Deploying Polycom Boss/Admin (now a part of UCS 5.0 Firmware)

September 13th, 2013 | Tags: , , ,

UCS 5.0 delivers a wealth of new Lync related capabilities:

  • Better Together-over-Ethernet (AKA BToE)
  • Support for the Lync Software Updates Service (UCS 5 onwards updates can be pushed out via the Lync Server rather than a Polycom provisioning server)
  • Lync Address Book
  • Call Park
  • Lync Status (Lync configuration information delivered via the handset)
  • Boss/Admin (sharing line appearance)

In this post I’m going to go over pre-requisites for the latter (Boss/Admin), if you’re interested in learning about the features then check out a great overview from Jeff Schertz here.

The Boss/Admin feature in UCS 5.0 leverages native Lync capability in Lync Server 2013, all that is required is to add delegates by using Call Forwarding Settings within the Lync Client followed by selecting either Call Forward or Simultaneous Ringing to activate the feature. (see below)

BossAdmin01

One word of warning however is for folks still utilising Lync Server 2010, whilst this feature is supported an extra administrative step is required (this is configured out of the box with Lync Server 2013).

To enable the feature for Lync Server 2010 you need to run a Microsoft SQL command against your backend database (specifically the RTC database), for Standard Edition this will be co-located with your Front End and for Enterprise Edition this will be located on a dedicated SQL Server.

Before you run the command you can check to see whether the “dialogInfo” category has been created or not by executing the following command (change the server be.contoso.local to the name of the server running the RTC database):

osql -E -S be.contoso.local\RTC -Q "use rtc;select * from CategoryDef"

In my case this had not been created and the query returned 19 rows “dialogInfo” wasn’t one of them. To add this element to the database execute the following command (again replacing the be.contoso.local server name with your own):

osql -E -S be.contoso.local\RTC -Q "use rtc;exec RtcRegisterCategoryDef N'dialogInfo'"

That’s it!