Lync Powershell Cmdlets Mindmaps

The guys at the Technet Blog describe a great aid to those of us struggling through the hundreds of Lync Powershell Cmdlets. Tom Arbuthnot has developed a Flash based online interactive application that groups the cmdlets by category and verb. Tom's article is available here and there are mindmaps with category and verb views.

 

 

 

 

Lync Cmdlets by Category

Lync Cmdlets by Verb

Copying Lync Server Policies

An interesting article on Technet that describes a method to copy Lync policies. It's upsupported but could be very useful to create a number of similar policies for an installation. It uses Powershell to export the policy to an XML file which can be edited before importing the modified file to create a new policy.

Testing Lync with Synthetic Transactions

One of the advancements in Lync over the previous Microsoft OCS product is the use of Powershell as the basis for configuration and administration. Microsoft has included a number of synthetic transactions cmdlets that can be used to test that Lync is functioning correctly.

To see the full list of test cmdlets available, get-command test-cs


 

Test-CsAddressBookService

Test-CsAddressBookWebQuery

Test-CsAVConference

Test-CsCertificateConfiguration

Test-CsClientAuth

Test-CsComputer

Test-CsDialInConferencing

Test-CsDialPlan

Test-CsFederatedPartner

Test-CsGroupExpansion

Test-CsGroupIM

Test-CsIM

Test-CsKerberosAccountAssignment

Test-CsLisCivicAddress

Test-CsLisConfiguration

Test-CsLocationPolicy

Test-CsOUPermission

Test-CsP2PAV

Test-CsPhoneBootstrap

Test-CsPresence

Test-CsPstnOutboundCall

Test-CsPstnPeerToPeerCall

Test-CsRegistration

Test-CsSetupPermission

Test-CsTopology

Test-CsTrunkConfiguration

Test-CsVoiceNormalizationRule

Test-CsVoicePolicy

Test-CsVoiceRoute

Test-CsVoiceTestConfiguration

Test-CsVoiceUser

Test-CsWebApp

Test-CsWebAppAnonymous

 
Most of these cmdlets require one or two SIP registered users to be provided as parameters. To set up the test users and register them as health registrars, the guys at Technet have published a script to create the required users and register them with Lync as test accounts and Registrars for health monitoring.

A simple test of IM can be run with Test-CSIm poolFQDN

Test-CSIm lync.contoso.com

TargetFqdn : lync.contoso.com Result : Success Latency : 00:00:02.5953597 Error : Diagnosis :

 
The individual tests can be scripted, scheduled and the results entered into the Event Log or sent to an administrator in an email.

To collect the result and print it to the screen –

$Test_result = test-csim lync.contoso.com $Test_result

 
To just access the Result property, use $Test_result.result which should print out Success or the result can be checked and an appropriate alert generated

$Test_result = test-csim lync.contoso.com $a = Test_result.TargetFQDN+ " "+Test_result.error if ($Test_result.Result -eq "Success") { "IM Working" write-eventlog -logname Application -source LyncTestApp -eventID 3000 -entrytype Information -message "LyncTestApp no problem detected." } Else { "IM Failed" write-eventlog -logname Application -source LyncTestApp -eventID 3001 -entrytype Information -message "LyncTestApp detected a problem. $a" }

 

Note: First you must register your app with new-eventlog -LogName Application -Source LyncTestApp