Taking a Lync Polcom CX600 home to meet the family.


When demoing Lync to teams within Freebridge one of the hardest concepts to get across is that a phone number is now not tied to a bit of plastic that sits on your desk but it is now part of your user account (the same as your email).

Some people thought still like the idea of having a traditional looking handset to pick up. For these people we supply either the Polycom CX600 or the Plantronics P540. Once our end users have the freedom to login from anywhere (home, coffee shop, train) then they start asking can they use their handsets there too.

The P540 is a dumb USB device so just taking it home with you and plugging into an internet connected and Lync cliented PC means that “it just works.” The CX600 is a different beast. It’s an IP phone using Power Over Ethernet (POE) that when on the corporate network finds our front end pool and allows you to login fully on the phone.

When at home then you have a few barriers to overcome to get the CX600 to login.

Barrier Number One

It’s a POE phone.

I would wager that not many people have POE on their home network. So you will either need a POE injector or a power supply for the CX600

Barrier Number Two
The phone needs to know how to connect to the Edge Server.

For a phone that has been setup at work this is no problem. The phone already has the domain name that it needs to connect and authentication details saved into its internal memory and when it boots up on an external network it simply finds the Edge server and signs in with the cached credentials

For a new out of the box phone we have an issue though. The sign in on the phone is your extension and passcode. The phone has no knowledge of what that extension number connects to and as such will fail to find the Edge server. The solution is to plug the USB cable into a computer that has Lync on it and then us the “better together” feature to pass the network credentials from the Lync client on the computer to the phone which will then be provisioned to find the Edge server and log in successfully in future.
CX600 plugged into BT Home Hub and connected to Edge server

Outlook not showing attachments

One of our users contacted the ServiceDesk to say that they were no longer getting attachments from specific senders. The email would show the paperclip icon but when the email was opened no attachments were there.

The emails were all from users of Applemail and the end user was on our Exchange 2007 server.

Client was Outlook 2007, upgrading them to Outlook 2010 didn't help.

Only change on the server was the patch Update Rollup 3-v2 for Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 3 (KB2530488) was applied to the server.

To fix on our server I followed http://support.microsoft.com/kb/954684 which was to run the following PowerShell command:

set-OrganizationConfig -ShowInlineAttachments:$true
After running the command I restarted the Transport service and the test email came through correctly.

Performing a Consultative Transfer using Lync


A consultative transfer is a common scenario where before transferring a call to someone you want to contact the person you’re transferring to first to ensure they are able to take the call. Let’s walk through this scenario to show how this is accomplished using Lync.


Matt Webster has called me and is inquiring about the project we are working on.



As I don’t have the experience in this specific project, I start a new phone call with Andy Robinson from the Contact List, the project manager for this specific project.


When I start the new call to Andy, Matt’s call is automatically put on hold.



Andy has indicated that he is free to take the call, so I return to Matt’s conversation window and click on the Transfer Button. The transfer menu automatically includes people I’m currently talking to, so I’m able to select Andy from here.







While the call is transferred I can see the status from both Matt’s and Andy’s conversation window. After the transfer has completed both windows are closed :)



The beautiful part about Lync is that you are not just limited to consulting using a phone call. Next time you want to consult someone before transferring, try using an IM.

As you can see from this simple scenario, the ability to consult with someone before sending a phone call to them can be quite useful in ensuring that the person is available, and has the background required to help the caller.



This blog post uses the text from http://blogs.technet.com/b/lync/archive/2009/10/21/using-consultative-transfer.aspx but with the images of Lync instead of OCS for all us early adopters!


Feel free to add me on your Lync - sip:tobie.fysh@freebridge.org.uk

Lync 2010 forgetting contacts





I have a problem with Lync 2010 on Windows 7 SP1 with Office 2010. Excahnge 2007
It is reproducible across other machines in the organisation on both Outlook 2007 and 2010.
The problem is as follows:



Create a contact with an email address and phone number in your personal contacts in Outlook







Then switch to Lync and search for the contact and add them







As you can see the contact is added with all information present.







Logout of Lync and back in, Lync will then try to sync contacts with Outlook (shown by updating…)







After a while the sync finishes but the contacts do not have the details left in them to be able to phone the contact. Sort of defeats the point of adding it in the first place.





Sophos Install on Vista/W7

Have recently upgraded to Sophos Enterprise Manager 4.5

Still didn't seem to be a way to push the install to the more modern of the Microsoft Windows family so had to work out how to script it.

I could see the PC's that were not showing up as connected in the Enterprise manager and hacked together this script:

e:\pstools\psexec.exe \\ComputerToInstallTo -u Domain\Adminitrator -p Password -h -i \\SophosServer\SophosUpdate\CIDs\S000\SAVSCFXP\setup.exe -mng Yes -crt R -user Domain\Administrator -pwd Password -s yes -ni yes

The PC that you are trying to push Sophos to needs to be logged on but only as a standard user

For information about the above check out these two help pages:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897553

http://www.sophos.com/support/knowledgebase/article/12570.html

An Alarming Time (or Facebook stalking works out)

I live beside a Gardman warehouse, the one that is mentioned in this press release.

For some reason the alarm at the building was triggered between the end of 2010 and the start of 2011 (Saturday), being a good neighbour I wandered down to the sign saying who looked after the building to see if they were aware.



On phoning the local security company (GSL Darden) they informed me the key holder had been contacted but he was in Essex and it would be a while before he turned up.

A second night of the alarm sounding went by and (now Sunday) I again phoned GSL who told me that the key holder had decided to stay in Essex until late Monday probably Tuesday.

Humm – that’s a bit of a pain as this alarm is getting slightly annoying now. So what to do?

  1. I rang all the numbers I could find on the Gardman website (http://www.gardman.co.uk/contact-us) and got either no reply or automated “thanks for calling but we are closed”
  2. Searched Twitter for an account -Found @gardman but don’t think that Keith Lee is the guy I need!
  3. Did a bit of digging for directors names and came up with:
  • Mark Pearson (CEO)
  • Tim Stainton (Commercial Director)
Thought about buying the financial reports online from Companies House to get home details (did that before to get them for First Choice when they gave poor customer service) but didn’t want to spend the money.

So where to turn next...... FACEBOOK :-)

So, lets start at the top – Mark Pearson, I found this profile : http://www.facebook.com/mark.d.pearson who is friends with a Tim Stainton but not sure its the CEO

On to Tim – he was easier to find as he has a nice clear photo http://www.facebook.com/tim.stainton and reading down from his (unsecured) wall there is this comment about B&Q.



When you refer to http://www.diyweek.net/news/news.asp?id=12511 you can see that Tim came from B&Q in the past and he also has a boat http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=226355&id=777438972

so I’m thinking reasonably successful guy with the same name – probably a match.

It's time to craft a message to him:

Hi Tim,

Sorry to disturb you on a Sunday but myself and my family have been disturbed by one of the security alarms on your new West Lynn site since New Years Day. The site is the one this press release is about :
http://www.gardman.co.uk/gardman-ready-growth

I phoned the local security company, who tell me that the key holder has been informed but wont be back until late Monday or probably Tuesday when the site re-opens.

I think this is a tad antisocial and would appreciate if you would please get someone to site earlier to firstly turn off the alarm and secondly for your peace of mind ensure that the site and products are secure.

With kindest regards
Tobie Fysh

I’ll post any response that I get.