One meeting to allow them all

19th of July, 2017 / / No Comments

The day is getting closer where you can look to Microsoft Office 365 Skype for Business to be able to meet all the capability of your UC collaboration platform in the cloud. The hardest part is knowing what is available and what would you need to purchase to make the complete package for your organisation.
E3 licenses will get you the Skype for Business cloud platform for IM/P, Web and Video Conferencing within your organisation and federated Skype for Business partner organisations.… [Keep reading] “One meeting to allow them all”

Surface Hub – Skype for Business Login Failure

28th of March, 2017 / / 2 Comments

Excitement has grown around the Kloud office of late as each state waits with anticipation of a Surface Hub arriving to connect to our Skype for Business environment. The 84 inch Surface Hub destined for our Adelaide Boardroom which I nicknamed ‘Godzilla’ has had only one problem since installation, it fails to login to Skype for Business. Which makes this device go from a high end meeting room endpoint to a what I could only say is a giant tablet for games of tick tac toe, therefore this became my problem rather quickly.… [Keep reading] “Surface Hub – Skype for Business Login Failure”

A Closer Look at Amazon Chime

28th of March, 2017 / / No Comments

In news this quarter AWS have released a web conferencing cloud service to their existing ‘Business Productivity‘ services which already includes Amazon WorkDocs and Amazon WorkMail. So my thought was to help you gauge where this sits in relation to Skype for Business. I don’t want to put this into a Microsoft versus Amazon review but I do want you to understand the product names that ‘somewhat’ align with each other.

Exchange = WorkMail

SharePoint/OneDrive for Business  =  WorkDocs

Skype for Business  = Chime

The Microsoft products are reasonably well known in the world so I’ll give you a quick one liner about the Amazons products:

WorkMail “Hosted Email”

WorkDocs “Hosted files accessible via web, PC, mobile devices with editing and sharing capability”

So what is Chime?

… [Keep reading] “A Closer Look at Amazon Chime”

Skype for Business Mac Client – General Availability

28th of October, 2016 / / 6 Comments

I currently run a MacBook Pro for my daily driver, it’s the ‘spice of life’ I say! A MacBook Pro, a Google Pixel phone and the Microsoft Office 365 collaboration suite is what makes up my toolset. Now more then ever collaboration and data is becoming more accessible via a device flavour that you prefer. Running Mac OSX while working with the Microsoft stack presents two issues I’ve had to endure to this point as an end user and adminstrator:

  1. I want to leverage the full capability of Kloud’s Skype for Business platform while in OSX
  2. I want to execute PowerShell CLI natively in OSX

I’ve marked October 26th in my calendar as the day where I get to put a line through one of my wish list items.… [Keep reading] “Skype for Business Mac Client – General Availability”

Automated Call Distribution for Cloud PBX

7th of October, 2016 / / No Comments

Microsoft’s Cloud PBX is well on its way to provide Office 365 customers PSTN calling ability in Skype for Business, if you’ve missed out my colleague Joel Neff has written a great blog about the start of Cloud PBX and the features it will offer the end user with call functionality. To put it very simply, they will get the same experience as a traditional Skype for Business Enterprise Voice user. This will enable you to have PSTN numbers assigned to your end users and will be sufficient for 1-1 and conferencing calling scenarios, but what happens with my public number entry points?… [Keep reading] “Automated Call Distribution for Cloud PBX”

Change ring tone behaviour with a Sonus SBC and SIP trunk provider

27th of May, 2016 / / 2 Comments

I recently had an issue with calls originating from a SIP trunk provider to Skype for Business Server(s) that needed to change who supplied the ring back tone. This would have been a much simpler process with ISDN, but SIP trunks are a much more involved PSTN connection. If you’re having problems with ring back this should help provide a quick troubleshooting step to expose a problem in this area. This article specifically describes what to change in Skype for Business and Sonus 1000/2000 SBC to get the desired outcome with a SIP trunk.… [Keep reading] “Change ring tone behaviour with a Sonus SBC and SIP trunk provider”

Office 365 – AADSTS50008: SAML token is invalid

4th of March, 2016 / / 6 Comments

If you’ve made it to this post because you are troubleshooting your AD FS sign in with Office 365 due to “AADSTS50008: SAML token is invalid” I still recommend you do all the standard troubleshooting steps provided in this article below the image:

AADSTS50008https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3015526

Generally speaking, if you’re getting issued a token from your AD FS server and Microsoft’s STS is stopping you from logging in, it would be because of your token signing certificate:

Has your Token-Signing Certificate changed since you last told Microsoft?

… [Keep reading] “Office 365 – AADSTS50008: SAML token is invalid”

Delegate Mailbox Access using Groups in Exchange Online

8th of February, 2016 / / 4 Comments
A common misconception about granting mailbox access rights in Exchange Online is that you can only add access to the individual and not a group. You may have opened the Exchange Administrator Center (EAC), found the mailbox you wanted and looked at the delegated access tab. Only to be provided with a list of eligible user identity’s, but none of your on-premises security groups that have been created. Fear not, the on-premises groups just need a little remediation to the correct flavour to be seen in the picker and then applied.
… [Keep reading] “Delegate Mailbox Access using Groups in Exchange Online”

Block Inbound/Outbound Calls on Sonus SBC 1000/2000

6th of January, 2016 / / No Comments

At Kloud we had an interesting chat amongst the UC group on how to best implement call blocking/screening on a Sonus Session Border Controller 1000/2000. We proceeded to trial various methods including a well documented ‘Action Set’ scenario, which proved to be unreliable in our implementation. It was from this we looked to a simpler method that I will share with you in this article.

The process to block a call will be to use a Call Route Type with ‘deny’ action as the destination type, rather than the standard process of the destination being a FXS, FXO or SIP signalling group.… [Keep reading] “Block Inbound/Outbound Calls on Sonus SBC 1000/2000”

Polycom VVX Phone – Call Transfer Options

6th of November, 2015 / / 4 Comments

During the pilot phase of a Skype for Business Enterprise Voice rollout it is standard practice to get some IP handsets in and do testing on functionality. Its important to try match feature sets between old and new handset functionality to make sure adoption of the new handset is simple.

How did you do it before? Here is how you do it now.

The longest conversation I have with this phase of testing is which transfer type will the business adopt as a default for all phones.… [Keep reading] “Polycom VVX Phone – Call Transfer Options”