If you are in the Denver, CO area on Thursday (10/30), you should come join us at the October Colorado UC User Group (COUCUG) meeting. We have a great line up of speakers! Topics are Lync with Office 365 UM and Lync Contact Center.

We have a ton of give aways from our sponsors too! We will be giving away a tablet, Jabra headsets and more!

Please visit www.coucug.org to learn more and to RSVP.

Working with larger Lync deployments, I have run into this a few times where we need to force the Backup Service using Invoke-CsBackupServiceSync and we get the message “No Central Management services were found for the pool you specified to backup.”

The first time I saw it, it made me pause but I noticed something, it wasn’t an error. Errors always display in red. I went back to Technet and read about the cmdlet.

I have now experienced this issue at two different clients so I thought I would share how we are handling it in case others are experiencing it.

Background: After you publish a Lync topology where you add and/or delete and object, you see the CPU utilization spike to 100% across all of your front-ends.

This issue has been around awhile. Ken Lasko talked about it on his blog (http://ucken.blogspot.com/2014/01/high-processor-utilization-on-lync-2013.html) back in January of 2014. He had suggested simply restarting the AppPool’s on the CMS servers.

The August meeting is just over two weeks away! Come hear about Attendant Pro from Landis Computer and enter to win a Plantronics headset.

We’ll be kicking things off at 4pm and we’ll go til 6pm. Food and drink is being supplied by Matt Landis and Landis Computer.

You can RSVP and get more details at www.coucug.org. We hope to see you there!

Yesterday, Microsoft announced that they are not doing the smaller, product centric events like Microsoft Exchange Conference (MEC) or LyncConf. They are switching to a Unified Technology Event which will be next May in Chicago. You can read the announcement here: http://blogs.office.com/2014/07/21/microsofts-unified-technology-event-for-enterprises/.

This news isn’t all that surprising, combining efforts has to be a great way to save money and more efficient from a planning standpoint.

I have to admit, I’m sad to see LyncConf go. I went to both years of it and thought it was fantastic. I hope the new event is as good and not just a re-invention of TechEd. A few reasons that I am disappointed the smaller conferences are going away:

We recently had a requirement when deploying a new Lync 2013 pool to give a Site/Region their own Simple URL’s. I knew this could be done and it’s always easier when doing it during the deployment but this was the first time I had ever had to do it when the site had been running for awhile on Lync 2010 and using the Global Simple URL’s.

Our requirement was to go from using the Global Simple URL (meet.company.com) to a Regional based one of meet-emea.company.com.

This post was inspired by a troubleshooting session that happened just before the long Memorial Day Weekend here in the states. We had just moved our pilot users over to our Lync 2013 pool a day before when they started reporting issues calling certain numbers. What was interesting was not all calls were failing. Only international calls and a few mobiles were failing. National calls were working fine. Nothing changed call flow-wise so it had me a bit stumped.

Awhile back I was given a Jabra Motion UC headset to test and work with to review. You can read my initial thoughts here: http://phyler.wordpress.com/2014/02/05/jabra-motion-uc-initial-thoughts/

After using this now for a few months, I thought I would report on the battery life. Jabra released an update in mid-April that extends the battery life to 8 hours but I wasn’t seeing anywhere close to that so I contacted their support and we worked through it and found a few things.

The May meeting for the Colorado UC User Group is just around the corner on the 29th from 4-6pm. Come listen to Exchange MVP Jason Sherry (@jasonsherry) speak about Exchange Cross-forest migrations.

You can get more details and RSVP at www.coucug.org.

The last full week of April we saw many people from around the US gather to participate in local user group events. As a leader of the Colorado Unified Communications User Group (COUCUG), I am ecstatic to see the success and engagement growing for all of the local communities.

If you are not involved in a local user group, I believe you should be. The local user groups are not a place where people should be bored listening to a sales pitch. Each group, whether it is an independent group like ours or one of the national Lync Users Groups, has experts who want to share what they have learned over time. These experts consist of MVP’s and Microsoft Certified Masters (MCM’s) who give of their time to come and speak.