Making Lync 2013 work on your Android tablet?

Before I begin, the method described in this post is in no way supported by any of the vendors involved, and should you choose to do so anyway, you do it on your own risk.

During Easter, the Lync 2013 client got released for the Android market as well, bringing the client to virtually all platforms. By the looks of the tweets on the subject, people are quite happy about the client and how it works.

But as rumored, it seems like the Lync client was only released for phone models, and not tablets. Not my tablet, anyways. I do not know if there will be a version for tablets, like the one they made for iPad, but I do know I want my Tablet to run Lync 2013.

Here is a description of how to make the phone client run on a Samsung Galaxy Tab, with Android 4.0.1 running ( I have no idea if this will work on other tablets or versions, so please let us know if it does!!).

Step 1 - Make sure you are able to install "insecure" packages (meaning not from the store)

Step 2 - copy the package from a working phone, or grab  it from this link:

Step 3 - Once downloaded, start the installation manually.

Step 4 - Configure your options as with all the client installations, Phone number, WiFi requirements and so on.

Step 5 - ENJOY!

As you can see from the following screen shots, things works just as they would have on any Phone Device (or at least I have not been able to find any major faults yet).

My status:

Search for users and presence (presence took some time to update at first):

Meetings: 

One thing about online meetings: You might have some issues starting a meeting from the meeting page. When I clicked the link, and selected my default browser, it did not recognize my Lync client and failed.

But if You set the client to use the native Internet application, it all worked as a charm!

There is nothing much to it, use it at own risk. But I am currently enjoying audio and video calls to my colleagues from my Android Tablet now, as well as presence and audio calls to my Skype contacts. 

Downside of this client:

You can't see shared content, and the video is scaled for smaller devices.

I can only hope for a proper release for Android tablets in the future. Why should the Android guys not be able to enjoy the same features as the iPad users?

An update to the Lync 2013 Enterprise Backup script

I have now updated the Backup script for Lync 2013 Enterprise to support a topology with a mirrored back-end server (SQL). The script is tested on systems with and without a mirror configuration.

Also, the script is updated to take backup of the persistent chat server. If none is deployed in your topology, either ignore the error message, or REM out that part of the script.

Thanks to Dino Caputo for alerting about the error in my script!!

The script can be found right here, and the other links are all updated.

A new update to "Assigned Numbers Script"

Thanks to some bug reports on the original post, I have now edited the Assigned Numbers script.

Hopefully, it will now give you a correct output of users with a lineURI.

I used this as an excuse to clean up the script, and sign it, so it can be run directly in your lab without interaction.

I have also tested and verified it in a Lync 2013 setup

The script has been moved to a new location, and can be found here

Signing scripts, from now on

During the Lyncconf13, I was lucky enough to win a certificate from digicert in give away competition from the The UC Architects. It didn't take long to decide what to do with the gift. I decided to get a code signing certificate for my online scripts.

Now, you should be able to run the scripts directly by downloading them to your labs, without tampering with the script, it's security settings or your power shell security setting.

A benefit for me, is to see if the script has been tampered with if it does not work on a tested system. I decided to sign all my backup scripts, and I will also sign every new script I post on my blog.

As a side note: I was wondering if signing a lot of certificates was going to take a long time. I turned to power shell  and scripted it. What else "could" I do? It turned out to be quite easy, and done in a few minutes (writing the code, signing took seconds)

param ([Parameter(Mandatory=$true)][string]$folder,[string]$certvalue)

cd $folder

$cert = @(gci cert:\currentuser\my -codesigning)[$certvalue]
foreach ($scripts in (Get-ChildItem)){
Set-AuthenticodeSignature $scripts $cert}

All my backup scripts have been updated, so if you download these scripts now, they will be signed. (If your machine trusts Digicert, you should be in good shape.)

Here are two posts I used as reference:
http://technet.microsoft.com/nb-no/magazine/2008.04.powershell(en-us).aspx
http://tfl09.blogspot.no/2010/06/signing-powershell-scripts.html

Backup your Lync Enterprise 2013 Server to one zip file

As an architect, I will always try to convince customers to use the HA/DR (High Availability / Disaster Recovery) features built into Lync Server 2013. Still, there are those who for different reasons chooses not to install a fully HR/DR deployment (cost could be one of them). And for these customers, a sound backup is the only safety-net when it comes to DR. This is one of the reasons I have chosen to adapt the Lync 2010 backup script to Lync 2013.

Another good reason for this backup script, is for me as a consultant to make one real snap shot of how I left the deployment after completing a Lync project. If things go bad after a while, it is always good to have a reference of how things were when I left. I consider this backup as my own deep level documentation.

There is not much new in this script, except the changes made for 2013, as I posted back in http://tech.rundtomrundt.com/2012/09/back-up-your-lync-2013-preview-standard.html.

The new changes to look out for are these:

Transcript and Log:
As the output of this script is to much for most Powershell Console buffers, and it might be hard to spot thos errors, I have enabled a transcript of the entire session to a logfile. The location of this is a the root of c:\

#################################################################
#
# Logging how it's implemented, these lines are found throughout the script
#
#################################################################
$date = "{0:yyyy_MM_dd-HH_mm}" -f (get-date)
$logfile = "c:\Backup_run_" + $date +".log"
Start-Transcript -Path $logfile -Append

# All commands are run with -verbose to capture information

Write-Output ("Finished at: " + (Get-Date -format  yyyy-MM-dd-HH:mm:ss) + "A logfile has been created as " + $logfile);
Stop-Transcript

File rights issue during Backup
If you have read my recent posts on backup, you might remember the SQL backup job actually run as the service account which SQL is running on the remote SQL database server. And this account needs access to the share and folder where you try to do your backup to. If you are doing this to a folder with the "wrong" permissions, the SQL backup will fail. In my previous script, I added a share before backing up. With this script, I am also setting ACL's to the folder where i want to create the backup.

#################################################################
#
# I ran into some file rights issues when backing up the SQL
# Setting ACL on the target forlder of the SQL Backup
# Should not impose any security threat, as the share is removed in the end
#
#################################################################

$Acl = Get-Acl $filepath3
$Ar = New-Object  system.security.accesscontrol.filesystemaccessrule("Everyone","FullControl","ContainerInherit, ObjectInherit", "None","Allow")
$Acl.SetAccessRule($Ar)
Set-Acl $filepath3 $Acl

Toplology backup
I have also added a line to ensure you have a xml file which can be imported to a topology builder.

#################################################################
#
# Creating a backup of your topology as an XML file
#
#################################################################

(Get-CsTopology -AsXml).ToString() > $backupfile12 

Here's a summary of things you should know before you run this in your own lab:

- This script is for a Enterprise Edition Server.
- The script has only been tested in single site topology. I suspect adjustments must be made for deployments with more than one site (If anyone would do so, or let me have access to such a deployment, please let me know)
- This script has been tested with a co location of all databeses. If you require it to backup your Monitoring/archiving databases from seperate SQL servers, you must add these sources to the script.
- The script should be able to run without any modification or input, unless you want to use other paths than I have entered.
- The script must be run on a server where Lync PS is available.
- If the script must be run in a PS3 environment, and will load all nessecary modules automatically
- My script creates a directory C:\lyncbackup\, this may be edited if you like.
- Certificates will only be backed up if you allowed for this when requesting and creating certificates.
- Certificate backup is only done on the machine where the script is run
- The creation of the zipfile can take a while. The script finishes before the zipfile is finished (If anyone know how to wait for this task before quitting the script, please let me know).
- I highly recommend you test the script in your Lab, before running in your production environment

That's all for now. A copy of the script can be found here: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/22417188/Lync%20scripts/Backupscript%20-%20Enterprise%20EDT%20v2%20%28Lync%202013%29.ps1

As always, I appreciate comments and feedback :)