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

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