Continuing my set of instructions for installing Lync Mobility. Here we cover setting up our servers. My previous post covers certificates & the reverse proxy, Part 2 (how to update your servers) and Part 1 (configuring DNS)

Overview of changes

  • Add two new DNS records – one internal, one external
    • Either A records or C-Names
  • Patch everything to Lync RTM CU4
  • Define the “Internal ports” used for mobile clients
  • Install mobility bits on Front-Ends & Directors
    • Enable Dynamic compression in IIS
  • Re-request certificates to support new mobile DNS names
  • Configure your reverse proxy
  • Configure push notifications
  • Test! (Kinda)

Configure push notification support

Push notification is supported for Apple devices and Windows Phone 7. Rather than your edge server directly sending notifications to either Apple or the WP7 notification services Microsoft have implemented quite a clever solution.

You need to setup a connection to Microsoft’s hosted Lync platform & then allow federation with Microsoft’s push notification service which then sends out the notifications to the Apple and WP7 services on your behalf.

Setting this up is a two stage process. If you haven’t setup federation with Lync online before running the following command from a Lync management shell:

New-CsHostingProvider –Identity “LyncOnline” –Enabled $True –ProxyFqdn “sipfed.online.lync.com” –VerificationLevel UseSourceVerification

Next allow federation to the push service:

New-CsAllowedDomain –Identity “push.lync.com”

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After allowing the change time to reach the edge server you can verify both settings by running the following:

Test-CsFederatedPartner –TargetFqdn <edge FQDN> –Domain push.lync.com –ProxyFqdn sipfed.online.lync.com

And

Test-CsMcxPushNotification –AccessEdgeFqdn <edgeFQDN>

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(push notifications at MS’s end weren’t running yet! Hence my error)

Enable push notifications for users buy running the following commands

Set-CsPushNotificationConfiguration –EnableApplePushNotificationService $True –EnableMicrosoftPushNotificationService $True

And

Set-CSAccessEdgeConfiguration -AllowFederatedUsers $True

Note there is a typo in the documentation they missed out the “CS” part of the command

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Testing

Until the mobile Lync clients get released you need to satisfy yourself by doing synthetic tests, luckily Microsoft provided a PowerShell command that lets you do this!

From a Lync management shell run the following:

Test-CsMcxP2PIM -TargetFqdn <FQDN of Front End pool> -SenderSipAddress sip:<SIP address of test user 1> -SenderCredential <test user 1 username> -ReceiverSipAddress sip:<SIP address of test user 2> -ReceiverCredential <test user 2 username> –v

When you run the command you’ll get two windows authentication boxes in which you can enter your sets of credentials

If you scroll the window back up a bit just before all the yellow text you should hopefully see a successful result & no reported errors!

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*Phew* that was a long set of things to post but I hope that was useful to a few of you Lync folk out there. If you’ve got any comments or questions please drop me a note in the box below. It might look complex but its not that bad really! Honest..

Ben.