Monday, November 11, 2013

November 2013 Update for the Lync 2013 Client

If you applied the October 2013 update for the Lync 2013 client, I'm sure you noticed that calendar-based presence updates broke.  This was a huge headache for me, as I typically block off my calendar with an appointment for the customer I am working with.  Normally, this sets my presence status in Lync to "Busy" so I don't get interrupted (ha!).  With the October 2013 update applied, I had to remember to do this manually - which I often forgot to do.

Monday, October 28, 2013

Kemp Load Balancer and Lync Unified Contact Store Integration Note

During the deployment of Lync 2013 for a customer who was integrating with Exchange 2013, we ran into somewhat of a strange issue with the Unified Contact Store (UCS).  Even though EWS access was working, and OAuth appeared to be working, users' contacts were not being migrated into the UCS.  After a bit of troubleshooting on our own, a conversation with Kemp support pointed us in the right direction.

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Microsoft UC User Group in Saint Louis, MO

We're building a new Microsoft Unified Communications User Group in the greater Saint Louis, Missouri area.  The focus of this group will primarily be Lync, and since the products are so tightly woven, we'll probably have some discussions around Exchange as well.  This is an open group, so anyone is welcome to join.  If you are a knowledgeable resource and would like to present on a topic, we would be happy to have you do that as well.  We're going to keep things informal, and if the turn out is good enough we may have an occasional social event.  If you're interested, please register below and we'll look forward to seeing you!

Meetup Page and Registration Link:
http://www.meetup.com/MSUCUG-STL/

Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Lync Online Federation Issues with Lync 2013 Post-Migration

***UPDATED*** - 6/19/2013


As part of the Lync 2013/W15 TAP program with Microsoft, we were one of the first organizations to deploy Lync 2013 into production.  In doing so, we also had the joy of experiencing the migration "gotchas" before deploying Lync 2013 into customers' environments.  One oddity I ran into when performing the Edge migration from Lync 2010 to Lync 2013 was with our Lync Online federation partnerships.  Post-migration, many of these federations flat-out broke, and others that seemed to work were behaving strangely.  After looking over the errors and symptoms, we got everything sorted out - and the solution was relatively simple.  However, I'm still unsure as to why this issue was allowed to occur in the first place.

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Updated Lync Debugging Utilities!

I mentioned this on Twitter a while back, but I find it worth posting again as they recently helped me in troubleshooting some issues with a customer.  Just prior to RTM of Lync 2013, Microsoft released a new set of Debugging Tools.  Included in the bundle are updated versions of Snooper, OCSLogger, OCSTracer, and ClsController.psm1.