Voicemail Retention in Exchange UM

Every Exchange admin freaks out at least a little bit when you start talking about storing voicemails in Exchange, except for maybe the handful that are blessed with unlimited storage.

Most users are pretty bad about managing their mailboxes unless you have implemented storage quotas on their mailboxes. I've seen mailboxes with email going back years. Even though the actual storage requirements for a single voicemail is pretty low (especially compared to large pdf's, spreadsheets, Word docs, etc) it does add up over time.

Older systems typically performed automatic cleanup of old voicemails, usually after 14 or 30 days. Since this is not a default behavior of Exchange, Microsoft has introduced a retention tag specifically for voicemail. This is only available through PowerShell, not through the Console.

Using the New-RetentionPolicyTag command, you can specify the Voicemail Message Class (this is the only class you can specify, all other tags use All). You can then specify an action to be applied after the retention age limit has expired. You will probably want to specify an action like PermanentlyDelete or DeleteAndAllowRecovery.

To create the new retention tag, your command will look like:

New-RetentionPolicyTag -Name “Delete Voicemail after 30 days” -Type All -MessageClass Voicemail -AgeLimitForRetention 30 -RetentionAction PermanentlyDelete

You will then need to create a new retention policy (New-RetentionPolicy) or assign this tag to an existing policy (Set-RetentionPolicy). After you have a policy it needs to be assigned to mailboxes using Set-Mailbox -RetentionPolicy. To assign it to a database, you will need a command like

Get-Mailbox -Database "DB01" | Set-Mailbox -RetentionPolicy "Delete Voicemail after 30 days"

~ brad

Fun Fact:
Douglas Englebart, the inventor of the mouse, has never seen a dime from the patent. That’s because his patent expired just before the device became widely used with almost every computer. But he’s not cursing his luck – Englebart has had a hand in a multitude of other inventions, including hypertext.

OT: Security Question

Managing Users with Default Policies

User Management is always fun. The longer you have Lync installed, the more policies seem to build up and overlap. Frequently I will pull and manage users based on the policies that they have assigned. This can be done through the Console, but it does get slow the more users you are trying to manage.

While I do have all of my Global policies configured, I prefer to keep specific policies assigned for the major policies. Like I mentioned above this can be slow and tricky in the Console. Finding users who already have a policy assigned is pretty easy using a command like:

Get-CsUser -filter {ConferencingPolicy -eq "Lync-Conferencing-Gold"}

This will pull up all the users with the specified policy name, and can easily be piped to another command such as Grant-CsMobilityPolicy.

Finding the users that are inheriting the default Global policy is a little trickier. Running the command

Get-CsUser -filter {ConferencingPolicy -eq "Default"}

will give you the following error.
   "Get-CsUser : Cannot bind parameter 'Filter' to the target. Exception setting "Filter": "Policy "Default" is not a user policy. You can assign only a user policy to a specific user."

In order to find all the users with the default policy assigned you will need to use a command like:

Get-CsUser -filter {ConferencingPolicy -eq $Null}

~brad

Fun Fact:
In a short period of ten years Van Gogh made approximately 900 paintings.

OT Article: Astronomers May Have Witnessed The Birth Of A New Moon In Our Solar System

*Off-Topic*
These may appear on the blog from time to time for things I find interesting.

Astronomers may have just witnessed the birth of a small, icy moon within the rings of Saturn. And since it could be Saturn’s last natural satellite, this is a particularly rare and precious opportunity for us to learn about the formation of the planet’s many moons, including the cloud-wrapped Titan and the ocean-holding Enceladus.

Read the full article on the I F-ing Love Science! blog here.

Article: You've Seen This Photo A Million Times -- Now Learn The Story Behind It

If you have used a computer in the last decade you have probably seen it, especially if you are in IT. I'm talking about the default Windows desktop 'Bliss' that has been used since Windows XP. Check out this article on Huffington Post for the full story on this iconic desktop.

~ brad

"If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living."  ~ Henri Poincare

Article: Lync Finds Its Groove in 'Universal Communications' Era

Scott Bekker from Redmond Channel Partner has an interesting article about Microsoft Lync Partners and the Keynote from the Lync Conference. The adoption and interest in Lync is growing, and Microsoft has no plans to slow that growth.

You can read the full article here, but here are a couple pieces that I found interesting.

Carol Spowart spent a moment at the recent Microsoft Lync Conference exchanging high fives with a peer on the show floor.
Spowart is the CEO of House of Lync, a Costa Mesa, Calif.-based professional services firm, which, as you might guess from the name, is 100 percent dedicated to Lync deployment projects. "I have a very friendly competitor out of Houston, and the president said, 'It's raining Lync.' I said, 'All you have to do is put out a bucket,'" Spowart recalls.

and later on...

"The era of universal communications is here to stay. That's what the next decade is going to be about. It's going to change your and my life. In fact, 1 billion people in this decade will use Microsoft universal communications," said Pall, who recently returned to Lync from other parts of Microsoft's business.

and still later...

McGillen notes that Microsoft has made installation of Lync so simple that customers often go too far in enabling features without understanding the underlying network requirements for quality of service. "It's a big problem when somebody tries to install Lync on their own," he says. "It's easy enough to click next, next, next and install it, and the [call] button shows up. That's when we get called in a lot. The voice quality is crummy. It was easy to install, but that doesn't mean that everything is magic."

Enjoy!

~ brad

“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something” ~ Plato

Changing a User's SIP Domain

One of the big projects that we have been working on is re-branding with a global image. This project started with migrating all of our users to have the same email domain and SIP domain. When Lync was initially installed the decision was made to support two SIP domains.

I was lucky and we only had a handful of users that needed to be changed to out primary SIP domain and could make the changes manually. To change a lot of users you could use a script like this. I have not tested this script, so test it first.

$UserList = Get-CsUser -Filter 'SipAddress -like "*olddomain.com"'
foreach ($User in $UserList)
{
   $oldAddress = $User.SipAddress
   $newAddress = $oldAddress -replace "@olddomain.com", "@newdomain.com"
   Set-CsUser -Identity $User.Identity -SipAddress $newAddress
}

Once you change all of the users, you will want to update the Lync and Exchange address books. The changes will update eventually depending on your replication time and when Address Books are scheduled to rebuild, but we want to have as little impact on the users as possible. I ran all of the PowerShell commands just to be on the safe side.

To update the Lync address book:
     Update-CsAddressBook

To update the Exchange address books:
     Update-GlobalAddressList
     Update-OfflineAddressBook

Impacts to the User

• When the change is made, the user will be logged off Lync, and they will need to log in with the new SIP address.
• Internal contacts should update the SIP address automatically – no action required.
• External contacts will have to re-add the user to their contact list.
• Lync Online Meetings will now be scheduled using the new meet web address. Any existing meetings will need to be rescheduled. There will be a delay between the changing of the SIP address and the ability to schedule meetings with the new address. Once you have updated the Exchange Address List and Offline Address Book the users will need to close and relaunch Outlook for this change to be picked up.

~ brad

Fun Fact:

The MS 150 is a two-day, 180-mile fund raising cycling ride organized by the National Multiple Sclerosis (MS) Society: Lone Star chapter. This ride is the largest event of its kind in North America taking in about 13,000 riders each year with a goal of raising $18 million towards finding a cure for MS.
This year's 30th Anniversary ride is scheduled 12-13 April 2014.

Lync Conference Sessions Videos

Microsoft has published several videos from Lync Conference 2014 on a new YouTube channel. This is by no means all of the sessions, but there are some including some of the customer sessions.

We are still waiting for all of the sessions to be released on the main Conference page.

~ Brad

Fun Fact:
The domestic cat can run faster than Usain Bolt (the Jamaican sprinter known as the fastest man ever).