May 22, 2018

The end of the road for Lync Phone Edition (LPE)

Not sure if you noticed, but Microsoft made an announcement back around the Ignite time frame that they were going to disable TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in Office 365. Originally, they stated they were going to do this in March of 2018. Many of us wondered what impact this would have on Lync Phone Edition. Well, Microsoft thought about it, then decided to delay implementing the change until October 31st. When they moved the date, they confirmed that Lync Phone Edition would not be updated to support TLS 1.2 and that after that date, it would no longer work with Office 365.

April 17, 2018

Teams and Scheduled Channel Meeting Invites

This blog came from a situation where I noticed I got an invite for a meeting from a Team where I am a guest member. When I reached out to the person who sent the invite, they said they didn’t invite me and that no one else from their team had received the invite. This caused me to dive deep into the behavior of invites with Teams.

HT to Bryan Nyce for pointing me to Matt Soseman’s article about this very topic: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/skypehybridguy/2018/01/06/why-do-i-receive-invites-to-channel-meetings-in-microsoft-teams-mystery-solved/

February 20, 2018

ICYMI: Skype for Business Server 2015 - January 2018 Update

In this episode of ICYMI: Skype for Business Server 2015 - January 2018 Update

If you were overwhelmed in late January by the rapid release of a bunch of Skype for Business and Teams features, you weren’t alone. I wanted to take a minute to highlight some key things that came out with the January 2018 Update:

  * Support of Location Based Routing with the Mac Client
  * Location Based Routing fixes where LBR users can be connected to non-LBR users
  * Support for Disclaimers on the Mac Client

Couple of things to note, first, with the Mac Client, you should have the latest deployed. LBR and E911 support came to the client back in November but we needed the December and/or the January updates to get the backend pieces.

February 13, 2018

ICYMI: Microsoft Teams App Studio

In this episode of ICYMI, I wanted to highlight the Microsoft Teams App Studio:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/Microsoft-Teams-App-Studio-Preview/bc-p/151540#M629

Here is the link to the “Getting Started with Teams App Studio”: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/platform/get-started/get-started-app-studio

While I am not a developer, I really think Teams App Studio is exciting. I can see a lot of potential for how organizations could use this to create simple (or complex) Apps that can be embedded into Microsoft Teams to help streamline their co-workers tasks.

November 30, 2017

Skype for Business - Deploying Handsets Checklist

For many folks that have deployed Skype for Business (or one of its predecessors) this post might seem a bit dated. Still, I can’t help that lately, I’ve seen quite a number of issues arise while deploying handsets with Skype for Business.

When deploying handsets for Skype for Business, there are certain requirements that need to be met from a network and systems perspective to ensure that they can function properly. This post is mainly to provide my readers a checklist of sorts to ensure that phones can log in, function, as well as be managed.

October 2, 2017

Reflections on using Microsoft Teams at Ignite

After spending a week at Microsoft Ignite, I thought I would give a quick reflection on how I used Microsoft Teams during the conference.

For background, I have been using Teams at work since it was released as a public preview. We utilize it quite heavily for group communication. In fact, we replaced GroupMe at our team event back in April with Microsoft Teams in order to communicate where people were at and what they were doing. Overall, I’ve been super happy with Teams for it’s original purpose of group communication.

August 31, 2017

With Microsoft Teams, has Microsoft turned a corner with UC?

If you have been paying attention lately, there have been quite a few articles, tweets, blog posts, etc. talking about Teams. As I utilize Teams every day and read these articles, a few thoughts have come to me.

First, just to give background, I’ve been using what is now Skype for Business since Office Communications Server RTM (circa 2007). Ever since I got my start with it, the biggest questions I have been asked about the product(s) have been around Conferencing and PSTN connectivity. Specifically, folks have looked to Office Communications Server, Lync, and/or Skype for Business as a replacement for their PBX in addition to the UC functions such as Instant Messaging and Presence. Most of the folks that I know that are deploying Skype for Business have had similar conversations.

August 4, 2017

Microsoft Teams - Teams Meeting Outlook plug-in not showing

This is just a quick tip on how I fixed an issue with the Microsoft Teams “Teams Meeting” Outlook plug-in not showing up. If you have the Teams client installed, then in Outlook, you should get “Teams Meeting” under the New Items list.

Here is what I was seeing:

What I should have seen is:

After ensuring the Teams Meeting plugin was installed by looking in %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\TeamsMeetingAddin, I uninstalled and re-installed the desktop client (also closed and re-opened Outlook after this) but this had no affect.

August 4, 2017

Speaking at VMworld 2017

I have the pleasure and opportunity to speak at VMworld again this year about how to deploy Skype for Business on vSphere. Thank you to everyone who attended last year and left good reviews and comments as that is what got me invited back!

Many companies are still deploying or have deployed Skype for Business in a virtual environment. If you are one of them (especially if you are deploying voice, video, and/or conferencing) and want to know the best practices for running Skype for Business on vSphere, you should attend this session. We’ll give you tips that should ensure success with your deployment.

July 19, 2017

Thoughts on the discontinuation of support for SBC's in Exchange Online UM

ICYMI: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Exchange/Discontinuation-of-support-for-Session-Border-Controllers-in/m-p/88228#M1134

Well, this is something I had heard about but kept hoping Microsoft would change their minds on. I get (kinda) the business decision around this. I’m sure the SBC’s were costing a bunch of money, might have been having issues keeping the service quality where Microsoft wanted it, etc.

That said, I’ll be honest, I’m disappointed. I really feel like Microsoft is making a mistake here. Exchange UM always just “made sense” for many organizations. They already were using Exchange (whether Online or On-prem) so they essentially were paying double for any voicemail system. In recent years, I’ve moved solidly in to the “Online” camp and for most organizations I don’t see the value in an on-prem Exchange deployment.