Yesterday, (April 24th), was the Best of Lync Conference Denver. As a leader of the Colorado Unified Communications User Group, I was involved in the planning, setup and execution of putting this event on. I wanted to take a moment to reflect on what we accomplished.

First, we had a goal of 40 attendees. We ended up with 48 or 49 plus the sponsors and leaders of the user group for a grand total of 58. We did this with about a months worth of planning and invitations. Based on the amount of effort that was put into just this, I have to say my admiration and and respect (which was already pretty big) for Jamie Start (@nomorephones) and his team has been exponentially magnified. I have no idea how they have pulled off the real LyncConf the past two years without going absolutely crazy. Seriously, that team must be amazing.

For folks in the Denver area, the February meeting of the Colorado UC User Group is this Thursday (2/27) from 4-6pm at the Microsoft offices in the DTC.

We are going to be discussing Identity Management with Office365. This is an important topic if you are wanting to utilize Office365 with Single Sign-on or if you are running (or going to run) a Hybrid setup.

You can find out more and RSVP at www.coucug.org.

The good folks at Jabra sent me a stack of devices that I will be working my way through. This is my first impressions with the Jabra Motion UC device.

My day job requires me to be on the phone a lot. I work from home most days and use a headset or speaker phone for an average of 4-5 hours per day. A good headset and a speaker phone are a must. There are a few requirements that I have to have:

Awhile back, a tool called Find Lync Versions was released. This tool was pretty helpful in finding out what versions of Lync were registering to a server. For me specifically, it helped me find a bunch of old CX700 phones that were connecting with OCS versions of Lync Phone Edition. I recently went to find it again and the site that it was hosted on was gone.  I used the Way Back Machine and an old copy I had to use it again recently. Thought I would re-post the directions for it as its main feature was a SQL Query against the RTCLocal database. Since I don’t know the original author nor do I have their permission, I am not going to re-publish the zip file publicly. Hopefully the original author can re-post it or the source code somewhere.

Ran into this awhile back and documented it in my “To Blog” note pile. Client wanted to know how long someone who isn’t the meeting owner (i.e. a guest from another company) could stay in a meeting before they were kicked out if the meeting owner (aka Presenter) dropped.  I found this article on Technet: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg398340.aspx and it explained the following:

AnonymousUserGracePeriod:

Represents the amount of time an anonymous (unauthenticated) user can remain in a meeting without an authenticated user being present in that same meeting. For example, if this value is set to 15 minutes an anonymous user can stay in the meeting for, at most, 15 minutes before an authenticated user must join. If an authenticated user does not join before the grace period expires then the anonymous user will be removed from the meeting. This setting applies to both scheduled meetings and to ad-hoc meetings created by clicking Meet Now in Microsoft Lync.

My good friend Jonathan McKinney originally posted this article about the Lync Debugging tools:

http://blog.lyncdialog.com/2013/03/inboundrouting-and-outboundrouting-does.html

In the article he notes that you should copy the default.tmx file from C:\Common Files\Microsoft Lync Server 2013\Tracing to the folder where the Debugging tools are installed as the default.tmx file that shipped with the Debugging Tools was only ~5Mb in size.

Well, I was following this advice as I always do and when I noticed that on this fresh install of the Debug tools, the default.tmx file was ~22Mb big. I went back and checked, and sure enough, the Debugging tools were updated on 1/8/2014.  You can get them here:

The January meeting of the Colorado Unified Communications User Group (COUCUG) will be held on January 30th from 4-6pm at the Microsoft offices in the DTC. Plantronics will be sponsoring the meeting and will be providing food and drinks.

Our topics this month are:

  * Lync Meeting Etiquette
  * Deploying Lync Voice

Please RSVP at www.coucug.org so we can bring in the right amount of food.

We’re looking forward to a great year with lots of great topics and hope you will join us.