the UC Guys

Microsoft Ignite: Microsoft announces Teams will evolve as the primary client for intelligent communications in Office 365

At the first day of Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft made some major announcements regarding its new vision of “Intelligent Communications” with Teams being the centerpiece, signaling a shift away from  the Skype for Business client.  Teams will be built on a a new modern Skype Infrastructure for enterprise-grade voice and video communications. 

Microsoft also announced a new version of Skype for Business Server targeted for the second half of calendar year 2018.

What this all means?

1. Mainstream Support will continue for on premise customers of Skype for Business Server through 2023 assuming vNext is released at the end of 2018.  Customers can rest easy knowing they can continue to use Skype in the way they have been without having to worry about a major migration in the near future.  

2. Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business clients can be run side by side to evaluate and explore what’s best for your organization.  For organizations that have not yet deployed Skype, it likely makes more sense they start on their journey of Intelligent Communications using Teams. 

3. Expect to see continued growth and investment in Microsoft Teams, with the product moving to achieve feature parity with Skype for Business.  Guest Access was recently rolled out.  PSTN Calling was called out as a feature to preview soon.  PSTN Conferencing is already available in preview today.  

4.  Also expected is tighter interoperability between Teams and Skype, namely including universal presence, messaging and calling interoperability.

Indeed an exciting new chapter is unveiled..  See https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/09/25/a-new-vision-for-intelligent-communications-in-office-365/ for further details. 

Guest Access in Microsoft Teams – Getting it all right so your Guests can participate!

Microsoft has recently announced Teams Guest Access opening up the door for “federation like” communication between Office 365 Tenants that are using Teams. The process for adding Guests is documented here however there are a few caveats you need to be aware of.

1.  The Guest you are inviting needs to have Teams enabled. This seems kind of obvious but if they don’t have access to Teams they won’t be able to sign on to take advantage of the invitation they just received to join another Team. In Office 365 ensure the user has the appropriate license assigned and ensure that Teams is enabled for them individually. Some Tenant Admins also turn Teams off at the Tenant layer so also ensure this is not the issue first.

Of course, both above settings relate to the Tenant of the Guest you are inviting so you will need to reach out their IT Administrator to ensure the about requirements are true. At the time of publishing this it does not appear Teams is doing a check to see if the target user meets all the current prerequisites of accepting and joining as a Teams Guest. This would be an ideal feature enhancement.

2. Your Organization needs to allow you to invite Guests. Check with your IT Administrator to make sure you are allowed to invite Guests to your Teams. Currently this is a Tenant Level Setting meaning it is either On or Off for all Teams Users within your organization. In Office 365 go to the Settings, Services & Add-ins, Office 365 Groups option. I’m not a fan of how this is laid out but essentially the second option controls whether you can invite Guests to your organizations Teams and the first option controls the access that guests that already have been invited have. Notice that these features are controlled within the Office 365 “Groups” settings given the tight integration of Teams to Groups.

Figure 3: Allowing your Organization to Invite Teams' Guests

With time I expect that the user experience around the Teams ‘federation’ model improves.  Once of the other caveats is that the user joining as a guest must sign out of their Teams Tenant and into the “Guest” tenant of the organization that has invited them.   While in this tenant it means they miss conversations and meetings that are happening in their own tenant.  I’m hoping and again expect that the experience here also improves. 

Skype for Business File Share is not accessible… Element Not Found

Recently, a large customer of mine running Skype for Business Server 2015 CU5 on Windows Server 2012R2 started noticing Front-End Servers complaining that they lost access to their DFS file share. The occurrences were random in nature and possibly related to a recent Windows Server patching cycle.

It was brought to their attention by the following SCOM alerts:

Alert: [Skype] No write access to the file share.

Source: Conferencing Announcement Service Component [SfBFE02.mycomany.com]

Path: SfBFE02.mycompany.com

Last modified by: System

Last modified time: 9/6/2017 9:00:23 AM

Alert description: No write access to the file share.

 

There is a problem accessing file share: \\mycompany.com\skypeforbusinessfileshare\BDCFsData\3-ApplicationServer-1\AppServerFiles\CAS

Cause: No write access to the file share.

Resolution:

Make sure that the permissions are set correctly.

And this one:

Alert: [Skype] Could not extract file share information from local management store.

Source: Conferencing Announcement Service Component [SfBFE02.mycompany.com]

Path: SfBFE02.mycompany.com

Last modified by: System

Last modified time: 9/6/2017 9:17:42 AM

Alert description: Could not extract file share information from local management store.

 

Cause: Conferencing Announcement Service might not have been installed correctly.

Resolution:

Make sure that the permissions are set correctly and Conferencing Announcement Service is run in a supported scenario.

 

Please see the 'Product Knowledge' and the 'Alert Context' tab on Alert Properties view for more information.

The event logs on the server showed the following errors:

Log Name: Lync Server

Source: LS Storage Service

Date: 9/7/2017 9:51:56 AM

Event ID: 32008

Task Category: (4006)

Level: Error

Keywords: Classic

User: N/A

Computer: SfBFE02.mycompany.com

Description:

Unexpected exception.

 

Message=Error: Path \\mycompany.com\skypeforbusinessfileshare\BDCFsData\3-WebServices-1\StorageService failed to be read for flushed data. Error details: System.IO.IOException: Element not found.

Attempting to access the file share from windows explorer would yield the following message:

Solution

Given this environment used a Windows Distributed File Share (DFS) for the Skype file share I assumed it was something to do with a DFS client issue.

Restarting the Front End Server would correct the problem, however this is not always practical in the middle of the working day.

After researching this a bit further, I found you could flush the DFS client cache using the following cmd:

PS C:\Windows\system32> .\dfsutil.exe cache referral flush

 

DfsUtil command completed successfully.

PS C:\Windows\system32>

 

Note: Skype for Business Front End servers typically don’t have the DFS tools so you will need to install them to use this command. The installation of the DFS tools does not require a reboot. You can do this using the following PowerShell cmdlet

Add-WindowsFeature -Name "RSAT-DFS-Mgmt-Con"

 

After running this and checking Windows Explorer the file share was once again accessible. While this does not address the root cause it will correct the issue and save you from rebooting the server. If this continues to be a problem I’ve advised the client open a PSS ticket to troubleshoot further. Will update this post if the root cause if found.