Federated User – Presence Unknown

15th of October, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Here at Kloud we have just been busy updating our Skype for Business Public Certificate before it expired. Our SAN certificate provided by GoDaddy is used on our Edge Server and Reverse Proxy for all external communication to be encrypted with TLS or HTTPS.

After updating our certificate and restarting services to make the certificate take effect, we started to get some feedback from Kloudies (Kloud Employees) of federated contacts showing up with ‘Presence Unknown’ in their contacts list.… [Keep reading] “Federated User – Presence Unknown”

Skype for Business External Authentication

7th of May, 2015 / / 13 Comments

Microsoft Lync/Skype for Business has revolutionised the way people can communicate and collaborate in the workplace. With light weight and portable form factors coming into their own, devices have enabled businesses to rethink their communication strategy. Lync not only enables users to communicate using great device form factors, but also from wherever they may be located. The sense of a roaming lync identity brings freedom to how people choose to collaborate and office spaces, desks and name tags mounted above them, seem like a necessity of the past.… [Keep reading] “Skype for Business External Authentication”

EnableSkypeUI Where Art Thou?

19th of April, 2015 / / 9 Comments

Are you missing the EnableSkypeUI from Lync Management Shell in Lync Server 2013?

If you have deployed a Skype for Business (S4B) client into your Lync Server 2013 environment you may see the following error upon login:

Skype warning on Start

There are plenty of articles about how to switch the client via Office365 Powershell, Lync Management Shell or the Registry, but if you’re scratching your head on how to get the new parameter “CSClientPolicy” here are some steps that may have been missed.… [Keep reading] “EnableSkypeUI Where Art Thou?”

Australia’s leading wholesale distribution company transforms IT with Office 365

13th of November, 2014 / / No Comments

Customer Overview

Metcash is one of Australia’s leading wholesale distribution and marketing companies, specialising in grocery, fresh produce, liquor, hardware and automotive parts and accessories.

Business Situation

Metcash required the transition of a number of on-premises workloads to a cloud based service to alleviate infrastructure, support and performance issues experienced by the organisation.

Metcash evaluated several alternative SaaS options and requested to roll-out the Microsoft Office 365 suite of products in the form of a technology pilot.… [Keep reading] “Australia’s leading wholesale distribution company transforms IT with Office 365”

Lync 2013 Basic Client – the forgotten client

28th of October, 2014 / / No Comments

I’ve had conversations with customers lately whom are looking to use Lync Server 2013 and currently don’t want to move their desktop SOE to Office 2013 suite with Lync 2013 Client. This can be a project in itself and one that IT Admins aren’t always prepared to look at. Whether this is because of the analysis needed to roll out the suite or they still are in an agreement that only allows them to Office 2010.… [Keep reading] “Lync 2013 Basic Client – the forgotten client”

Lync IP Phones – VVX Media Phone Alternative

8th of May, 2014 / / 6 Comments

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Updated 16 July 2014: The new 5.1.1b VVX Firmware has been released by Polycom and can be found here
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The Polycom VVX Media Phones offer an additional option for Lync Enterprise Voice customers over the traditional consumer choice of ‘Optimized for Lync’ Aries phones running Lync Phone Edition firmware. I recently came back in touch with these devices and this blog post is some of my latest observations.

Microsoft extended support for the Aries phone firmware till 2023 which shows Microsoft’s commitment to traditional telephony devices and to vendors of Lync IP phones continuing sales for some time into the future.… [Keep reading] “Lync IP Phones – VVX Media Phone Alternative”

Protect Your Identity in the Cloud With Multi-Factor Authentication

16th of April, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Multi-factor authentication is now available for both administrator and end user accounts.  This service is now available Office 365, Windows Intune, and Microsoft Azure.

One of the risks of cloud technologies is that they are accessible from anywhere.  This means that any hacker can try to log into your account from anywhere in the world.  User names are usually public and widely known (i.e. an email address).  The only thing standing between the hacker and your personal data is a password. … [Keep reading] “Protect Your Identity in the Cloud With Multi-Factor Authentication”

Simulate moving to the Cloud with NEWT

28th of March, 2014 / / No Comments

I’ve blogged a bit in the past about the unique challenges encountered when moving to the cloud and the unavoidable consequence of introducing new network hops when moving workloads out of the data centre. I’m currently working for a unique organisation in the mining industry who are quite aggressively pursuing cost saving initiatives and have seen cloud as one of the potential savings. The uniqueness of the IT operating environment comes from the dispersed and challenging “branch offices” which may lie at the end of a long dedicated wired, microwave or satellite link

Centralising IT services to a data centre in Singapore is all very well if you’re office is on a well serviced broadband Internet link but what of these other data centres with more challenged connectivity.… [Keep reading] “Simulate moving to the Cloud with NEWT”

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”