Technology | Todd's Blog

Bi-directional Communication with Lync and Skype

posted on May 29, 2013

Microsoft has announced today the Skype to Lync and vice versa connectivity has been launched. Great news. and the full details can be found at the Lync Blog

If you are wondering where to start then let me help you out.

Before you get started you will need an Edge server in your deployment and you will need a Microsoft Agreement number (Volume Licensing). You probably have some sort of Microsoft Agreement number but the Edge isn’t always setup in all deployments. If you don’t have one, got do that first. Don’t know how? Check out Iain Smith’s blog and his post titled Complete Lync 2013 Installation Guide including – Edge Server installation PART 5 of 6. That will help you deploy the Lync Edge role.

One word of advice, if you use an internal CA to sign the internal cert, ensure your server is able to reach the internal CRL, you may have to add a hosts file for that. I remember having routing issues with our Edge Server trying to contact the internal CRL.

So now you have completed these steps. Next thing you need to do is set up PIC connectivity with Microsoft. Check out the TechNet article titled Configuring SIP Federation, XMPP Federation and Public Instant Messaging which will get you started down that road.

Once you have the PIC connectivity established and your edge is working correctly, you should be able to message between Lync and Skype.

Setting SPNs and the User Rights Needed

posted on April 10, 2013

One of my co-workers just came over and asked me what are the minimum amount of rights we need to let someone create SPNs (Service Principal Names)?

Good question. Off to TechNet I went looking for the answer. Typically to set SPNs you must be a member of Domain Admins or Enterprise Admins. Alternatively you can set permissions so delegated Admins can set SPNs. The wording from TechNet sounds like this:

If you need to allow delegated administrators to configure service principal names (SPNs), you must ensure that their user accounts have the Validated write to service principal name permission.

The full article can be found at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731241(v=ws.10).aspx.

Publishing Exchange Web Services for Lync

posted on December 19, 2012

I’ve been involved in a 12,000 seat, 33,000 user Lync deployment at work over the past few weeks. One of the pain points we had, was publishing free/busy from Exchange for internet connected clients. We use an appliance to give access to our internal resources including OWA and Exchange ActiveSync. And because we are implementing an MDM solution, we are not wanting to make much available externally without having to go through the MDM solution.

Finding good articles covering publishing EWS without exposing everything is few and far between. Luckily I did find a link a couple of weeks back talking about how to do this. For our Lync deployment we are using Threat Management Gateway 2010 (TMG 2010 ) to publish our Lync services to external users. So tacking this feature on is relatively painless. Here is the link here: http://www.confusedamused.com/notebook/publishing-exchange-web-services-remotely-only-for-lync/.

Enjoy