Telstra and MS have agreed to provide a PSTN option (finally) from Skype for business online.

The telstra sales spead can be found here – https://www.telstra.com.au/business-enterprise/solutions/collaboration-conferencing/cloud-collaboration/telstra-calling-365

A good rundown of it (with less sales-speak) is available here – http://www.skype4badmin.com/telstra_calling_for_office365_announced/?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_feed%3BlvXSTr%2FARtuirZuPGlYhyA%3D%3D

The author, concentrates on the release, the price point and the basic concept of what it can do.

The big possible downside here is Telstra. Anyone that has ever been unfortunate enough to deal with their multitude of billing departments and their ahem… “support” would have experienced the pain that dealing with Telstra can bring.

As always, it would be very nice if i was completely wrong – and Telstra had its shit completely together, and customers weren’t massively overbilled and the product worked…. all we can do is wait and see.

Being able to communicate with Skype users via Skype for business is fantastic – however, the interface for adding Skype users – well, is confusing.

Generally, when talking to someone and exchanging Skype details – the other person will quote their Skype name – which is fair enough – that’s how it works with Skype….

When using Skype for business, the address bar forces you to use a full SIP address format…. but, its fair to say that’s its not really clear from the UI how to add someone correctly

First up, you need to get the email address associated with their Skype account.

If this email address is a Microsoft account, such as outlook, Hotmail etc – then you can use that address.

If this email address is not a Microsoft account, its a bit whacky, the format is

user(domainname.com)@msn.com

So joe.Bloggs@contoso.com would be joe.blogs(contoso.com)@msn.com….

Hopefully Microsoft will sort this out at some stage – as its not very intuitive.

http://www.lync.geek.nz/2015/02/whats-new-in-skype-for-business-server-2015.html

http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-rebrands-lync-as-skype-for-business-readies-2015-releases-7000035665/

While it makes sense to align the technologies… “skype of business”…. gives the impression of a consumer product with business functionality as an after-thought…..

The Lync Connectivity Analyser is a handy tool for troubleshooting some issues – and is available from http://www.microsoft.com/en-au/download/details.aspx?id=36535

Recently i found it was crashing on startup, seemingly from a recent patch.

Uninstalling KB2840642v2 (.net framework 4.5 update) made it work again for me.

Obviously this might not be an issue for everyone…. either way, i hope the patch gets updated or the LCA gets updated soon-ish.

The full guide is here…

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=39071

For those of that already have PIC enabled (most of you i would assume)…. i found the guide to be a little bit off, in that my existing provider was called “MSN” – not “Messenger”

So, my suggestion is to open up your Lync powershell and…….

Get-CsPublicProvider

note the name of your msn/messenger federation partner (it will likely be “messenger” or “MSN”)

Remove-CsPublicProvider -Identity MSN (or messenger, depending on step above)

New-CsPublicProvider -Identity Skype -ProxyFqdn federation.messenger.msn.com -IconUrl “https://images.edge.messenger.live.com/Messenger_16x16.png” -VerificationLevel 2 -Enabled 1

Restart your lync client and check that Add Contact | Add contact not in my organision | Skype exists

now enjoy IM and audio calls between Lync and Skype…. video apparently coming soon.

I upgraded my servers to Lync 2013 a few months back and all has been working fine….. but in the past few days, i upgraded a couple of home machines with fresh installs – everything was working ok apart from Lync 2013 client, which came up with access denied errors. (but if signed in on an existing install, everything was still fine)

After some investigation, i found the following event in the System Event Log (event ID 4)

The Kerberos client received a KRB_AP_ERR_MODIFIED error from the server im04$. The target name used was HTTP/im04.company.com.au. This indicates that the target server failed to decrypt the ticket provided by the client. This can occur when the target server principal name (SPN) is registered on an account other than the account the target service is using. Please ensure that the target SPN is registered on, and only registered on, the account used by the server. This error can also happen when the target service is using a different password for the target service account than what the Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC) has for the target service account. Please ensure that the service on the server and the KDC are both updated to use the current password. If the server name is not fully qualified, and the target domain (company.COM.AU) is different from the client domain (company.COM.AU), check if there are identically named server accounts in these two domains, or use the fully-qualified name to identify the server.

fair enough…. next thing setspn -q http/im04.company.com.au, which returned the account LyncKerbAuth… a computer account created by the lync install process.

“thats correct” i thought…. but after some short searching, found the test PS commandlet of “Test-CSKerberosAccountAssignment -Identity <sitename> -Report “C:TempLog.htm” -Verbose” which failed with lots of red!

Test-CSKerberosAccountAssignment : The Kerberos configuration on im04.company.com.au is invalid. The expected assigned account is companylynckerbauth. Ensure that the account has not expired, and the
configured password on the machine matches the Active Directory password of the account.

After some short searching, the process to reset the account is

1. Set-CsKerberosAccountAssignment -UserAccount “CompanyLycKerbAuth” -Identity “site:<sitename>”              (this step sets Lync to use that account)
2. Enable-CsTopology                                                                                                                                                                         (this step activates the above change)
3. Set-CsKerberosAccountPassword -UserAccount CompanyLyncKerbAuth                                                                      (this step sorts out the passwords)

Then i ran Test-CSKerberosAccountAssignment -Identity <sitename> -Report “C:TempLog.htm” -Verbose again, and got muchy less red – and all clients can now logon.

Not sure how it broke – maybe something in the 2010 to 2013 migration process that i missed – but it is/was a little odd that it didnt show up for existing clients and seemed to lay dormant for a few months – or it coulld have been something to do with Lync 2013 CU1.

Anyhoo – hope that helps someone else that might into the same issue.

So i finally decided it was time to put this in today….. and stop using our mobiles for everything…. the billion config web interface doesnt make ity easy – so i thought i would put up a quick doc in case anyone else is running into the same issue…

Via the Web GUI

• Configure all your standrad voip settings (username, sip proxy etc)
• Delete all PSTN dial plans (assuming your voip only)
• Telnet into the Billion
• voip endpoint 1 set digitmap ‘(x.T) +x.T’
• voip endpoint 2 set digitmap ‘(x.T) +x.T’
• refresh to web interface to ensure the settings are there

save config and restart device.

At some point ill get around to using asterisk to talk to nodephone, so i can then integrate with both the old school phones and Lync…. i was hoping Lync 2013 would have authenticated sip trunks, so i wouldn’t havent bother with asterisk, but alas it does not look like it does.