with the script (i.e. .\Connect-LyncRemotePoSH.ps1 myserver.mydomain.com ) param ($poolname)

#If no server or pool was passed when the script executed, pop up a box and ask for it. if ($poolname -eq $null){ [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName(‘Microsoft.VisualBasic’) | Out-Null $poolname = [Microsoft.VisualBasic.Interaction]::InputBox(“Enter a Pool or Server to connect to”, “Remote Lync Pool or Server”, “”) }

#Change the server or pool name in to a properly constructed URL $poolname = “https://” + $poolname + “/OcsPowershell” $cred = Get-Credential $session = New-PSSession -ConnectionURI $poolname -Credential $cred Import-PsSession $session `

To execute, simply run the script (assuming proper execution policy is set). It will pop-up a box and ask you for the remote server or pool then pop up another box and ask for your credentials. You can also pass the server or pool name to it as part of the script execution (i.e. “.\Connect-LyncRemotePoSH.ps1 mypool.mydomain.com”).

This is also a nice way for being able to do Lync Management from your desktop without having the Lync tools installed.

Just remember, when you are done, remove the session by running “Remove-PsSession $session”.