Exchange 2010 - Voicemail enabling a shared mailbox

If you create a shared mailbox using PowerShell in Exchange 2010 like thus:
New-Mailbox -Name:'SharedVoicemail' -OrganizationalUnit:'fch.local/Shared Mailbox Accounts' -Database:'Shared Mailboxes' -UserPrincipalName:'SharedVoicemail@Domain.local' -Shared
The mailbox is created with a disabled user account and all is merry with the end users are dipping into their newly created mailbox.



You implement Lync and decide that one team is going to have a shared voicemail instead of having personal voicemail and that as they all use the aforementioned shared mailbox that you might as well just Enterprise Voice enable the Shared Mailbox in Lync and then enable it for Unified Messaging.

You do so and ring the number that you have given to it for its voicemail and all seems fine, messages are left and the users witch access to the account are dipping in and listening to the voicemails along with the emails they used to do...... The only issue is that Exchange has used its text to speech engine to give the mailbox a robotic sounding name. You think, no problem, I'll use the Outlook Voice Access number to dial in and setup the mailbox.

You dial the number, input your extension number assigned to the Shared Mailbox and get the lovely:
"XXXX isn't the correct extensions number for the mailbox"
huhhh?

It is. Look, it's there in Exchange and Lync. Why can't I get into it?

Well -  Shared Mailboxes are created with disabled user accounts. Honest, have a look at the documentation - I've got time.

As such the user of the Shared Mailbox is not allowed to login, so, simply enable the account in AD (setting a password as required by your domain policy), make the changes you need and re-disable the account.

Case closed.

My Lync “must have” utility’s

When building a new laptop for myself there are a couple of apps that I install for Lync that mean I can be more productive in from the off. Both run in the notification area and are silent in operation and as such this post is also for my own benefit so I can remember to install them. They are:

Voice Mail Preview (confidence is low)….. but funny

Exchange 2010 has a brilliant feature called Voice Mail Preview. This gives Exchange Unified Messaging the ability to take an incoming voice mail and convert the audio to text enabling you to check the content of a voice mail without listening to the audio that was recorded.

Or that’s the idea.

Microsoft are yet to release a Language Pack for en-GB (or British English!) which includes Voice Mail Preview (see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd638119 for details).

I have recently upgraded our environment from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2010, the decommissioning process had been running well in that running with the Exchange 2007 servers powered off all features appeared to be working. The final part of the decommissioning is to uninstall the Exchange 2007 servers.

After uninstalling all Exchange 2007 servers and then testing features all seemed fine until one of the end users mentioned that her voice mail had turned American.

I checked by calling my own Voice Mail which confirmed that I now had an American lady speaking to me and also suddenly Voice Mail Preview started working. The problem with this was the American lady was having trouble with my British accent:


On checking the EMC I could see that all the dial plans had reverted to en-US (US English). From the drop down list no other language packs were available. Strange I thought as one of the steps in my migration was installing the en-GB lang pack.


On attempting to install the en-GB language pack I received the following error:


Error: Unified Messaging language packs are already installed for the following cultures: ‘en-GB’. The installation can’t proceed until the following language packs are removed from the list: ‘en-GB’

A quick Bing for information brought back the following post for Exchange 2007:


Digging through the registry I found the following key :

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\ExchangeServer\v14\UnifiedMessagingRole\LanguagePacks

Which contained the following entries:

"en-US"="cef60964-21ae-47e0-93c6-611aa8941b7f"
"en-GB"="d0ff1f64-221f-42ba-81bd-a06e3b6c8a91"

I backed up the key and deleted the en-GB key. The language pack installation then continued successfully and I was then able to amend the UM dial plans in the EMC back to English (United Kingdom).

I do hope that Exchange 15 has en-GB as a Voice Mail Preview option!

Exchange 2010 Orphaned GUID

The following error kept being thrown in our Exchange 2010 Application event log:

Event ID 9554
Source MSExchangeIS

"Unable to update Mailbox SD in the DS. Mailbox Guid: 0XXXXXXXXXXd. Error Code 0x8004010f"

(GUID obscured)

The Microsoft articles for this are as follows:

These state taking the mailbox GUID and converting it back to the AD GUID and then fixing permisions.

When I tried this in our enviornment no results were returned.

Digging deeper I tried searching our maiboxes for the GUID:

get-mailbox | ft ExchangeGuid, DisplayName

The GUID was not evident in this list.

The only other place I could think of a GUID hiding was in the disconnected mailboxes so ran the following on each database to see if the GUID came up:

get-Mailboxstatistics -Database "DATABASENAME" | Where-Object {$_.DisconnectDate -Notlike $NULL} |FT DisplayName, MailboxGuid

The GUID was found - wahoo.

Next I ran:

Remove-Mailbox -Database "ICT" -StoreMailboxIdentity 0XXXXXXXXXXd

And waited, checking the event log later in the day and the event ID was no longer showing.