Skype for Business Announced

We finally know what the next iteration of Lync will be. Today Microsoft announced Skype for Business. A decade ago Skype brought down the barriers by making it easy to talk to someone anywhere in the world. A few years later, Microsoft bought Skype and introduced a lot of speculation about what that would mean.

Microsoft has now fully merged Lync and Skype, enabling what should be near seamless communication between the two. Skype for Business will be launched the first half of 2015. Existing Lync on-prem customers will be able to upgrade to the new Skype for Business server, and Office 365 customers will be automatically updated.

For more information, click here for the blog or here for the YouTube promo.

~ brad

"While only one day of the year is dedicated solely to honoring our veterans, Americans must never forget the sacrifices that many of our fellow countrymen have made to defend our country and protect our freedoms." ~Randy Neugebauer

Sorry for the delay

Sorry for the unexpected long absence. About two months ago I decided to flip my life upside down. Long story short, I now have a new job in a new city (New York City!). Managing all of that has kept me quite busy lately and I haven't had time to post.

Now that I am mostly settled in I should have more time to manage this blog.

~ brad

"When you realize you've made a mistake, make amends immediately. It's easier to eat crow while it's still warm." ~ Dan Heist

SCOM Test Accounts

Looking to create some test accounts to run synthetic transactions on a Lync watcher node? Good! Heads up: keep your SAM Account Names under 15 characters. I usually follow this practice, but - as usual - the time I made an exception, it really mattered as Doug Dietterick was telling us a few years back: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dodeitte/archive/2011/07/18/issue-when-running-new-set-cshealthmonitoringconfiguration.aspx

~ponboquod~

SysAdmin Cheat Sheets

In most of our jobs, we touch a lot of different technologies. If you are like me, I have notes everywhere; in text files, OneNote, EverNote, bookmarks and who knows where else. A colleague found this site which has compiled a lot of cheat sheets, one-pagers, whatever you want to call them.

~ brad

“We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.”  ~ Steve Jobs

Unable to Schedule Online Meetings

The Scenario
I recently had a user that was unable to Lync 2010 Online Meetings from Outlook 2010. He didn't even have the button to create one. Otherwise his Outlook worked fine, no problems sending or receiving email, or scheduling meetings.

Fixing the Issue
My first thought was the Conferencing Addin was disabled. When I looked into his settings it was, but the Conversation History Addin was active. For some reason the Online Meeting Addin would not enable though. I ran a repair on the Lync client, no change. I had my Service Desk uninstall and reinstall the client thinking something was still corrupted with the install. No change.

Then one of the guys fixed it. Somehow the user had corrupted his Navigation Pane view. To fix this, click Start and in the search/run box type outlook.exe /resetnavpane

After this was done, we could enable the Online Meeting addin and schedule meetings.

Hope this helps!

~brad

Fun Fact:
There is no definitive history about how the word “barbecue” originated – or why it’s sometimes used as a noun, verb, or adjective. Some say the Spaniards get the credit for the word, derived from their “barbacoa” which is an American-Indian word for the framework of green wood on which foods were placed for cooking over hot coals. Others think the French were responsible, offering the explanation that when the Caribbean pirates arrived on our Southern shores, they cooked animals on a spit-like devise that ran from “whiskers to tail” or “de barbe a` queue.”

Smilies as Links

I ran into an interesting bug/fluke the other day. This happened to one of the guys working on our Service Desk. Jonatan (our Service Desk hero) is homed on one of my 2013 pools and is using the 2013 client. Dana is one of our end users, and is homed on a 2010 pool and uses the 2010 client.

While they were on IM working through an issue, every link that Dansa IM's came across on Jonatan's client as a smiley. We do have links enabled, and it didn't matter if it was an email address or URL.

In Dana's chat window, and in Jonatan's Conversation History everything appeared normal. Links other users would send him would appear and work fine. Restarting Jonatan's Lync client didn't resolve the issue either.

This is the first time I have had this reported. I'm still not sure what caused this to happen, but figured I would share anyway.

~ brad

Fun Fact:
During the initial compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the largest contributor of more than ten thousand words was Dr. W.C. Minor, an American Civil War veteran who was an inmate in an asylum for the criminally insane.

OT Article: All Our Patent Are Belong To You

In a rare move by any business these days, Tesla Motors has opened their patents to anyone who wants to use them. They are doing this to help promote the electric car market as they simply cannot keep up with demand.

From the blog:

Yesterday, there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology.

 We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform.

 You can read the full article over here.

~ brad

"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." ~ Albert Einstein