Small Fysh in a big pond

Moving from a Mitel PBX to Lync 2010 (part three of three)

So we had reached the end of our journey, staff moved, Contact Center deployed. Time for the final push to migrate remaining analogue devices and switch off the Mitel.

For this part we continued with the company who started us on the Lync journey - Eurodata, but by now they had been consumed by Trinity Expert System who during the planning stage were taken over by Liberata. This caused some phone calls to confirm contracts being in place and existing bookings would be honoured but the scheduled time was met and we had support for the choosen weekend.

As we had Lync working with the Mitel/Dialogic setup we felt the route with least risk was to use a second Media Gateway (Sonus) to configure the ISDN onto which gave us the option of falling back to the Mitel/Dialogic configuration if towards the end of the maintenance window we had not got everything configured.

On the new ~~NET UX1000~~ Sonus SBC 1000 the first challenge we encountered was configuring the number manipulation we had on the Dialogic (number re-writing on outgoing calls to present our non-geographic number for certain calls) and also to support what I like to think of as dynamic outgoing number rewriting but in getting suppliers to understand it can be refered to by any of these names:

ISDN Option 4 (noclip)
CLI Type 4
CLI No Clip
Presentation Number Type 4
CLIP No Screen

I'm including all of these here for the benefit of search engines as getting information was difficult to find in one place. The best non-technical description is from Ofcom:

Presentation Number Type 4
A presentation number available for the onward transmission of the originating number where a call breaks into a private network and breaks out again before termination, as in a DISA scenario. On the break out leg the number is generated by the user's equipment although it will have already been verified in consequence of having been delivered to the private network. To maintain the verification it is necessary to ensure that the number submitted by the private network is the number that was received.
Network providers wishing to offer a type 4 service will require a contractual commitment from customers that they will only submit CLIs that have been received from the public network. Unlike other types of presentation numbers, type 4 numbers may not always be diallable; this will depend on the nature of the number received from the public network

In Lync terms the best use of this is for Simultaneous Ring. An example is:

I've set my desk phone to SimRing my mobile as I'm waiting for an important call from the local Dominos. I don't want to answer a sales call though. The inbound call from Dominos (01553 777228) is to my Lync DDI (01553 667796) which SimRings my mobile (07775 560821). On my mobile I see the incoming call as 01553 777228. This is not possible without the ISDN option 4, at best you would see an incoming call from your DDI or maybe even the ISDN pilot number.

The upshot of all of the above was an extra few hours getting the Sonus box to do the same as the Dialogic, luckily the consultant we had has posted about the issue so hopefully that will help any future Sonus users.

Our final challenge was moving faxing over to the Lync Environment instead of having it hanging off the back of the analogue ports on the Mitel. We already have our remote site with analogue phone lines from Lync via a AudioCodes MP114 but faxing I had never been able to get working in a consistent way.

The solution was to have the AudioCode MP's homed twice, once on the Sonus box for fax (ISDN > Sonus > AudioCodes > Fax)

and also homed in the Lync topology for analogue voice (ISDN > Sonus > Lync > AudioCodes > Analogue Voice)

After a ream of paper and many many test calls we had a stable solution for faxing (100% success rate).

Late night Sunday we had everything in place, so I sent an email to all staff letting them know we had completed the works and went home. Monday morning came and my IT Support mantra came into play - "If you do your job properly, no one will know you have done anything."

The only fly in the ointment was the Dialogic Removal - we had left if powered on and in the Lync Topology just in case the was any major problems so after 12 hours of running on the Sonus I powered it off, and the following happened, my lesson, remove things from the Lync Topology before powering them off.

So after 7 years of faithful service it was time to:

Thanks for reading.

Moving from a Mitel PBX to Lync 2010 (part two of three)

By April 2013 all staff had been moved over to Lync 2010 Enterprise Voice and we started to look at the options for a Contact Center replacement.

After looking at a few of the different offerings in the market place we actually settled on what we had: prairieFyre for Lync (the Mitel 6100 is written by prairieFyre and then rebadged).

After placing the order with Koris (our implementation partner for the Contact Center rollout) Mitel then came in and purchased prairieFyre! We have had assurances that the product will not disappear though and that it will be marketed as part of the MiVoice lineup (edit 24/7/14 - looks like they kept their word).

As we standardised in the Contact Center we used our yearly PC refresh to prep new PC's for all of the Contact Center staff, the idea being that on cut over day we would unplug all PC's and phones on desks and plug in the new PC and new Jabra Pro 930 devices:

What's the collective noun for @We_are_Jabra headsets? pic.twitter.com/xwMfoYeJSW
— Tobie Fysh (@tobiefysh) October 9, 2013

Whilst testing the solution we hit the following bug "AVMCU does not support DTMF in Lync 2010 Server or Office Communications Server 2007 R2" this was a massive issue for us as our legacy call recording solution injected DTMF tones into the call to stop and start call recordings to protect us from fraud and to comply with the PCI DSS requirements. After discussions with the supplier we felt that the best option was to source a new Lync Compatible call recording solution for those staff that take card payments. After researching the market and deploying a couple of POC's we choose Verba as the solution. One of the most interesting parts of their solution is what you can record depending on where the software is installed. We choose to install on the Mediation Servers which in our environment was the Front End Pool as this felt the least risky option - prairieFyre already changes the flow of calls so we were uncomfortable with two products potentially competing!

Go live was nice and smooth with the cut over happening on our quietest day of the week, staff coped well but after a few days were complaining about the ring tones in the Jabra being too quiet to hear. To compensate we found the ideal solution in Busylight, its a USB Lync Qualified Presence indicator with ring tones built in meaning that you can set the audio controls on the PC to whatever you want (muted) separate from the ring tone and light to notify you/others of incoming calls and presence state.

Busylight install time. @msftLync pic.twitter.com/1p5KDifeZx
— Tobie Fysh (@tobiefysh) October 18, 2013

Once rolled out we were then ready for the final challenge - migrating fax machines and powering off the Mitel.

Moving from a Mitel PBX to Lync 2010 (part one of three)

I’ve worked at %dayjob% since July 2006, where we have a Mitel 3300. At the time this was amazing – digital to the desktop, everyone with their own DDI, Voicemail and the ability for an end user to setup hot keys themselves – it was THE FUTURE!

February 2007 saw the Network Admin and myself visit Nottingham for a Microsoft Technet Roadshow. The Microsoft Presenters were Eileen (Twitter), Darren (Twitter), Steve (Twitter) and James (Twitter) – the presentation that stood out was of Office Communication Server 2007 and a live demo with Tayside Fire and Rescue who used OCS for audio communication as well as IM and presence. Coming back to work I started to enthuse about what the IM and presence features for OCS would bring for us and how it would enable us to work smarter. We worked up a small skunkworks server in the ICT team using a Technet installer which worked well for us but we never pushed further due to other commitments.

The use of OCS throughout the organisation was still a dream of mine which after much selling to other members of the team and to the management team we succeeded in getting budgetary approval for the rollout of OCS 2007 R2 to all users for IM, presence and P2P audio/video. This work was carried out with PostCTI and in a short space of time we had every member of staff enabled. One side note here is that we provided training to groups of staff and at the end of each training session we gave away some gifts: a webcam and headset (all OCS certified so plug-and-play) and a packet of Jelly Belly Beans to emphasises the presence jelly beans in OCS and Outlook – people love sweets!

One thing that we had not anticipated was how the scheme managers (a single person looking after a sheltered scheme - an old peoples home in common parlance) would take to video conferencing, we worked out that this was because they would only get together with their colleagues at the monthly team meetings and so this gave that face to face feeling that other staff got in the main offices.

In December 2010 we launched the our Contact Centre – this was designed to be one stop shop for the majority of calls that we took and was built on the Mitel 6100 system. This was a great success and the use of OCS jelly beans to check for the status of people before calling them was part of the procedures that each agent would use.

Over time we got to a standardised desktop (Windows 7 and Office 2007 throughout) and OCS was looking a bit tired as it was based on Office 2003 non-Ribbon layout. The Mitel 3300 was starting to get tired too so based on the success of OCS we started to explore using it as our phone system. We chose Eurodata systems to help us get to this stage and after a very fast Proof-of-Concept stage we rolled out Lync 2010 to the ICT team as our phone system in a behind the PBX configuration (ISDN to Mitel to Media Gateway to Lync).

After rolling out to ICT we had an urgent request for a senior member of staff to be able to work from multiple offices with the same phone number. Using the Mitel system this would have been…… uhhhh….. messy and expensive. Moving him to Lync seemed like the most obviously solution, especially as we had deployed the Lync Edge server role and had Outlook Anywhere running too.

Over the next few years we migrated all staff to Lync 2010 Enterprise Voice for their phone services. We appeared to be ahead of the curve on the migration as we let our staff CYOD (Choose your own device). The device choice was limited to:

Polycom CX300
Blackwire C320-M	Blackwire C310-M
Jabra UC Voice 250 MS	Jabra PRO 930USB

One insight is that (unless there was direction from a manager on device) people would say they want a desk phone but then after a few weeks they would see the advantage of having a wireless headset and ask to change. In that way our original order of CX300's got moved to a new team every few months and we would start the process again!

Other area's that got Lync were our carpentry office who use a Bedlam Siren Caller on an analogue phone line and all our remote sites who use Remote App’s for the majority of their ICT Services. So by the end of April 2013 everyone was “Lync’ed Up” – all that is apart from the Contact Centre Team.

Bye Bye Mitel Phones. Hello @msftLync pic.twitter.com/u8pCPFenYt
— Tobie Fysh (@tobiefysh) May 30, 2013

Updated with device choices 29/11/2013 & 06/02/2013

Unused Media Gateway stops Lync 2010 Response Group calls

Over the last weekend we removed our legacy Mitel PBX and replaced our Dialogic Media Gateway with a Sonus SBC 1000.

The Dialogic was left in place but does not appear in any call routing with the idea if we had a massive problem we at least had the infrastructure in place to start failing back.

Today I came back from a meeting and thought to myself “I’ll power off the Dialogic and the Mitel box now”

So I did.

All seemed to be fine – no user complained.

An hour later an external call came into our ServiceDesk Response Group. Which I was not able to pick up. Looking on the Monitoring server we had the following:

10001 - Gateway did not respond in a timely manner (timeout)

Powering the Dialogic on fixed the problem (We could all pick up Response Group calls again).

I have since removed the Dialogic from the Topology and powered it off and Response Groups are still working.

Connecting Untrusted or Workgroup Computer to System Center Data Protection Manager 2012

The documentation for this on the Microsoft website is slightly unloved. At the time of writing it was last updated January 15, 2013 and has the text:

[This topic is pre-release documentation and is subject to change in future releases. Blank topics are included as placeholders.]

So here are my concise install steps.

1. Copy the protection agent files from the DPM server to the untrusted server. Ensure that you get the correct “bitness” and the latest agent:
:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012 DPM\DPM\ProtectionAgents\RA\\

So in my environment:

D:\Program Files\Microsoft System Center 2012\DPM\DPM\ProtectionAgents\RA\4.1.3313.0\i386
and I copied to: C:\DPM on the untrusted computer

2. Install the agent on the untrusted computer by running the .exe

3. After install is complete start an elevated command prompt and run the following:

CD c:\Program Files\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\DPM\bin
SetDpmServer.exe –dpmServerName MYDPMSERVER.DOMAIN.local -isNonDomainServer -userName DPMAdmin -productionServerDnsSuffix DOMAIN.local

This syntax is as follows:

SetDpmServer.exe	The program you are running
–dpmServerName	he DPM server this untrusted machine will connect to
–isNonDomainServer	Tells the DPMAgent that this is not domain joined
–userName	The *New* user that will be created on the untrusted machine for running backups
–productionServerDnsSuffix	Uhhh – The DNS Suffix of the Production Server……

4. On pressing return you will be prompted twice for a password, make a note of this as you will need it when attaching the agent to the DPM server (step XXXXXX)
The screen should then resemble something like this:

5. If you check in Users on the untrusted machine you should see the following:

The DPM user has the following group membership:

6. You are now ready to attach the untrusted machine in DPM.

7. As you can see in my environment the Agent version is older than all of the Trusted machines, in DPM2010 this update would be in the install folder and all would be good, for some reason its not there on the 2012 install.

8. The update in this case is Update Rollup 2 for System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2802159
Which can be applied by Windows Update on the untrusted machine.

Additional information 12/12/2013
I'm revisiting this post today as I got hit by a little issue on the server this was installed on. Once the user is created ensure you set the password to not expire and for the user not able to change the password (or whatever password policy you have):

Without this you will get the following error in the DPM management console:

Lync for Mac 2011 displays Chinese characters on USB phone

Hit an interesting problem when updating our Macs to Lync for Mac 14.0.4 or 14.0.5. The connected USB phone display changed to a Logographic character set (Chinese or Japanese?):

It appears that this is a problem if you are using the discontinued Plantronics Calisto P540 phone, simply switching the phone to a Polycom CX300 and the problem goes away (reusing the P540 for a Windows user is not a problem).

Skype and Lync Integration

Microsoft have ~~today~~ yesterday announced that some of the features that you had with Lync to MSN Messenger have now been made available in Skype.

I say some as video calling is not working but IM and P2P voice is…..

If I use my old Hotmail account which I merged with my old Skype account (and who is already on both my Lync and Skype contact lists) then I can IM and Voice call with either party initiating the conversation.

I signed up for a new Microsoft Account and signed into Skype, I then added my Lync contact to Skype but no notification request came up on Lync.

I then moved to Lync and added the new Skype Account and could immediately send IM and calls (maybe because the Skype user had already added the Lync user?).

Some testing:
For the below Tobie is a Lync user and Bob is a Skype user
Tobie has Bob in his contact list but Bob has not accepted: