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:

• SuperToast by Paul Nearney @PaulNearney (http://www.modalitysystems.com/software/super-toast/), this helps you not miss an IM that arrives while you are working on your secondary screen by displaying an on screen message that (most importantly) does not steal focus!
• Lync Select Dial by Matt Landis (@MatthewLandis)
  (http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Lync-Copy-Dial-Just-Select-3c426244), this allows you to highlight a number and simply hit F8 to dial it. Saves you having to hit "Ctrl+C, switch to Lync, Ctrl+V, Enter" which is an extra 7 (at least) key presses so to my mind makes you at least 7 times more productive!

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:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exchangesvrunifiedmessaging/thread/158d2a68-fb56-4c15-b3fb-dae78a646fb4

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:

• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/322308 XADM: Event ID 9554 Appears After You Modify Mailbox Permissions
• http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555433 Troubleshooting Event ID 9554 using ADFind Utility

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.

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

--- Updated post for Skype for Business 2015 now available ---

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