Archive for the ‘Featured Article’ Category

I have had a number of e-mails/comments asking how you enable a user from within Active Directory for Lync, which this might be considered by most a simple task (for those that are PowerShell challenged), in can be confusing…never fear help is at hand a step-by-step guide can be found below:

Friday, December 3rd, 2010 at 16:59 | 0 comments
Categories: Featured Article

Once a year I give my “blessing” to the wife to go away on a long weekend with the girls and usually I try to call in a few child minding favours from my parents/in-laws and this weekend, thank goodness, is no exception to the rule!

Last time I was given these days of peace I wrote a Trixbox/Exchange 2010 integration guide, the emphasis was on this becoming the first in a series of how-to’s – however this never really came to fruition, the reason? Asterisk + friendly UI = Bad bad bad…so from here on in I have chosen to move to AsteriskNOW.

Trixbox is a great distribution of Asterisk, however it does break certain Asterisk standards and you can’t beat a good ol’ command line – yes in Asterisk’s case the command line is easier than a web interface.

So why not plain old Asterisk? AsteriskNOW makes light work of the install and I’m by no means a Linux guru! You can still opt for the FreePBX front end – but we will choose to not go down this dark path – trust me on this!

So let’s talk objectives…

Setup AsteriskNOW, configuring a SIP extension and corresponding dial-plan
Install and configure Skype for Asterisk (SFA), ensuring the SIP extension above can route in/out (SkypeOut)
Take the Lync 2010 Server install performed here and integrate it with AsteriskNOW
Make calls to and from the Asterisk SIP extension (Lync & SFA)
Make calls to and from the Lync client (SIP & SFA)
So here is an idea of how this will all piece together:

Sounds like a tall order right? Wrong. With AsteriskNOW and Lync Server 2010, it is reasonably straight forward and I will endeavour to document the end-to-end setup process.

Saturday, October 9th, 2010 at 17:48 | 127 comments
Categories: Featured Article

As many of you may well know the long awaited public release candidate of Microsoft Lync 2010 (previously Communications Server ‘14’) is now available for download. This major new release offers a radical difference to the previous architecture and unlike it’s predecessors (Communications Server 2007 R1/2 and to a certain degree Live Communications Server 2005) offers a streamlined and consolidated deployment, great for smaller scale implementations which are not overly abundant to date.

This guide will run through a consolidated standard edition install (without voice gateway integration, I’ll try and come back to this later), whereby all roles will be deployed on a single virtual machine except monitoring, archiving and edge roles – yes this is a supported scenario!

Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 at 02:16 | 333 comments
Categories: Featured Article

I previously mentioned that integrating OCS 2007 R2 was now possible given that Asterisk 1.6 now supports TCP SIP trunking. I also found myself in a position where I wanted to start testing Exchange 2010 UM without touching my production PBX (which in this case is a Nortel CS1000). After scouring the blogosphere I found […]

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 at 15:49 | 91 comments
Categories: Featured Article
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