Acme Packet SBC for Office 365 UM with CUCM

28th of November, 2013 / / 2 Comments

Office 365 Exchange Online can provide Unified Messaging (UM) functionality such as voicemail for on-premises telephony systems. Configuring integration between Exchange Online UM and Lync is a straightforward process assuming you already have Enterprise Voice and a Lync Edge server in place. There is TechNet documentation for Lync 2013 and Lync 2010 or an older Office 365 Checklist.

Things get a lot more complicated when you want to use a different telephony system, for example Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM).… [Keep reading] “Acme Packet SBC for Office 365 UM with CUCM”

Exchange 2013 DNS Settings Cause Transport Services to Crash

22nd of November, 2013 / / 2 Comments

I ran into a problem at a customer recently with two Exchange 2013 servers where the ‘Microsoft Exchange Frontend Transport’ (MSExchangeFrontEndTransport) service would crash continually. It would eventually bring down the ‘Microsoft Exchange Transport’ (MSExchangeTransport) and ‘Microsoft Exchange Mailbox Transport Submission’ (MSExchangeSubmission) services. This meant the server was responding to SMTP connections with ‘451 4.7.0 Temporary server error. Please try again later. PRX2’ on attempting to submit a message.

The primary error in the Event Log was Event ID 1000:

Faulting application name: MSExchangeFrontendTransport.exe,
… [Keep reading] “Exchange 2013 DNS Settings Cause Transport Services to Crash”

Lync 2010 DirectAccess Audio Video and Application Sharing Troubleshooting

22nd of August, 2013 / / No Comments

A customer recently had a problem with Windows 2012 DirectAccess connected clients performing desktop sharing, audio and video conversations with internal clients. DirectAccess is a Windows service that is part of the Remote Access role that allows domain joined clients to access internal resources over the internet as if they were on the LAN. DirectAccess does this by providing seamless VPN connectivity without any user input. Lync can work over DirectAccess (and Lync 2013 works a lot better as it supports IPv6) but because the traffic is encrypted and is real time communication, it is recommended to use the Lync Edge server for connectivity rather than sending the traffic over the DirectAccess VPN.… [Keep reading] “Lync 2010 DirectAccess Audio Video and Application Sharing Troubleshooting”

PowerShell Deployment of Web Application Proxy and ADFS in Under 10 Minutes

14th of August, 2013 / / 17 Comments

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Updated 10 September 2013: tested with Windows 2012 R2 RTM and the script functions as in R2 Preview. Outlook Anywhere bug in the Preview code has been fixed and Outlook now works with RTM. Updated the script to correct Autodiscover ExternalURL
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In this post I will be discussing deploying a highly available Windows 2012 R2 Preview ADFS and Web Application Proxy solution using only PowerShell. This was done as a proof of concept to compare the time taken as well as complexity to build and configure a Reverse Proxy solution to replace a UAG 2010 array.… [Keep reading] “PowerShell Deployment of Web Application Proxy and ADFS in Under 10 Minutes”

SSL SAN Certificate Request and Import from PowerShell

30th of July, 2013 / / 4 Comments

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Updated 5 August 2013: allow wildcard subject names e.g. “CN=*.showcase.kloud.com.au” which get written to disk as ‘star.domain’ e.g. ‘star.showcase.kloud.com.au’
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Automating a certificate request with PowerShell should not be hard – but it is. Exchange has had offline certificate requests with New-ExchangeCertificate since PowerShell was introduced with Exchange 2007. Lync has had online certificate requests using Request-CsCertificate since Lync 2010 and GUI based online requests from the OCS days. I had a requirement to script the request, issuing and importing of a certificate request including multiple domain SAN (Subject Alternate Name) entries.… [Keep reading] “SSL SAN Certificate Request and Import from PowerShell”

Publish Lync 2013 with 2012 R2 Preview Web Application Proxy

15th of July, 2013 / / 16 Comments

I discussed the new Windows 2012 R2 Preview Web Application Proxy (WAP) remote access role in a previous post Windows 2012 R2 Preview Web Application Proxy – Exchange 2013 Publishing Tests. I showed how to publish Exchange 2013 (except for Outlook Anywhere which isn’t working) and a claims based application.

In this post I am going to cover:

Publishing Lync Applications

Lync has a few different namespaces that need to be published:

  • Lync External Web Services (which includes the Lync Web App and Lync Scheduler)
  • Lync meeting join
  • Lync dialin page
  • Lyncdiscover for client autodiscover
  • Office Web Apps Server for PowerPoint sharing

Lync applications cannot use Preauthentication and have to use Pass-through which lets the backend server provide authentication.… [Keep reading] “Publish Lync 2013 with 2012 R2 Preview Web Application Proxy”

Windows 2012 R2 Preview Web Application Proxy – Exchange 2013 Publishing Tests

3rd of July, 2013 / / 51 Comments

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Updated: 10 September 2013

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Updated: 15 July 2013

  • I have heard from a member of the Web Application Proxy product group who said there is a bug in the Preview version that prevents Outlook Anywhere from working. They say it will be fixed in the RTM version
  • Lync 2013 and  Office Web Apps 2013 have been tested and work with some configuration changes.
… [Keep reading] “Windows 2012 R2 Preview Web Application Proxy – Exchange 2013 Publishing Tests”

Skype Integration with Lync Server and Lync Online

3rd of June, 2013 / / 19 Comments

Skype integration with Lync has been teased since the first public beta preview of Lync 2013 in July 2012. Microsoft mentioned it in Lync 2013 Preview TechNet documentation (no longer available) and in a blog post by the Lync team UPDATE: Skype and so much more: Why we’re so excited about the new Lync which implied it would be available at launch. Lync 2013 became publicly available without Skype integration which was a bit disappointing after being talked about as one of the many features.… [Keep reading] “Skype Integration with Lync Server and Lync Online”

Office Web Apps Server – just say no to Windows Update Automatic Updates

21st of May, 2013 / / 1 Comment

Office Web Apps Server 2013 is a standalone Microsoft product that is leveraged by Lync 2013, SharePoint 2013 and Exchange 2013 for web based document viewing and editing using the WOPI (Web app Open Platform Interface) protocol. Office Web Apps Server used be called Web Application Companion (WAC) and that is what all of the Lync 2013 pre-release software and documentation called it. In my opinion, Office Web Apps Server is a very confusing name as Exchange Outlook Web App (or Access) has owned the OWA acronym since 1997 with Exchange 5.0 SP 1.… [Keep reading] “Office Web Apps Server – just say no to Windows Update Automatic Updates”

Outlook Anywhere NTLM SSO with UAG 2010 KCD

17th of May, 2013 / / 8 Comments

Outlook Anywhere can be configured with two authentication methods – Basic and NTLM. Outlook Anywhere NTLM authentication has always been a bit of a tricky beast when using a pre-authenticating reverse proxy like TMG or UAG. The benefit it can bring is that a user signed on to a domain joined computer with a domain account can get seamless SSO (Single Sign On) without entering a password. This can happen if the user is on the corporate network or if they are remote using Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTP) and cached credentials.… [Keep reading] “Outlook Anywhere NTLM SSO with UAG 2010 KCD”