If your CMS pool is unavailable and cannot be recovered in short time or at all, you’ll have to move Central Management Store to another pool to be able to make any changes in the topology. However, you’ll also have to move all other services hosted...

I just realized that it’s been quite a while since I announced in my last blog that I’d publish DR procedure for SQL server holding CMS (Central Management Store). The procedure is quite similar to previous one (Restoring Enterprise Edition Back End server...

While you can find official Lync Server 2010 Backup/Restore guide at Backing Up and Restoring Lync Server 2010 , in this article I’m providing an additional recovery scenario to restore the data. There’s nothing wrong with the procedure...

Enterprise Voice fault tolerance (as well as load balancing) is enabled in several ways in Lync Server 2010. We can start with possibility to deploy Enterprise Edition pool with multiple Front End servers (with either collocated Mediation service or deploying...

Administrators are frequently required to limit media ports that are used by Communications Server 2007 R2 clients. This particular task is straightforward to perform for Office Communicator 2007 R2 clients through group policy. For details, see Media...

During my work on OCS engagements, I’ve already seen situations where OCS admins would start successful trace of SIP sessions (IM, voice calls, conferences, etc) but at one point they would be “lost” in that bunch of SIP packets in the log. In short ...

When using Office Communicator to place a voice call, you can use several different ways to establish a call: clicking on a Communicator Call option next to the contact in your OC, thus using contact’s SIP URI to place a call dialing E.164 number dialing...

Working with regional and worldwide customers and partners who deployed OCS 2007 or 2007 R2, it was noticeable that one area was particularly challenging to configure - remote access. Although official documentation was good and detailed, there was many...

When I changed my career path to Unified Communications a few years ago (after having spent two decades with several UNIX flavors, MS directory and MS messaging platforms), one of the biggest challenges for me was trying to understand what all those methods...