Skype for Business Profile moving to Skype Online – Lync for Mac 2011 ‘adding, removing, tagging’ contacts issue

While im in the mood for another blog post, below is further information around Skype Online and the sketchy Lync for mac automatic supportability.

Ive been moving my profile between Skype for business Onprem and also Skype online and while this is a seamless transition to complete, lync for mac does grumble somewhat with moving your profile.

One of the main pain points of this profile move is the fact that contacts (your buddy lists) stop functioning as you would expect. For example when your profile is moved to SkypeOnline, you cease the ability in adding, moving and tagging of Lync user contacts???

Unfortunately to get this working you need powershell in the backend of the SkypeOnline to invoke some permissions. For some reason putting the profile online causes the UCS *unified contact store to have issues for your -identity

If you run the command get-csuserservicespolicy you should see the USC allowed set as false? so in general you should not be having any issues.?? go figure.!

the solution needed to get you past this issue is another powershell command which is detailed in this link

Once you’ve invoked rollback of your identity, the contacts in the SkypeOnline will start acting as normal.

Regards

Iain Smith

Lync and Skype for Mac -moving profile from SkypeOnline back to Skype OnPremise issues

Hello All

Based from experience ,below are details on how to fix your Lync for mac 2011 client or the new Skype for mac client when you have your SkypeFB profile in the 365 cloud then for whatever reason want to bring it back on-premises.

Recently, i’ve been in the Microsoft TAP program for SkypeOnline and more interestingly CloudPBX. Today however i wanted to complete some testing back on the server estate on premises, which to reverse this hybrid profile approach i had is a couple of clicks within the 365 tenant to bring my profile back onprem.

Unfortunately though the Lync/Skype for Mac client does not like this change and without manual intervention will never ever log you back into the client.

So the scenario above then the fix below.

Lync 2011 or Skype for Mac 2016 for MAC

Log out and quit Lync/Skype for Mac.
Go to Finder > press Command+Shift+G > type in /users/<MacUsername>/library >

delete the following files:
Caches > com.microsoft.Lync
Internet Plug-Ins > MeetingJoinPlugin.plugin
Keychains > all files beginning with OC__KeyContainer
Logs > Microsoft-Lync-x.log and Microsoft-Lync.log
Preferences > com.microsoft.Lync.plist
Preferences > ByHost > MicrosoftLyncRegistrationDB.xxxx.plist
Go to Finder > press Command+Shift+G > type in /users/<MacUsername>/documents > navigate to Microsoft User Data > delete the following folders: Microsoft Lync Data and Microsoft Lync History.
Open Keychain Access from /Applications/Utilities folder.
Delete all keychains startting with OC__KeyContainer.
In your Login keychain, delete all e-mail address certificates.
Finally, empty the Trash.

 

Thats it you should be now again fixed and able to log back into the client.

Iain Smith

 

 

 

AnyNode SBC Review – TE-Systems

Good Morning All

Recently. I had the pleasure of meeting the guys from Anynode. If your not aware, Anynode are a German based company who provides a software based solution as in Session Boarder controllers which are certified to work with Skype for Business and the predecessors Lync 2010/2013. Interesting of late they have announced that they also can provide telephony capabilities into the new SkypeFB cloud Connector which I’m sure will become of interest to a lot of people.

The underlaying technical architecture is a well guarded secret, however on face value Anynode states their SBC solution can work with any Telcos SIP platform, so with the challenge laid, i set about building the Anynode SBC in my lab to work along side my PureIP SIP trunk.

Below are my findings.

From the start as you can see the interface is one that is a lot different to what we might has seen before (in relation to Sonus, Audiocodes), yet it was one of simplicity. There are a number of things you need to align within the wizard build before the wizard takes over and completes, however if you have all the necessary FQDNs & IP addresses etc at hand literally within 10 minutes you can be up and running with calls traversing between your SIP carrier and Skype for Business.

In my lab i wanted to ensure that the SBC can do all the things a hardware appliance is capable of, meaning smart routing, DDI transformation, cause code rerouting, message  header manipulation etc etc. so with this in mind i started to tweak my configuration.

Back at the main page, on the left hand pane you see your configuration from the wizard on the select down tabs and from there you can start to get cute with your configuration to make it work exactly how you want.

Other things of interest are..

If the Server running the Anynode software is being hammered with traffic or maybe there has been a dodgy OS patch which is causing the CPU to spike, Anynode has built in resilience to specify CPU load conditions and for the software to make a judgement on what happens next, whereas more traditional hardware appliance will try and soldier on and in turn provide poor audio quality calls due to the CPU ramping.

My Synopsis on Anynode the company and also the SBC software

The guys at Anynode could not be more forthcoming with help and assistance and are willing to provide time to suit the customer to get the Software configured to your requirement.

The SBC software is excellent in truth and for any customer looking for a SIP only solution and maybe doesn’t have the outlay of money to purchase a physical appliance, then running Anynodes SBC on a VM would be a perfect option. Like i say there has been nothing lacking i can see within the software which you would get from a Sonus/Audiocodes hardware based solution.

Its worth mentioning in terms of physical\Virtual hardware, the footprint is minimal and the software is happy running on a small subset of CPU and RAM.

All in All, i really like this solution and at the time of writing in the UK the likes of Audiocodes and Sonus don’t have a low end/user software based solution which in some respects opens the door for a company like Anynode to provide an offering.

If you are interested in reviewing, trailing or even speaking to the guys at Anynode about something you are trying accomplish within your company then they are more than happy to assist.

Details are below

http://www.anynode.de

Contact Nick DiCiaccio on Email : support@te-systems.de

 

 

Lync for Mac 2011 ver. 14.3.3 -instability and balloon Spinning hanging

Hello All

Recently i have suffered from a real pain in the ar5e issue with Lync for Mac 14.3.3

Backtracking to February when 14.3.3 arrived as GA, i noticed that my Lync for mac client became really unstable with random crashes and general instability of the client. As this only become present with the 14.3.3 update, i downgraded back to the 14.1.1 build which brought the client back to a workable/normal state. At the time of going to 14.3.3 i had also been running a few Microsoft UC TAP/beta programs and i was thinking that it could be these clients causing the issues and instability i was seeing.

So, i decided that it was time for a new OSX rebuild of my machine and to get a good clean image to build upon. Following the OSX installation, i loaded Office 2016 for mac, and set my profile correctly before installing Lync for Mac 14.3.3 **without any TAP/Beta installations!..  AGAIN i saw the same random instability issues including the spinning beach ball cursor (not responding) from the Lync for Mac client. Again i ran with this setup for a few days, but then decided that the client was physically unworkable and was left again with no choice but to downgraded back to 14.1.1 which like before worked flawlessly.

This now led me to believe (in error) that it was either el-capitan OR office 2016 for Mac. ? so i set about investigating both with more several rebuilds… On builds i did notice that applying my profile before Office 2016 meant the issue was still seen.??? arghh.

One common dominator though was on a fresh rebuild of OSX THEN the installation of Lync for Mac 14.3.3 without Profile and Office 2016 would work perfectly and that the issue would only arrive back when i installed either Office 2016 or on the configuration of my profile (dock, power setting, screen saver etc).

Anyhow after a far to long and drawn out process of elimination, i finally cracked the riddle of the problem, and this being……

There is a bug in Lync for Mac 14.3.3 which is nothing to do with El-Capitan OR Office 2016  but was in fact the use of a OSX profile picture greater in mb size of 5mb.! IF you changed your picture to > greater than 5mb you will start to see instability of the Lync for mac client 14.3.3. (this didn’t happen in 14.1.1).

Simple resolution was to downgrade the profile picture to less than <5mb and the client became workable using 14.3.3 **note: this has been raised with Microsoft.

 

Skype for Business – Moving the Fileshare Error

Hello All

This blog post is to share the experience seen with issues around moving the Skype for Business fileshare from one windows server to another.

Its worth noting that this was a real life issue seen on a clients site so elements of the image are blackout to hide the clients identity.

Below is the details and scenario seen

I followed this set Microsoft procedure to move the actual file share:

1. Create the new file share and configure the correct permissions;
2. Stop all Skype for Business services across all FE’s in the Enterprise pool;
3. Configure topology to include new file store and associate with the Enterprise pool before publishing changes;
4. Run bootstrapper on all FE’s;
5. Copy data from old file share to new one using robocopy;
6. robocopy \\OldServerFQDN\OldShare \\NewServerFQDN\NewShare /S /R:10 /W:10 /XF Meeting.Active /MT;
7. Start the Skype for Business Enterprise pool using Start-CsPool commandlet;

After following each of the steps about, all services started successfully however after a basic health check it appeared that there was an issue with the backup service (pool pairing), see below:

So go figure….?

My next steps was to de-configure the pool pairing and re-configure it, however the error same occurred.

I then proceeded to reboot each Frontend in turn, same error occurred after rebooting all Frontend’s.

Everything looked good at this point in terms of File Store association with the Enterprise pool. The old file share was not referenced anywhere.

THE FINAL PART OF THE FIX

The fix was to move the WebServices* directory on the old file share into a temp directory, very bizarre as the old share was not referenced anywhere in Topology/PowerShell. 

After moving this directory and restarting the backup service again, all the errors cleared and the backup service returned to normal state.

 

Skype for Business CMS Pool Failover Issue

Good Morning All

Last week, while working on a clients deployment one of the Modality team came across a rather interesting issue around failing over a Standard Edition SkypeFB pool pairing.

What started out to be a simple failover test became a monster of an issue without any real good reason. The situation was when the pool faileded over the CMS , it became kindof orphaned in the process with the secondary front end not becoming the master and also what was the primary releasing itself as the master. Its also worth confirming that the procedure to failover was completed without error and issue and it was only when the services restarted that we saw the issue. **The Master replicator service would not start.

As this was the first time of seeing such an odd issue, we referenced the usual channels and came across Mark Vales blog almost detailing word for word the same situation/issue.

Doing some investigation we could see that the CMS was no longer attached to the primary frontend and also the secondary frontend, yet the SkypeFB client was happily working??. Also running powershell commands we could also see that the replication was now false across all the frontends/edge.

We tried a number of steps to resolve this issue including the ones Mark detailed in his blog, without success. It seems this issue can morph itself into many factor.

We tried to failback to the primary without success and got the following error

And when we attempted to restart the services we were getting the following error

Also we went to the extent of deleting the xds/lis databases and reinstalling them and importing the backup we had onto the clean databases. Still we was seeing the same errors.

The solution that worked for us was a simple one really.

Uninstall-CsDatabase –CentralManagement

then

Install-CsDatabase –CentralManagement

and restoring CMS from backup did the trick.

 

 

Northern UC UserGroup 2016 Dates Published.

Good Afternoon All

Below are the Northern UC User Group dates confirmed for 2016.

March 23rd (Wednesday)

June 22nd (Wednesday)

Sept 21st (Wednesday)

Dec 14th (Wednesday)

All the events will take place in Leeds, at the location of Modality Systems Leeds office next door to the Leeds Train Station.

Address: Modality Systems Leeds office: 223 Princes Exchange, Princes Square, Leeds LS1 4HY

Also its with pleasure to confirm for the 2016 events we are running with two sponsors. these being www.ir.com & http://kemptechnologies.com/uk/ 

Tickets are now available for the March Usergroup HERE

Unified Communications Day 2016

Hello,

I would like to announce that Unified Communications Day which i co-host will be coming back in 2016 on the 24th October. After a successful event this year we have decided to include an extra technical track to our event (Microsoft Azure) where you can learn from the best about the latest and greatest happening within the Azure arena. This will now make UC Day a dedicated Microsoft Unified Communications and Cloud Conference, which makes us very excited for next year.

UC Day will be returning to the conference suites at National Motorcycle Museum Birmingham which has now been rebranded to the National Conference Centre.

All slides and information from 2015 are still available on the UC Day Website www.ucday.co.uk

Remember you can also follow the event on Twitter @ucdayuk

Registration Opens Mid-2016

Registration will open Mid-2016. Conference tickets will be subsidised by our event sponsors and currently free. Join our Mailing list to ensure you dont miss out on this event and receive further information about the pre-conference event, speakers and sessions as they are announced and discounts on the conference partner hotel.

Join Our Mailing List

The UC Day Team looks for to seeing you all in 2016 and wish you all a Merry Christmas.

Regards
Iain Smith

I will be at Microsoft Future Decoded next week – London

Modality Systems are a gold sponsor and have a stand at the upcoming Microsoft Future Decoded in ExCeL London, Tuesday 10th and Wednesday 11th November. I’ll be there for the technical day (Wednesday 11th), if you are coming along please come over and say hello.

What is Future Decoded?

Future Decoded 2015 will host 10,000 of the brightest Business Decision Makers, Developers, IT pros and Partners from across the UK and Europe. Attendees will be taken on a journey to decode the future of business and technology whilst gaining tangible insights in making sense of the latest social and economic changes. The Expo and Conferences will be taking place at the fantastic ICC Capital Suite, at the ExCel centre in London and will take place over two days: Tuesday 10th November 2015 for Enterprise, Partner and SMB audiences and Wednesday 11th November 2015 for Technical and Developer audiences. Last year the event had almost 9,000 attendees and saw a social reach of 52 million.

Come and find out the latest in the technology field and lean what Modality are doing with Office 365 and Skype for Business. Find out more details about the event here.

UC Day – UK 28th September. Not to be missed.

Unified Communications Day is now only 6 weeks away and if you work in or with Unified Communications (Skype for Business, Office365 and Exchange) it really is an event you don’t want to miss. Andrew J. Price one of the Contributors of the UC Architects Podcast and Founder of Unified Communications Birmingham User Group has teamed up with fellow UCBUG organisers and other well know UC Professionals based in the UK to bring a very special event to the UK Conferencing calendar. We will be focusing on the “Real World and True Techie” sessions you don’t really get to see outside of Microsoft Ignite, TechEd and other Microsoft based Conferences.

We boost an impress line-up of speakers which includes;

• • 13 Microsoft Valued Professionals
• • 4 Microsoft Certified Masters
• • 3 Microsoft Employees
• • 4 Book Writers
• • 4 Community Leaders

So I says it safe to say the guys that will be speaking at UC Day really know there stuff when it comes to Unified Communications.

So who are the speakers?

Skype for Business Speakers	Exchange Speakers	Office 365 Speakers
Stale Hansen (MVP)	Brian Reid (MCM, MVP)	Gary Steere (MVP, MCM)
Tom Arbuthnot (MVP, MCM, Community Leader)	Steve Goodman (MVP, Community Leader)	Ed Baker
Tom Morgan (MVP)	Michael Van Horenbeeck (MVP)	Jon Maunder
Iain Smith (MVP, Community Leader)	Dave Stork (MVP)	Martina Grom (MVP)
Ben Lee (Community Leader)	Nathan Winters	Toni Pohl (MVP)
Alessio Giombini	Nick Parlow (MCM)	Justin Harris (MVP)

So how much does this event cost?

This event is completely free to attend, all you need to do is head over to the UC Day Website to grab a ticket and then turn up on the today where you will be presented with a badge. On your badge will be a barcode which will be used by sponsors to obtain your contact information. This process is pretty standard across most events run in the UK.

Agenda

The flow of the day will be very simple and affective kicking off with morning coffee for Network with other Attendees, Sponsors, Organisers and Speakers from 07:30 the moving to the Britannia Suite for the opening morning welcome from Andrew J. Price and Keynote (Speaker to be confirmed)

Once we have completed the Keynote session there will be 15 minutes break before we kick off with our first 3 sessions from Stale Hansen, Ed Baker and Steve Goodman. Each session will run for 45 minutes with a 15 minutes break in-between during the sessions you more than welcome float around the venue and we will have an excellent Expo Hall which will have all our sponsors setup and waiting to answer any product related questions you may have.

There will be longer break after the second session of the day for attendees to get lunch and network.

You can find the running Agenda over on the UC Day Website at www.ucday.co.uk/agenda

The UC Architects will be UC Day

As a member of the UC Architects Team, we will be hosting a Pre Event on the 27^th September at The Windmill Village Hotel in Allesley. The order of the evening will be Curry Buffet and Quiz hosted by the UC Architects, as this is an additional event to UC Day there will be slight cost involved to cover the Curry Buffet but why not come and network with some of the best guys I know.

Tickets cost £14.00 with a £1.49 Eventbrite fee

We have got a discounted room rate for attendees of the Quiz, just call or email The Windmill Village Hotel and quote “Unified Communications” to obtain your discounted room