Lync Conference 2013

Last week I was fortunate enough to be part of the very first Lync conference hosted by Microsoft in San Diego, CA.

The conference was all about Lync and Lync systems. Packed with session for technical, sales and business people, it was a huge boost for the Lync community.

With the launch of the new mobility client on all major platforms and live demonstration of A/V on all clients, the Keynote on tuesday was a big success.

An even bigger high was the introduction of Lync Room Systems(http://blogs.technet.com/b/lync/archive/2013/02/19/the-lync-room-system-lrs.aspx), which will make a big impact in meetingrooms accross the globe in the time to come. From Polycom, Smart, LifeSize and Crestron, the LRS will certainly make an impact on end users in regards of utilizing meetingrooms in a more efficient way.

Another key feature in Lync 2013, is the ability to communicate with Skype clients. The feature will enable Lync users in corporate networks to collaborate and communicate on a B2X level in an even larger scale than with Lync 2010 and Msn/Yahoo/AOL.

The last feature of Lync 2013 that I would like to mention, is the new XMPP service running on all Front End and Edge servers. This will allow for Lync to federate with other XMPP partners without having to deploy a dedicated GW on the Lync side(still need the GW on federated systems depending on the solution deployed).

Stay tuned for more updates to come 🙂

Using Cisco Tandberg VCS as video gateway for Lync.

I’ve recently had to do some video routing in Lync in order for users to be able to connect to external video systems other than Lync.
Apparentliy, this was doable in Lync, but I’ve never configured it before.
So here we go:
First, the routing video system has to be configured, in my case this was a Cisco Tandberg based system which was supposed to serve as a GW for Lync video clients.
The system was configured as a TrustedApplication according to the installation manual from Cisco Tandberg.

Secondly, Lync has to be configured with static routes for the domain in question, for demo purposes named remotedomain.com. Internal domain is mydomain.com.

Assuming there is no static routes defined prior to this, the following commands are run in Lync Server Management Shell:

• New-CsRegistrarConfiguration -Identity Service:Registrar:lync.mydomain.com
• New-CsStaticRoutingConfiguration -Identity Service:Registrar:lync.mydomain.com
• $route = New-CsStaticRoute -TLSRoute -destination vcsc.mydomain.com -port 65072 -matchuri something.remotedomain.com -usedefaultcertificate $True
  (vcsc.mydomain.com=Fqdn of Cisco GW to be used)
• Set-CsStaticRouteConfiguration -Identity Service:Registrar:lync.mydomain.com -route @{Add=@route}

The result, when running Get-CsStaticRouteConfiguration, should look something like this(MatchUri and GW FQDN masked):

MatchUri would be the destination domain something.remotedomain.com and Fqdn=”name of your video GW”:”Destination port”

And that should be it. You’re now ready to make video calls directly from Lync to video end points in the configured domain. If there are several domains, make a static route for each domain.

Trouble installing ReachFonts.msi

Recently I had a strange experience when installing a new Lync 2013 Standard Edition server.

Normally, this is a straight forward procedure which (almost) never causes any problems. Just build the topology, publish and deploy server roles.

My problem started when I had finished building the topology and had installed the local replica of the CMS. Next step was to run Add or Remove Lync Server Components.

I started the procedure, and everything looked nice until it suddenly didn’t 😦

The Message was: Error returned when installing ReachFonts.msi

Solution:

The problem was solved by copying the ReachFonts.msi file from the installation media to the following location on the server:
C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\LyncServer\Deployment\cache\4.0.7577.0

Restart the process, and everything works fine.

This may apply to similar problems with other files in the installation process. The file copied and the file replaced had the same date and size, so figure out why this should be a problem…