Haiku #55

  • Article

You once were lost but

Now you're found. See why we asked

For your location?

The author of today's haiku has always had a soft spot in his heart for product disclaimers, those warning labels/pseudo-legal notices that accompany pretty much everything these days. For example, not too long ago he read a note from someone who bought a bag of peanuts and, before opening the bag, saw the following disclaimer:

CAUTION: This product was packaged in a facility that might have contained peanuts.

Whew; that was close. Likewise, Kia is currently running a commercial in which one of their cars is shanghaied by Poseidon (at least we think it's Poseidon; it might be one of the guys from ZZ Top); abducted by aliens; and sent back in time to a Mayan temple. If you read the fine print that accompanies the ad, you'll see the word "Do Not Attempt." But do not attempt what? Do not attempt to levitate a car if you are the Greek God of the Sea? Do not attempt to steal this car if you are an alien from outer space? We have to be blunt with you, Kia. The authors of the Lync Server PowerShell blog are Americans: if we want to send our car back in time to the Mayans, well, who are you to stop us?!?

Note. Here are a few more disclaimers, copied from the RinkWorks Web site:

· "Do not place this product into any electronic equipment." -- On the case of a chocolate CD in a gift basket.

· "Shin pads cannot protect any part of the body they do not cover." -- On a pair of shin guards made for bicyclists.

· "This product not intended for use as a dental drill." -- On an electric rotary tool.

· "Do not use near fire, flame, or sparks." -- On an "Aim-n-Flame" fireplace lighter.

· "This product is not to be used in bathrooms." -- On a Holmes bathroom heater.

· "Caution: Shoots rubber bands." -- On a product called "Rubber Band Shooter."

· "Warning: May contain small parts." -- On a Frisbee.

· "Do not recharge, put in backwards, or use." -- On a battery.

So what do disclaimers have to do with Microsoft Lync Server 2010? Well, believe it or not, there are at least two places in Lync Server where we allow you to write your very own disclaimer. (Although you'll never be able to top this one, found on a portable stroller: "Caution: Remove infant before folding for storage."). We've already discussed the conference disclaimer, which is shown to users who join a conference by clicking on a hyperlink. Today, we're going to discuss the Enhanced Emergency Services disclaimer.

Oh, and it’s accompanying Lync Server PowerShell cmdlets: Get-CsEnhancedEmergencyServiceDisclaimer, Remove-CsEnhancedEmergencyServiceDisclaimer, and Set-CsEnhancedEmergencyServiceDisclaimer.

As you probably know, Lync Server's Enhanced 9-1-1 feature (more commonly known as E9-1-1) makes it possible for Enterprise Voice users to dial 9-1-1 in an emergency; more importantly, it enables emergency responders to actually locate an Enterprise Voice user who dials 9-1-1 in an emergency. In order to do this, an organization create a "wiremap", a location map that uses such things as ports, subnets, switches, and wireless access points to help pinpoint a person's physical location. If you make a 9-1-1 call from, say, your office, emergency responders will be able to determine just exactly where you're calling from.

Of course, one of the advantages of Enterprise Voice is that you don't have to make phone calls from your office; you can make phone calls from pretty much anywhere. That's the good news. The bad news? Unless you have made a wiremap of the entire world, the system can't determine your location if you're calling from your backyard or a hotel room.

The solution to that problem is to ask each caller to manually enter their location any time they log on to the system and Lync Server cannot use the wiremap to determine their whereabouts. If you want to prompt users to manually enter their location, you must modify the appropriate location policy, something we won't discuss in any detail today. (For more information, see the help topic for the New-CsLocationPolicy cmdlet.) So what happens if you set the LocationRequired property of a location policy to Disclaimer? Funny you should ask:

If you set the LocationRequired property to Disclaimer, a dialog box will appear any time a user registers from an unknown location. That dialog box will ask the user to enter their location information. In addition, disclaimer text will appear that might tell the person the consequences of not providing a location. (The actual text of that disclaimer is up to you.) One consequence of not entering a location? You'll be allowed to make a 9-1-1 call, but you will not be allowed to call anyone else until you enter that location.

Of course, by now you might be a little concerned. Write your own disclaimer? How are you supposed to do that? And what happens if you write something like the following disclaimer, found on a chainsaw: "Do not attempt to stop the blade with your hand." What then?

Well, the first thing to do is to relax; the CsEnhancedEmergencyServiceDisclaimer cmdlets (Get-CsEnhancedEmergencyServiceDisclaimer, Set-CsEnhancedEmergencyServiceDisclaimer, Remove-CsEnhancedEmergencyServiceDisclaimer) make it easy to manage your organization's emergency disclaimer. (And yes, you can define only one global disclaimer for your entire organization. That makes this even easier to manage.) By default, you do not have an emergency disclaimer. (Well, technically you have one, it just doesn't have any text.) To create a disclaimer, just use a command similar to this one:

Set-CsEnhancedEmergencyServiceDisclaimer -Body "Warning: If you do not provide a location, emergency services may be delayed in reaching your location should you need to call for help."

Believe it or not, that's it. You have only one, global, disclaimer, so you don't need to provide an Identity. And the disclaimer itself has only a single property that needs setting: Body. What if you decide to change that disclaimer later on? That's fine; just use Set-CsEnhancedEmergencyServiceDisclaimer to overwrite the old disclaimer:

Set-CsEnhancedEmergencyServiceDisclaimer -Body "Warning: If you do not provide a location, then you will only be able to make 9-1-1 calls. You will not be able to make any other calls until you enter a location."

If you decide you'd rather not use a disclaimer at all, then just call Remove-CsEnhancedEmergencyServiceDisclaimer to delete all the disclaimer text:

Remove-CsEnhancedEmergencyServiceDisclaimer –Identity global

Note. Yes, in this case you do have to specify the Identity, even though there's only one possible disclaimer. Lync Server's Remove-Cs cmdlets almost always require you to specify the Identity.

And if you'd just like to review the text of your current disclaimer, well, that's what Get-CsEnhancedEmergencyServiceDisclaimer is for:

Get-CsEnhancedEmergencyServiceDisclaimer

Pretty easy. And pretty nice, too: it gives you the ability to offer at least some emergency support for your users regardless of where they might be calling from.

Which, come to think of it, is really nice.

See you Monday!

Note. You might have noticed that no disclaimer accompanies the daily Lync Server PowerShell haiku. Originally we were going to post the following notice at the beginning of each article: "CAUTION: Do not attempt to write your own Lync Server PowerShell haiku." But then we decided that maybe we didn't need to worry too much about that happening after all.