Lync: Local and Site-to-Site Dial Plan GUI Script

In a multiple, or even single, site VOIP deployment there are some  steps you can take to make life a whole lot easier on your end users. One of of the common features implemented across phone deployments (VoIP or otherwise) is site local and site-to-site dialing shortcuts. These shortcuts generally reduce the number of digits users have to dial to reach one another. In this post I’ll go over how you might setup such a dial plan in Lync. First I’ll go over how you might setup such a plan manually then I’ll provide a GUI tool to do the same thing.

Lync: Voice Route Diagram Creation Script

Lync voice routing boils down to three basic components working in concert to decide call flow. It seems quite simple on paper, you assign voice policies which determine call routes based on PSTN usages (often called the ‘glue’). After looking at Lync voice routing way too many times I finally caved into producing a script to create diagrams of the things over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.

Lync and UM Correlation with Powershell

I’ve been working on an Exchange/Lync voice deployment lately and have found a new level of frustration for the lack of connectivity between the several voice components involved in turning up such a solution. That being said it is not very difficult to validate your deployment with a bit of Powershell.

There are a few necessary results to gather where I believe it can be easy to ‘miss’ configuration steps when turning up or disabling users:

PS Quickie: New-PIN

Setting a bunch of PINs for Lync devices is not difficult at all. Here is a script to pre-generate them should you find the need to do so. The function simply generates random digits between 0 and 9 and convert to a string. An exception is made for the first digit (as zeros are often not displayed in csv files when opened in excel) and only digits 1-9 are used.

Exchange – The State Of External Client Access

Introduction

Most within the messaging and collaboration industry are hyped up about the next wave of Microsoft collaboration and messaging products which are soon to be released. Among these products is Exchange 2013 RTM. This type of release typically precedes yet another wave of architecture upgrades across the corporate landscape. Some of these (beta testers) will be will undoubtedly upgrade to Exchange 2013.

Other corporations will start to feel the burn to upgrade as well. These will be organizations which realize that their Exchange 2003/2007 infrastructure is nearing a decade old existence and cannot meet the demands of their ever growing mobile workforce. Realizing they are behind the curve, they may feel hastened to upgrade as well, possibly just to Exchange 2010. Regardless the reason in choosing to upgrade their messaging infrastructure, there are critical design decisions which need to be made in how clients access this infrastructure both internally and externally. This article focuses solely on the external access aspect of the infrastructure.