Lync Book Review: Lync Server Cookbook

I had planned to purchase this book at some point but instead was pleasantly surprised by an offer from one of the authors to provide an objective review of ‘Lync Server Cookbook‘! As I have worked with the product in some form since LCS/OCS days I believe I can speak with some authority on subject matter and readily agreed. With that being said, lets start with the book’s overarching scope and structure.

Exchange Mailbox Auditing with Powershell

Some time ago I wrote a script and GUI for performing security audits of Exchange mailbox and calendar rights in an environment. This script was far more popular than I anticipated and, I’m ashamed to say, was rather poorly written by my current Powershell standards. There is an obvious need to simplify the extraction of mailbox permissions or my old script would not still be so popular. So I’ve started to revisit my old code for this project in hopes of remaking it with my PowerShell reporting engine. The first step in this process is to pull out the several bits of code that do the actual rights/permissions extraction. I think I’ve finally got this part done and see no reason not to release this mini-library of functions first.

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:

Gather (and Diagram) Installed Roles and Features With Powershell

Use this powershell script to gather installed features and roles from remote systems. This uses two wmi classes in an attempt to gather as much information as possible. Win32_ServerFeature will contain roles and their dependencies on systems running Windows 2008 and above. For these systems we can use this hierarchy to also produce pretty diagrams using graphviz and techniques I’ve exhibited in some of my other scripts (I added this last part in cause it is easy to do, not really certain how useful it is other than maybe exploring the dependencies between windows roles/features).

Lync 2013: Monitoring Mirrored SQL Databases With PowerShell

In Lync 2013 you are given a powerful new backend redundancy option for your important databases in the form of SQL mirroring. In this article I’ll discuss which services are able to be mirrored, the databases they encompass, and provide a PowerShell script to generate a report on the database mirror status. I also threw in Lync CMS replication and service status sections because it is the civil thing to do…