DR Failover for Skype for Business Standard Edition

The article takes you through step by step of carrying out both health check and invoking disaster recovery (DR) a standard edition environment. The diagram below shows the layout of the environment where the DR was carried out on:

Figure 1 – Environment Overview

Before proceeding to test DR you need to make sure the appropriate registrar information is available/configured in the environment otherwise you will get the following error during Pool Failover process:

Please check that the pool <Prod_S4B> is healthy as conditions such as high CPU, low available memory
 or any disabled services can delay (or in some cases result in unsuccessful) fail over operations.… [Keep reading] “DR Failover for Skype for Business Standard Edition”

Skype for Business Online to On-Premises Migration

Okay guys – you’ve been told “lets move everyone back from the cloud! We need Enterprise Voice for our users” This will go against most Microsoft sales materials as we should be looking towards cloud.

If you are part of an organisation that has been birthed out of Skype for Business Online (SFBO) as part of your Office 365 subscription, it would make sense that you would have never had on-premises Lync or SFB servers in your Active Directory domain.… [Keep reading] “Skype for Business Online to On-Premises Migration”

Hybrid Exchange 2007/2013 and Lync EWS Integration

I came across an interesting issue recently with a client currently running Exchange 2007 and looking to migrate to Exchange Online. Since Update Rollup 10 for Exchange 2007 Service Pack 3, it has become possible to coexist Exchange 2oo7 and Exchange 2013.

After installing Exchange 2013 as the Hybrid server, this particular client ran into an issue with the Lync 2013 client losing EWS integration with any mailboxes that still reside on Exchange 2007. The net effect of this is that any users that hadn’t been migrated from Exchange 2007 to Exchange 2013 or Office 365 would have to rely on Outlook MAPI (and Outlook being open) for anything to do with the Personal Information Manager feature of Lync.… [Keep reading] “Hybrid Exchange 2007/2013 and Lync EWS Integration”

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

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”