You could say that I’ve spent a few hours with Cloud PBX, but it wasn’t until I attended Doug Lawty’s session “ Understand the mysteries of Dial Plans and Voice Routes in Skype for Business” at Microsoft Ignite 2016. That a single slide on the default dial plans caught my eye (around the 15 minute mark).

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of being a guest speaker on The Skype Show ( http://www.theskypeshow.com/). This monthly online video web cast is the brainchild of a newly awarded Microsoft Office Servers and Services MVP Mark Vale, which is dedicated to the evangelism of unified communications. The Skype Show has been going strong for almost a year and has had many amazing guest speakers, kudos to Mark on all his hard work and gaining MVP status!

A few months ago my SIP address was changing and was looking for a way of exporting/importing my contact list. I wanted a solution to work no matter if the Lync/Skype for Business environment was on-premises, hosted or online.

Before we start, I highly recommend you first read Scott Stubberfield’s “Anonymous join from Skype for Business and Lync Clients” blog post: https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/scottstu/2015/04/03/anonymous-join-from-skype-for-business-and-lync-clients/

Now that you understand the anonymous join process, we’ll go into one scenario that I’ve been tracking since Lync Server 2013 RTM (almost 4 years…).
UPDATE Sept 17,2017: Issue resolved, see: Skype for Business Anonymous Join Success When meeting organizer is disabled for federation

As someone that lives and breathes Microsoft Unified Communications day in and day out, I get asked why would I attend Microsoft Ignite? Being an Office Servers and Service MVP (AKA Skype for Business MVP), I have an NDA with Microsoft and usually have a chance to preview items on or before being published to the public Roadmap ( https://fasttrack.microsoft.com/roadmap). Also I get the privilege to spend a week with the Microsoft Product group in November during the MVP Summit.

For me 2016 will be the year Juniper (specifically SRX) attacked Skype for Business desktop sharing. I figured it was time to document at least one of my battles.

During Microsoft Ignite it was mentioned that the Session Detail reports would start rolling out to Skype for Business Online tenants this week. As promised, Session Details (Preview) started lighting up under the Report section of the Skype for Business Online admin center.

Hopefully this blog post will help any others out there having an issue understanding what language is being used in the voice prompts and email transcriptions for Microsoft’s Office 365 Cloud PBX Voicemail (Azure Voicemail).

I’ve come across an interesting bug in the Admin Center Preview portal in-regards to the domain purpose changing without reason. This is further to my recent blog posting: Federation Fails with Office 365, which required disabling the Skype for Business domain purpose for domains using On-Premises or Third-Party hosted environments without hybrid configured to resolve federation issues.

While working with a Third-Party hosted Skype for Business environment leveraging Exchange Online for Email/Voicemail, I came across an issue where federation worked except with sip domains hosted in Office 365.