Setting Lync 2010 policies (OCS Group Policy) with PowerShell

Important the following information is based on the Release Candidate and could change on RTM. Please check the latest documentation

With the release of Lync Server 2010 (RC) the settings which were deployed using group policy for OCS 2007 R2 are now for the most part sent using in-band provisioning to the client. There are a few setting which are used for Client bootstrapping and therefore still need to be configured in Group Policy.

The majority of group policy settings have been moved to PowerShell commands:

New-CsClientPolicy	Create a new client policy either at site or per-user scope
Set-CsClientPolicy	Modify an existing client policy
Grant-CsClientPolicy	Assign a client policy to a user or group of users
Remove-CsClientPolicy	Remove a client policy from a user of group of users
Get-CsClientPolicy	Get information on existing client policies

Example

New-CsClientPolicy -Identity SalesPolicy -DisableEmoticons $True          
-DisableEmailComparisonCheck  $True

Here we are creating a policy called SalesPolicy with 2 settings to turn off Emoticons and to turn off checking that the Outlook and Lync are running under the same account.

Now to apply this to the Sales department we can use the following:

Get-CsUser -LDAPFilter "Department=Sales" | Grant-CsClientPolicy       
-PolicyName SalesPolicy

Here we are getting all the enabled users in AD who have a department of Sales and applying the policy to them.

You can also apply the Client Policy in Lync Control Panel as well

There are a large number of settings for the client policy so I won’t reproduce them here either check the documentation of in the Lync Management Shell use the following command to see all the options:

get-help New-CsClientPolicy -full | more

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Licensing for Lync Server 2010

If you thought licensing for OCS 2007 R2 was complicated we now have the licensing for Lync. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/lync/pricing-licensing.aspx

The cost of an Enterprise CAL has come down but no longer includes telephony functions. Telephony in Lync server requires the new Plus CAL in addition to the Standard and Enterprise CALs. At the bottom there is the matrix of what each CAL covered both on R2 and Lync

If you have the Microsoft Enterprise CAL suite the Lync Standard and Enterprise CALs are included but the Plus CAL is still an addition.

The Lync client software is available either standalone or is included in the Office Professional Plus 2010 product.

Depending on your current Software Assurance your current OCS 2007R2 licenses as a qualifying license for Lync.

Having read details it has generated a lot of questions in mind and once I have answers I will update everyone.

IM and Presence

Audio, Video and Web Conferencing

Enterprise Voice

Lync Server simple URLs

When you setup the topology for your Lync deployment you need to setup 3 simple URL’s. These URLs are used for administration, dial-in and Meet

The administration URL you keep within your internal network but the Meet and dial-in are required internally and externally. By default these are set to dialin.domain.com and meet.domain.com.

This may not seem to be a problem however if you have multiple SIP domains the number of SAN’s you require can become quite costly. A simple solution to these simple URL’s is to change them to use the same sub-domain for example lync.domain.com/dialin and lync.domain.com/meet.

Using this format halves the number of SAN’s required at the expense of slightly lengthening the actual URL.

The other consideration is that these URL’s expect you to have split brain DNS as there is no external/internal option for defining these. However if you don’t have split brain DNS the request can route externally and the meeting GRUU that is returned enables you to connect either directly internally or externally.

Wave 14 Official Name and Release Candidate Available for Download

After months of talking about Wave 14 and CS2010 the product has finally been given its official name ready for release. We now have Microsoft Lync Server 2010. The full rebranding is as follows

If you want to try out the Release Candidate then you can download everything you need from here

Over the next few weeks I’ll be blogging about the new functionality.

TechEd 2010 Wave 14 Presentations

The presentations from the sessions from the New Orleans TechED have been about for a while but as I couldn’t find my notes on them when I thought I’d do a blog entry on them.

CS“14”: Transforming the Way People Communicate

CS“14”: What’s New in Communicator

CS“14”: Architecture

CS“14”: Voice Architecture and Planning for High Availability

CS“14”: Network Considerations

CS“14”: Voice Deployment

CS“14”: What’s New in Conferencing Experience and Backend

CS“14”: Management Experience

CS"14”: Interoperability: Voice, Video, Conferencing, IM and Presence

CS“14”: Monitoring and Reporting

CS“14”: Setup and Deployment

CS“14”: What’s New in Devices

CS“14”: Building Communications Enabled Business Processes

CS“14”: SDK: Integrating, Extending and Adding Contextual Data to the New Communicator Experience

CS“14”: Advanced SIP-Based Solutions Built on the Microsoft Unified Communications Managed API 3.0 & Microsoft Communications Server “14”

Problems installing OCS and not finding .NET 3.5

If you install all the current patches to your server before installing OCS it will install .NET Framework 4.0. When .NET 4.0 is installed OCS cannot detect .NET 3.5 and you receive the error message

Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2, Microsoft Unified Communications Managed API 2.0 Core Redist 64-bit installation requires Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.5. Installation cannot continue.

Microsoft has put up a knowledge base article kb2224981 describing the issue and also the work around.

To resolve this problem, follow these steps:

1. Remove .NET Framework 4.0 from the server. 
2. Install the OCS products that you want to have on the server
3. Install .NET Framework 4.0 on the server

Response Group Service Language Packs

By default OCS only installs the US English language pack for Response Groups. There are 11 other language packs you can install. The RGS uses the UCMA 2 Speech language packs which can either be found on the OCS install CD in the \Setup\amd64\Setup\Speech\ directory. You can also download the packs from here. 

After running the msi to install the language pack you need to register the language pack. To install the language packs you need to run the rgslang.exe application from the OCS 2007 R2 Resource Kit. From a cmd prompt run RGSlang sync then restart the RGS service. Full details of the install process can be found on TechNet.

As well as the speech packs you can also manage OCS in different languages or display the OC Tab in a different language by downloading the Response Group Service Language Pack.

July Cumulative Updates for Communications Server 2007 R2

The July updates have been released and can be downloaded from here.

For details of what is included in the patches can be found here http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=968802 along with installation details.

A few people have mentioned issues with the latest update but this appears to be because the OCS2009 DBUpgrade hasn’t been applied. This needs to be applied separately for a good description of how to apply this patch there are a number of blog entries such as the one on msunified.

Update 30 July

I left off the other updates below when I initially posted this

Office Communicator 2007 R2

Group Chat Patches 2007 R2

Communicator Phone Edition (OCPE)

Communicator Mobile

Exchange 2007 Certificate Manager

I still find that customers are using self signed certificates for their Exchange servers. When you install Exchange UM and want to link it to OCS you need to use a properly trusted certificate from a CA. To do this requires some messing around in Powershell and can be inconvenient. Today I spotted a blog post from Rui Silva highlighting a Certificate Management Tool from U-BTech which gives a quick and easy GUI to manage the Exchange server certificates. I haven’t tried it yet but I think it is definitely worth investigating.

Microsoft OCS 2007 R2 Workload Poster

Microsot have recently released a Workload Architecture poster showing protocol flow, ports, DNS and Certificates. It gives a graphical representation of information found in the various OCS manuals all in one place.

This poster only shows the IM & Presence, Conferencing, Application Sharing and Enterprise Voice Worloads. However it does show everything for internal and also external access through an Edge Server.