Come join us as we discuss Lync as a PBX and how to read SIP messages with Snooper.  The meeting is being held at the Polycom offices in Westminster (120th and I25). Get more details and RSVP at www.coucug.org.

The next meeting will be held on August 29th from 4-6pm at the Microsoft offices in the Denver Tech Center.  We are going to talk about the voice portion of the Lync solution. We’ll hit on topics such as SIP and Lync as a PBX replacement.

Microsoft Offices 7595 Technology Way Ste 400 Denver, CO

You can RSVP at: http://www.meetup.com/Colorado-Unified-Communicatons-User-Group/events/128810922/

In addition, you can have an impact on the future of the user group by filling out a quick survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/M9Q98GC

*** DISCLAIMER - I was approached by Packt Publishing to review this book. I was given access to the book for free. All opinions are mine.

Like a few other bloggers, I was asked to read through “Getting Started with Microsoft Lync Server” by Fabrizio Volpe. I had never read a Packt Publishing book before so I may have had poor understanding of how the book was constructed. It seems Packt Publishing books tend to be shorter and a bit more to the point than a traditional book, so be aware, this is not a massive tome like other computer books out there. This is 122 pages including the index and everything else.

While working on a project, I ran into an issue with SimRing and Call Forwarding. If a user set their Lync account to either SimRing or Call Forward to their mobile and another internal user called them via Lync, the call would forward just fine but if an external party called, the call would ring the Lync end-point (if set to SimRing) or just go straight to voice mail (Call forward).

When working with Lync and Exchange I regularly find myself needing to convert MP3 files to WAV files for the specific need of UM.  Typically, this involves finding the right bit rate, etc.  After finding a command line tool (SoundeXchange) to do this, I naturally wanted it even easier so I created a function in PowerShell to do just that.

In order to run this script, you do need a few pre-reqs.  First, you need to install SoundeXchange.  You can download it from here: http://sox.sourceforge.net.  My script is based on version 14.4.0 and I believe there is a newer version out so change the script below to fit the version you install.

If you install Lync via the evaluation bits, you might run into this error and need to change your version over to licensed.

http://pei.com/2013/03/how-to-change-lync-license-from-evaluation-to-licensed/

Being that I love being on the bleeding edge, the first night that CU1 was out, I went to install it.  The update package installed fine and I rebooted the server.  Then when I went to run the database updates, I got the following error:

Install-CsDatabase : Command execution failed: Cannot find any suitable disks for database files. You must manually specify database paths. At line:1 char:1

• Install-CsDatabase -ConfiguredDatabases -SqlServerFqdn server.corp.domain …

+ CategoryInfo          : InvalidOperation: (:) [Install-CsDatabase], Depl
oymentException
+ FullyQualifiedErrorId : ProcessingFailed,Microsoft.Rtc.Management.Deploy
ment.InstallDatabaseCmdlet

My environment still has Lync 2010 in it and the Central Management Store is located on the 2010 pool.  I naturally thought this must be the issue but then I looked a bit deeper.  The answer was somewhat simple.  The disk that the SQL databases were on had less than 10% free.  I expanded the drive and the database update went through without issue.

Lesson learned, make sure you have plenty of disk (just like Exchange) when doing the updates.

*** UPDATE ***

Microsoft has released a KB article about this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2816266/en-us?sd=rss&spid=924

Key take-away, when performing the update, you must have 16GB free on the local disks.

The latest published article I wrote for my employer:

http://pei.com/2013/02/lync-server-2013-and-the-lync-2010-client-2/

It is important to note that you should upgrade your Lync 2010 clients to the September 2012 update prior to moving the users over to the 2013 server.

Thanks!

Exchange 2010 SP3 is here. Woo-hoo! Oh wait, there’s some gotcha’s.  What do you need to know?

First, it doesn’t give you the ability to migrate from 2010 to 2013, yet.  It does support co-existence with Exchange 2013 CU1 (Cumulative Update).  You can test migrations with RTM in a lab setting but this is unsupported in production.

Second, once you move a mailbox database to an Exchange 2010 server with SP3 installed, you can no longer move it back to a pre-SP3 server.  There is an schema update to the database when it moves to a server with SP3.

A week or so ago, I was in the middle of deploying an AudioCodes Mediant 800 at a remote site.  The device had the Lync SBA installed as well.  We were trying to get the SBA to work with our Lync 2013 deployment.  This is just to document the issues we ran into.

***NOTE: The gateway must be updated to version 6.6 prior to upgrading the SBA.

First, an SBA that is based on Lync 2010 cannot be an SBA for a Lync 2013 Front-end.  This should make sense as a backup registrar must be on the same platform as the Front-end it is backing up (i.e. 2010 and 2010 or 2013 and 2013).  Sadly, I battled this way longer than I should have before this realization hit me.