Beginning December 1, 2015, Microsoft will be officially rolling out a number of new features within Office365 that significantly enhance the Skype for Business workloads. These features have been in preview form for a few months now, but December 1 marks the date where it becomes generally available (GA) for all tenants within Office365, across the […]
Trevor Miller
Blogs from this Author
Controlling Skype4B Application Sharing Bandwidth
In a previous blog post I talked about how administrators and architects should place more emphasis on planning for application sharing bandwidth in their Skype4B deployments. Armed with that information, the next logical progression of this blog series continues the focus on application sharing and discusses the available methods within Skype4B to manage and control […]
Skype4B App Share: What in the World Are You Doing to My Network?
For many of the Skype for Business and Lync readers out there, you may think to yourself, “Hey, I’ve seen a similar title like that before…”, and you would be absolutely correct. During Lync Conference 2014, Lync MVP Jeff Schertz gave a fantastic presentation about “Video – What in the World Are You Doing to […]
Ignite 2015 – Monitoring Investments in Skype4B
It’s the typical issue all IT professionals face: a new system is designed, built and deployed to end users, but months down the road issues arise and administrators are faced with the overwhelming task of trying to find root cause to remediate issues. As an IT Pro (in a previous life) this is definitely something […]
Ignite 2015 – Skype4B Mobility Security Improvements
I’ll admit that the title is a bit misleading because much of what existed (in regards to mobility) in Lync Server 2013 still exists in Skype for Business Server 2015. Unfortunately there has not been a great leap forward in functionality….YET. The “Yet” is there because there are HUGE improvements forthcoming in the Skype for […]
Managing the Skype Client UI in Skype for Business
With Microsoft officially announcing that they will be upgrading Office365 to utilize the Skype for Business back-end, administrators will need to begin to take actions to prepare themselves and their users for the impact of this update. Note: Since Skype for Business (hereafter, S4B) hasn’t been released to GA yet, this information is still pre-release […]
Changing the SQL mirror endpoint owner breaks mirror in Lync 2013
When you install Lync 2013 and configure the back end for mirroring, a lot of things happen “under the hood” to configure the mirror (and witness, if applicable). Microsoft really has done a fantastic job of hiding the overall complexity of SQL mirroring through Lync topology builder, but suffice it so say, there are many […]
Configuring Office Web Apps Location in Lync 2013
For those that have deployed Lync 2013 alongside Office Web Apps 2013, we’ve all seen this seemingly innocuous check box: Office Web Apps Server is deployed in an external network (that is, perimeter/Internet) Over the past year I’ve never yet had a reason to check that box and honestly didn’t have a very good idea […]
Lync 2013 SQL Mirroring Witness Gotcha
My colleague, Jason Sloan, has a great blog post on some SQL mirroring issues he encountered during a recent Lync 2013 deployment that I highly recommend everyone read. This post is intended as an addition to that list with an issue that I discovered during my own Lync 2013 SQL mirroring deployment. Consider the following […]
Uncovering the Cost of AOL Federation
For a long time Microsoft has offered the capability of on-premises Live Communications Server, Office Communications Server and Lync Server deployments to federate with AOL for instant messaging. In order to use AOL federation there were certain basic requirements that had to be met: You must have a functional edge server (including DNS records & […]
Disabling Edge Server File Transfers in Lync
In the November 2011 Cumulative Update of Lync 2010, Microsoft added the ability to disable file transfers via the edge server. This feature enhancement undoubtedly was the result of customers voicing concerns about data loss protection and was a welcomed addition to the IT administrator’s arsenal. In short, the feature allowed administrators to block all […]
Lync Support for CryptoAPI:NG Certificates
Simply put, Lync does not support certificates that are issued using the Cryptography API: Next Generation providers. At the time of this writing, Lync 2010 and Lync 2013 only support certificates that are issued using legacy Cryptography API providers. To determine if your certificate was issued with CryptoAPI:NG support, use these quick instructions: Using certutil.exe, […]