Haiku #42

Your coldness fogs the

Mirror of my soul yet a

Faint image remains.

If you're wondering how in the world we're going to tie today's haiku into something related to Lync Server PowerShell, we have to level with you: we have no idea how we're going to do that. So then why start things off with such a weird haiku? Well, the truth is, we've suddenly found ourselves under a lot of pressure here. This will come as a shock to most of you, but we aren't really haiku writers after all. (!) Instead, we've just been using haikus as a gimmick to attract attention to the Lync Server PowerShell cmdlets. A little dishonest? Well, maybe. But we figured that we could get by with faking it just as long as we didn't have any real haiku writers among our regular readers.

But now, disaster has struck! Apparently we have a new follower on our Twitter account (@cspshell) who actually enjoys and knows something about haikus. If word gets out that we don't know the first thing about haikus, well, we'll end up being the laughingstock of the haiku world.

Note. Would that really be all that bad? Look at it this way: we're already the laughingstock of the Lync Server world, the Windows PowerShell world, and the Lync Server PowerShell world. We really don't need to be the laughingstock of yet another world.

Which is why the author of today's haiku is also thinking about cancelling his gym membership.

So did we panic when we discovered that a real haiku person was now following the daily Lync Server PowerShell haiku? You bet we did. In fact, we immediately begin searching the Internet to find out what real haikus are like. We were hoping that most real haikus had something to do with either PowerShell or Lync Server, or – at the very least – were filled with lame jokes or vague references to television commercials. Unfortunately for us, however, most real haikus are similar to this one, written by Ilinca Bernea:

the starry night‘s peace

follows our destinies

like a magic lamp

Not a single word about PowerShell or Lync Server. Even worse, it's a pretty good haiku. Good grief, are the Lync Server PowerShell blog writers the only people who still write haikus the old-fashioned way: poorly?

There's just no respect for the traditional ways anymore.

Note. OK, that's not true, either. Traditional haikus are not written poorly; in fact they're written quite well. For example, consider Basho's Old Pond:

furuike ya

kawazu tobikomu

mizu no oto

Of course, that probably makes more sense if you can read Japanese. Nevertheless, even if you don't have any idea what that says it's still safe to say that we've never written anything that heartfelt and poetic.

Well, OK, with the possible exception of the help information for the Get-CsPstnUsage cmdlet. But other than that ….

Anyway, faced with an imminent deadline, and aware of the huge outcry that would arise if we failed to publish a haiku this morning, we decided to write something that vaguely resembled a real haiku, then try to figure out what to do with it later. And how will we handle this tomorrow? Oh, tomorrow we'll be back to our usual bumbling selves. We can't imagine anyone who really knows anything about haikus sticking around longer than that.

So what about today's Lync Server PowerShell angle? Well, we spent quite a bit of time searching through all the Lync Server PowerShell documentation, just in case there were any cmdlets that fogged the mirror of your soul. Turns out there wasn't.

Note. If that's something you'd like to see in future versions of Lync Server, just let us know.

Consequently, we decided to go with the CsVoicemailReroutingConfiguration cmdlets (Get-CsVoicemailReroutingConfiguration, New-CsVoicemailReroutingConfiguration, Remove-CsVoicemailReroutingConfiguration, and Set-CsVoicemailReroutingConfiguration). As near as we can tell, none of these cmdlets fog the mirror of your soul. On the other hand, there's no way we could ever fit CsVoicemailReroutingConfiguration into a haiku anyway, so we decided to dispense with those cmdlets while we had the chance.

So if the CsVoicemailReroutingConfiguration cmdlets don't fog up the mirror of your soul then what do they do? To explain what the CsVoicemailReroutingConfiguration cmdlets do let's take a minute to talk about Lync Server Auto Attendant and Subscriber Access, two features of Exchange Unified Messaging (aka Exchange UM). Auto Attendant provides voice recognition and touch-tone control (alias dual-tone multifrequency, alias DTMF) for outside callers to use in order to navigate a phone system to reach the desired party. You can also run Auto Attendant in "message taking mode," in which case the service won't transfer calls but will only take messages. (That, by the way, is something you do on the Exchange Server, not via Lync Server.)

Note. Message Taking mode is also known as Lync PowerShell Blog Writers mode, because the service attempts to do as little work as it can possibly get away with.

And what about Subscriber Access? Well, Subscriber Access allows internal users to access their Microsoft Outlook mailbox from a phone. The numbers provided by these settings also allow callers to leave voice mail messages for Enterprise Voice users, and for Enterprise Voice users to retrieve voice mail even if the IP connectivity from the Lync Server 2010 deployment at a remote site to Exchange UM in the data center is unavailable.

As for the CsVoicemailReroutingConfiguration cmdlets, well, they provide PSTN (public switched telephone network) phone numbers associated with Auto Attendant and Subscriber Access. Why do you need to do that? The primary case would be this one: IP connectivity from Microsoft Lync Server 2010 in the branch site to the Exchange UM Server located in the data center is not available. If that should happen, calls to Auto Attendant and Subscriber Access can be rerouted to the PSTN phone number. In turn, that means that service will not be interrupted even though the network connection is down.

Note. Yes, the CsVoicemailReroutingConfiguration cmdlets probably do deserve a better haiku. But a word to the wise: if you're looking for better haikus, well, you better keep looking.

Let's take a peek at the CsVoicemailReroutingConfiguration cmdlets in action. As it turns out, you can configure voicemail rerouting settings at either the global scope or the site scope. With that in mind, let's look at a command that creates a new collection of settings for the Redmond site, enables those settings, and, just for the heck of it, assigns an Auto Attendant phone number:

New-CsVoicemailReroutingConfiguration -Identity site:Redmond -Enabled $True -AutoAttendantNumber "+14255551212"

And what if, at some later date, you decide you don't want separate voicemail rerouting settings at the Redmond site? That's fine. After all, if you want you can always disable those settings simply by using Set-CsVoicemailReroutingConfiguration to set the Enabled property to $False:

Set-CsVoicemailReroutingConfiguration -Identity site:Redmond -Enabled $False

Or, if you prefer, just use Remove-CsVoicemailReroutingConfiguration to get rid of those settings altogether:

Remove-CsVoicemailReroutingConfiguration -Identity site:Redmond

That's all we have time for today; we need to start figuring out our haiku for tomorrow. Let's just hope that, between now and then, no one who fancies themselves an opera aficionado starts following us on Twitter. (Although you have to admit, The CsTrustedApplicationEndpoint of Seville has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?)