Author: Adam Fowler

Exchange 2010 – Out of Office for HelpDesk

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

One of the pains of looking after Exchange 2010 is putting in an Out of Office message for someone who forgot to do it before they went away, and either can’t or won’t do it themselves remotely. If you’re lucky enough to be able to delegate this task out to others, you can easily do so with “Role Based Access Control”. There’s a nice built in group called ‘Help Desk’ which gives the members access to everyone’s Outlook Web Access Options (not their actual emails). These options include Out of Office as well as several other useful settings that are not particularly private or contain confidential information.

To do this, from the Exchange Management Console go to Toolbox > Role Based Access Control (RBAC) User Editor. This will bring up a web page that is a part of Outlook Web Access – log in with the relevant credentials for Exchange Administration, and you can navigate to the Roles & Auditing Section:

rbac

From this, you can double click on the Help Desk entry from the list of Role Groups, and add members to the list.

Once this is done, the users who were added to the group can access other user’s Out of Office by logging onto Outlook Web Access, going to Options > Set Automatic Replies. You’ll be greeted with this screen:

auto replies

From here, you can drop down the ‘Manage Myself’ menu and choose ‘Another User…’, select your user and you’ll see the selected users options screen, allowing you to set Out of Office.

Hope that helps!

Update 7th October 2014:

I had someone ask as the above didn’t work for them, but it was due to one of the Assigned Roles being removed against Help Desk. They should be:

Assigned Roles:
Message Tracking
User Options
View-Only Recipients

Exchange 2010 Unified Messaging – Unrecognised Voicemail Extension

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

I had an issue where a particular user’s voicemail on Exchange 2010 wasn’t working. When they called the voicemail number, they were asked “To access your mailbox, please enter the extension” rather than being greeted with their name and messages. The user was on Lync 2010, and Unified Messaging was enabled on their account with the matching extension number. Also, when dialing voicemail and trying to enter the extension number just met the message ‘XXX isn’t a valid mailbox’.

Disabling and re-enabling Unified Messaging made no difference. I was rather confident this was an Exchange/Unified Messaging issue, so I had the idea of checking ADSI edit to see if UM was properly enabled.

Checking the attribute “msExchUMEnabledFlags” found the issue. When a user has UM enabled, the value of this field should be 831, or 830 when disabled. I’ve come across this issue before, where it’s the wrong value and needs to be changed, but this was the first time I’d come across it as being 832.

Never a good sign when you google something, and you get zero results:

exchange

Changing the Attribute value back to 831 instantly fixed the issue, didn’t even require disabling and re-enabling Unified Messaging. If all else fails, change the value back to 830, refresh your Exchange Management Console and the user should show as being disabled for Unified Messaging, then re-enable as you normally would.

Hope this helps anyone else who comes across a similar issue.

VisiPatch 360 Panel

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

This is our new Patch solution – VisiPatch 360 by Systimax http://www.commscope.com/Product-Catalog/Enterprise/Brand/SYSTIMAX%C2%AE-Patching-Solutions/VisiPatch-360%C2%AE/

I spent half of a weekend setting this all up, but it’s a pretty awesome system. For us, we have it so the middle yellow area goes back to our switches, and the top/bottom blue parts go out to the floor outlets. We connect a yellow to the blue patch port we want to make active, and it’s done. It makes moves and changes really easy.

20130318_173012[1]

 

The metal doors open to both left or right, and come off completely – that’s where a lot of the cable mess hides, but there’s a lot of room and nothing really gets tanged.

I’d recommend having a look at a system like this if you’re building a new comms room, or redoing one from scratch.

Lync 2010 Response Groups and Ringing

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

I’ve been knee deep in Lync 2010 lately, and one thing I was working on was setting up some Response Groups. Simple enough, people call a number and it goes through to a few different staff on various extensions. The main annoyance from people calling the new Response group was the Music On Hold. As soon as you ring and hit the response group, you’re put on hold – it should be ringing on the phones of the members of the response group, but the caller hears on hold music. This can be confusing for people, so the easiest thing to do is to switch the Music On Hold to the exact same noise Lync uses when a phone is ringing.

This is done by modifying Step 7 in the Response Group:

lync response group

 

You can find the Lync WAV files on any computer with Lync 2010 installed, under C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Lync\Media\

* Updated 4th March 2014: Stephen Dolphin in the comments below nots that the Lync 2013 path is C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office15\MEDIA *

COMMUNICATOR_ringing.wav is the default one that most people will be familiar with. Otherwise you can find a normal ringing phone WAV file from anywhere and use that, such as this one:

Ringing

After doing this, the callers don’t actually know they’re in a queue unless you’ve enabled other settings in the Response Group to make it obvious.

Enjoy.

Searching for Duplicate MAC addresses with Hyper-V and SCVMM 2012

Posted on by Adam Fowler

Hi,

I ran into an issue today where a server was complaining about a duplicate MAC address. Since almost all of our servers were virtual, I thought the best step (after doing an arp -a command locally and seeing if the offending IP address/MAC address was listed – which it wasn’t) would be to do a quick Google to see if there was an easy way without checking each VM.

Of course there is, thanks to Powershell. I quickly found this blog post from The Daily Admin and gave it a try. There was one slight change I had to make to get it to work:

Using the “Virtual Machine Manager Command Shell” I tried the command from the link above:

Get-VMMServer | get-vm | Get-VirtualNetworkAdapter | select name,EthernetAddress | export-csv “c:\temp\VM_Macs.csv”

It prompted for a Computer name. After working out you needed to specify your SCVMM server in the first part after ‘Get-VMMServer’ as per this:

Get-VMMServer “ScvmmServerName”| get-vm | Get-VirtualNetworkAdapter | select name,EthernetAddress | export-csv “c:\temp\VM_Macs.csv”

It worked perfectly. The resulting CSV file had a full list of the MAC addresses, which helped me narrow down what I was looking for.

 

Full credit to The Daily Admin at http://www.thedailyadmin.com/ !