Persistent Chat: Challenges vs. Benefits

No, we are not discussing that office worker that tends to yack your ear off like Kelly Kapoor on The Office. That would be Incessant Chat. We are talking about Persistent Chat!

This post is a very brief one. We are simply going over some pros and cons, or rather challenges and benefits, to implementing Persistent Chat in your Lync Server 2013 or Skype for Business Server 2015 environment. For those of that need a brief jogging of the memory, Persistent Chat is what was previously known as Group Chat in Lync 2010. It enables chat "rooms" where the conversation persists independent of the participants. For instance, User A can come and go from the chat room, but the conversation will  go on without that user, and the previous conversation involving User A will remain in the room regardless of their involvement. Yes, it is very cool indeed.

Challenges

So, what are the challenges associated with implementing Persistent Chat? Well, there are some things that are simply good things to keep in mind, and others that are indeed challenges. For this sake of this list, though, I am going to list them all together into one bullet-ed list.

• In an Enterprise environment, Persistent Chat cannot be collocated on the Front End Server. This means that if you are planning for Persistent Chat, you will need to plan in additional servers. Persistent Chat (PC) also requires a backend database. This database can live on the same SQL instance as your other roles, so you don't necessarily need another server for this role, but you should make sure your SQL server has enough computing power. The only case where you can collocate the PC role with the Front End is in a single-server Standard Edition build, in which case the PC SQL backend is simply another database in the existing SQL Express instance on the Standard Edition server. Of course Microsoft recommends that such an environment only be used for Demo and POC purposes, but anyone in the industry is well aware that these environments are used in production for MANY smaller businesses. If you are one of those smaller businesses, make sure you have enough RAM and CPU power on that server!
• The ability to partake in PC as an end user depends upon group and room membership. This membership is managed on the Room  level by the Managers of the room. In order to create a room, as user has to be added to the Creators group for a "Category", which is setup in the Skype for Business Control Panel. To manage these Control Panel settings, and  to create Categories and assign Creators, a user needs to be a member of the RBAC role Persistent Chat Administrator. Once a room is created, managers must be assigned per room, and those managers can then add Members. As you can see, there is quite a hierarchy that must be accounted for when deciding how use of Persistent Chat will be managed and administered within your organization.Will your chat rooms just be "open"? Will users need to submit tickets to a central Help Desk team to gain access to any rooms? Will more granular controls be required?
• A separate web interface is required to manage individual rooms, Managers, and Members. While this interface is fairly simple and  straightforward web portal that is managed through the Skype for Business client, it is yet another interface to be aware of, and to learn. This is not overly burdensome, but may require a bit of end-user training for those who will be "Managers".

Benefits

Alright, so, the challenges weren't too bad, were they? Nah. Now for the benefits. I am sure many of you have already started compiling into your own mental list.

• Many teams may have slightly different use cases for PC, but despite these differences, most of these teams share the commonality that having a central chat room for their  team  to work out of in real-time is a key component to enhancing internal communication and increasing efficiency. Having the leadership of a time buy into the added benefit of this tool will not just deliver this enhanced productivity - it will also increase end-user adoption of the Skype for Business product as a whole.
• Many teams run a 24-7 shop, meaning they have at least 3 shifts working around the clock, and such a structure usually include some sort of shift hand-off. Imagine how seamless and more complete this hand-off would be if all teammates were using a Persistent Chat room throughout their shift, recording all the happenings (good and bad) of that particular shift. Suddenly, Johnny ThirdShift won't be caught off-gaurd when an unhappy customer calls in to get the status of a down server when Suzy SecondShift forgot to mention that at turnover time.
• Enhanced productivity means less time spent trying to track down various bits of communication. If less time is spent tracking things down, or looking for an available tech to escalate to ("Hey, anybody in this room that can help me out"), workers can be more productive. This eventually translates to cost savings, which in turn means greater revenue.
• There are also "Auditorium" rooms. These rooms have a Presenter, who can essentially broadcast messages to a room with many members. While the members are not able to participate in conversation, they can closely follow the messages broadcast by the Presenter. This is especially useful in situations where there is a major outage, and several teams are trying to coordinate and work together to track the status and keep up with the latest developments of the issue. 

As you can see, Persistent Chat is not just as simple as flipping a switch on in your Control Panel, but depending on your company's needs, it may be well worth it to invest the extra planning into making Persistent Chat a part of your company's collaboration strategy. I hope this proved helpful for those of you currently weighing this decision. For others that have implemented it, and found additional Challenges or Benefits than what I have listed above, we would love to hear about your experiences! Drop a comment below!

Stay techy, my friends!

The "MCSE: Communication" Certification Journey: Part 3

Other articles in this series:

• The "MCSE: Communication" Certification Journey: Part 1
• The "MCSE: Communication" Certification Journey: Part 2

2Certs, 1 Stone

Well, this week I am finally able to wrap up this three-part miniseries on my journey to the MCSE: Communication. Consequently, in the process of pursuing my MCSE: Communication, I also achieved the MCSA: Office 365 simultaneously upon finishing my last exam on Wednesday, the 70-347 exam.

While I have covered the exam path options pretty thoroughly in the previous posts of this series, I will do a brief recap. On Microsoft's site, they show that the first two exams in this path are 70-346 and 70-347, which are both Office 365 exams (and as such, cover Lync Online). Upon completing both of these exams, you would have achieved your MCSA: Office 365 before achieving the MCSE: Communication, which would have been a product of the final two exams: 70-336 and 70-337. However, I went backwards, obtaining the Lync-specific exams first. Once I had these, I didn't posses any particular cert, and had to pursue the Office 365 ones next. This is how I ended up getting both certs upon completing that one last exam. As mentioned in the previous articles, MCITP holders should also be able to pursue the 70-417 in addition to the Lync exams, in leui of the MCSA: Office 365 exams. My personal recommendation, especially if you are interested in UC and the growing presence of Office 365, is to go the route that I ended up opting for.

70-347 Exam Prep Tips

So, up to this point, I have given exam tips and preparation suggestions for the other 3 exams. The last one, 70-347, won't differ too much from my suggestion for 70-346 here. As with 70-346, make sure you hit up the pertinent Technet and Office 365 Support sites thoroughly, and continue to reference them throughout testing and use of other materials, like books.

Once again, THE MOST helpful thing I can recommend to prepare for this exam is to purchase an Office 365 Business Essentials license at a minimum ($6/month for a single-user license), and get as intimately familiar with the Office 365 Admin Center as you can. In the case of 70-347, don't only get familiar with the Office 365 Admin Center, but also get very familiar with each admin center for each product, like the admin centers for Lync Online and Exchange Online. Really spend a lot of time exploring all your options within SharePoint Online as well. All of this is critical to achieving familiarity with the product, and understanding what is being asked of you on exam questions.

Also, I am going to strongly recommend the 70-347 CBTNugget series: https://www.cbtnuggets.com/it-training/microsoft-office-365-70-347. This series is only 4 hours total, and each nugget is very short (usually only a few minutes). It is a great way to focus in on certain aspects, and really get to know them and the procedures.

Finally the Microsoft Press Store Exam Ref for this exam is not due out until September of 2015, so if you are testing before them, sorry. If you are discovering this blog after that, though, please consider looking into this book as another good tool for exam preparation: http://www.amazon.com/Exam-70-347-Enabling-Office-Services/dp/1509300678/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1429890800&sr=8-4&keywords=70-347.

That's all folks!

I am glad to have all that studying and testing behind me, and thrilled to now be a member of the MCSE: Communication community (as well as the MCSA: Office 365 community). I hope this series has been helpful to those of you wishing to pursue the same certifications, and I wish you the best of luck on your testing. The weekend is upon us, and I am ready to celebrate!

Stay techy, my frieds!

Lync 2013 and OWA Integration Troubles

Gratuitous Intro to the Situation

Ok, so we'll keep this short(ish) and sweet. Integrating your Lync Server 2013 on-premise environment with your Exchange Server 2013 on-premise environment is a fairly common goal within companies that wish to leverage even a few of the awesome "unified communication" features that come with the grouping of these awesome applications. Moreover, there are exactly 12,073,258 (Disclaimer: the preceding statistic is a completely bogus number) different blog posts and forum entries on the web detailing how to go about integrating Lync with Exchange. So, this issue assumes that you already have integration setup and verified to be working. At least partly working...

The Actual Problem

Some sporadic, not all, Exchange mailboxes were unable to login to Outook Web App (OWA) and successfully sign-in to Lync from within OWA. If the user is enabled for both Lync and Exchange using the same SIP domain (Example: @msucguy.com), they should be able to log into OWA, and sign in to Lync from within OWA, at which point they can initiate chats from their web browser. Below is what one would expect to see in such a scenario:

However, for the sporadic few users that were not seeing this, they would instead see the below message once logged into OWA:

The notorious, "There's a problem with IM. Please try again later. If the problem continues, contact your helpdesk" error. 

How to Troubleshoot

There are a few things to consider when trying to get to the bottom of this pesky error. Let's dig into a few of the key things to check for.

1. While this post assumed that the Lync integration with Exchange had already been setup successfully (partially, anyway), let's take a step back and forget about the fact that we already know some users are successfully logging into Lync via OWA. If we know of no instances of users accessing IM within OWA, we want to ensure that Lync does in fact trust Exchange (and OWA). To do this, let's open up the ever-so-handy-dandy Lync Server Management Shell. Once in the Lync Server Management Shell, we will run the cmdlet "Get-CsTrustedApplicationPool". We should see the below results, listing out your OWA URL up top, specifying your Lync Pool as the Registrar, and listing "urn:application:outlookwebaccess" in the Application field:
   
2. Next, with the Lync Server Management Shell still opened, we will run the "Get-CsTrustedApplication" cmdlet. The results should look like below. Note the port number 5199. If you have a pretty tightly locked down network internally, you will want to make sure that your Lync Front End servers can reach your OWA servers on port 5199.
   Ok, I realize that most of this image is "whited out", but you get the picture. Make sure your FQDNs are where the white out sections are, and make sure "outlookwebaccess" shows up where it should.
3. Now that we have verified that our Lync environment is properly set up to trust the Exchange servers, let's go back to assuming that we now know for a fact that IM works for some users within OWA. If we know that it does work, at least for some, then we need to verify that there is not, in fact, problem with "IM" (a.k.a., Lync Server 2013). Of course we can verify this by checking to make sure that we are able to log into our desktop or mobile clients with Lync, but this does not rule out that there is an isolated problem in the environment. To make sure all is well, quickly log into the Lync Server Control Panel (LSCP), and browse to the "Topology" tab. On this tab, ensure that all your relevant servers show up with a green check mark for their Replication Status, and then ensure that all servers report a healthy status for their services. We will assume that all is well on these checks, and that the environment is perfectly healthy.

The Resolution (at least in my case)

Alright, well now that we verified that Lync is in fact set up to trust Exchange and OWA properly, that the Lync environment is not having any sort of issues, and that IM within OWA does actually work for most users, we need to do some checking on the individual user level. A topical inspection of the user's settings within Exchange and Lync didn't reveal anything that stood out right away, so we decided to do a side-by-side comparison of a user that was experiencing the issue versus a user that was not experiencing the issue by looking at their properties within ADSIEdit. ADSIEdit allows us to get a really granular view of all possible attributes that can be set for a user within the realms of Active Directory-integrated applications, like Lync and Exchange.

Sure enough, there was a single attribute that did not get set for the accounts experiencing the problem: msExchOWAPolicy. And wouldn't you know, that attribute sounds like it just may have something to do with the problem we are experiencing. The value for the problematic user was set to "<not set>", when it should have been set to the Default policy, like so:

Technet does a dandy little job explaining how a default policy is created when Exchange is installed, and that this policy has ALL options enabled by default, BUT this default is not set on any mailboxes by default: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd335142%28v=exchg.150%29.aspx. So, if your Exchange admins/engineers don't have a provisioning process that sets this value for each user, or if the process allows for a user or two to slip through the cracks, you might just find yourself with a handful of users that magically can not sign into IM within OWA.

Well, I supposed I completely blew the attempt to keep this short and sweet, but I hope this is helpful for someone out there, and that they don't have to spend too long trying to track the problem down.

Stay techy, my friends!

The "MCSE: Communication" Certification Journey: Part 1

Other posts in this series:

• The "MCSE: Communication" Certification Journey: Part 2
• The "MCSE: Communication" Certification Journey: Part 3

Hello fellow Microsoft UC enthusiasts! This post is my first official blog post on my new O365-based blog for all things Microsoft UC (though it will be primarily focused on Lync and Skype for Business). While trying to decide on the topic that I should write about for my maiden voyage post, I came to the conclusion that the most fitting topic for a first post would be a discussion on the certification process for the Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert (MCSE): Communications certification. As I am in the process of obtaining this cert (half-way there), I will discuss my personal experiences thus far, what has helped me prepare for exams, and what the road ahead looks like.
For those that are not aware, the MCSE: Communications cert ​is the professional-level certification that Microsoft offers to distinguish an individual that is ​proven in their knowledge and abilities in regards to Lync Server 2013. Many organizations that are looking to hire for Lync Engineers or senior Lync positions often would like to see this certification on your resume. The official page for this certification ​​​is here, and it very simply outlines the exams that are required to earn the certification, as well as courses and other optional training that will help prepare you..
The first two exams that are listed, 70-346 and 70-347, are more specific to ​setting up and managing various services within Office 365. The last two exams, however, are actually specific to Lync Server 2013: 70-336 and 70-337. As my role is currently a Lync Engineer, I started with 70-336 and 70-337, and will be following up with 70-346 and 70-347.
Before I get into my experiences thus far, however, I wanted to point out that you can achieve this exam by only taking three exams if you are already possess one of the following certifications, as listed on the link above:

• MCSA: Windows Server 2008
• MCITP: Virtualization Administrator on Windows Server 2008 R2
• MCITP: Enterprise Messaging Administrator 2010
• MCITP: Lync Server Administrator 2010
• MCITP: SharePoint Administrator 2010
• MCITP: Enterprise Desktop Administrator on Windows 7​

While the website does not make mention of it, the MCITP: Enterprise Administrator is also qualified, and I know this because that is what I currently possess, and had to look deeper into it. Essentially, if you have one of the above certifications already, you can take 70-417, "Upgrading Your Skills to MCSA Windows Server 2012​" in place of the O365 exams. While this may be a tempting route to go because it is one exam versus two, Microsoft does not really treat 70-417 like one exam in terms of the exam structure or the material needed to study. The exam actually is being taken in place of 70-410, 70-411, and 70-412, and the study recommendations and guides pretty much mirror all three of those tests, except that they get combined onto one test. If you do the math, that is a LOT of preparation and studying for the one exam, whereas taking 70-346 and 70-347 individually will be a much a much lighter load for each test. 

Personally, I was going to go down the 70-417 road at first, but after doing the above analysis, I decided it would be not only easier to go the O365 exam route, but learning all the ins-and-outs about O365 would actually be HUGELY beneficial as a Lync Engineer. Let's face it, more and more customers are moving into the cloud, or opting for hybrid environments, and being able to intelligently discuss those options with a customer, in addition to the usual On-Prem options, will be incredibly valueable in the future.

Now, as I mentioned, I have already completed 70-336 and 70-337. Ok, I take that back, I did not mention that; I merely stated that I started with them, so to clarify, I did indeed pass them. Ok, I'll  be honest, I passed 70-336 on the second try! At any rate, these exams are particularly difficult to prepare for, because as you will find, there are far fewer study guides in existence for them, and there are precisely ZERO practice exams in existence. Nope, not even from Transcender or MeasureUp. Super helpful, right?

No need to despair, though. While the preparation options are fewer for these exams, there are still some good options. Of course, there is always the Microsoft Official Courses for each exam, though it is not always easy to convince the boss to send you to training for a couple grand a pop, and who wants to shell out that money on their own? Not this guy! There are two main resources that I used, and they were immensely helpful and educational in relation to these exams.

The first one was Chris Ward's CBT Nugget series on Lync. He has two series, one for each exam. With a "Nugget" being an individual video on a single topic within the exam, you can pace yourself nicely, and take in some good material, without getting overloaded and bored to death. You can watch all the Nuggets you want on a 7-day trial, and then you can go month-to-month after that for only $99. I paid for a month, and it was well worth it. Check it out: https://www.cbtnuggets.com/it-training/microsoft-lync-server-2013-70-336

The second tool I used a handy book called "Microsoft Lync Server 2013 Unleashed" by Alex Lewis, Tom Pacyk, David Ross, and Randy Wintle. Some tech books can be very dry and difficult to read, and despite that fact that the book is still a very technical book, I found it to be an easy read. It explained things very well, while still digging pretty deep into various topics. I would venture to say that there probably wasn't much on the exams at all, if anything, that was not covered in this book. For roughly $35 new on Amazon, it was totally worth the money: http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Lync-Server-2013-Unleashed/dp/0672336154/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1428096680&sr=8-1&keywords=microsoft+lync+server+2013+unleashed.

Well, I realize this has been kind of a long post, but I am thrilled to be launching this blog, and I can't wait to start digging into some more technical topics very soon! I will also be following up on this post as I make progress through 70-346 and 70-347.

Stay techy, my friends!