One of These Things is Not Like the Others: Challenge 17: Answer

As you all know, nothing lasts forever.

Note. Well, except for bank accounts. One of the authors of the Lync Server PowerShell blog once closed a bank account, and was given a receipt that showed that the account was officially closed. A few months later, he got a bill in the mail for having not maintained a minimum balance in that account. (Which, in his defense, was not a high priority for him, seeing as how the account was closed.) He went in, got the matter straightened out, closed the account yet again, and was given another receipt that showed that this account was now officially closed. A few months later, he got a bill in the mail for having not maintained a minimum balance in that account.

Etc., etc.

At any rate, the point is that – with the possible exception of bank accounts – nothing lasts forever. Among other things, that means that, someday, the Lync Server PowerShell One of These Things is Not Like the Others challenge will come to an end. And when it does, the first thing we're going to do is ask all of you the following question: how in the world did you guys manage to go about solving the challenge week after week?

Take challenge No. 17, for example. In that challenge, we showed you the following four Lync Server PowerShell parameters, and asked you which of those four parameters was not like the others:

We knew that people would come up with all sorts of clever solutions to the challenge but, to be honest, we didn't expect too many people to hit upon the solution we originally had in mind. If we were going to offer a solution to this challenge, we should have picked the DisablePoorNetworkWarnings parameter. Why? Because it's the only one of the four parameters that did not have a Group Policy equivalent in Office Communications Server 2007 R2. In Office Communications Server, there were Group Policy settings for managing calendar presence, the display of free/busy information, and the use of rich text in instant messages. But poor network warnings? There wasn't a Group Policy setting for poor network warnings.

As we should have known, however, a whole bunch of people hit upon that very same answer. For example, Tom A. picked DisablePoorNetworkWarnings, noting that the parameter "… has no 2007 R2 policy equivalent, as there was no direct equivalent in MOC." Likewise, Aleksandar N. pointed out that "Set-CsClientPolicy.DisablePoorNetworkWarnings parameter is not like the other. It doesn’t have the equivalent Office Communications Server 2007 R2 Group Policy setting." The list goes on and on and on.

How in the world are you guys able to figure this stuff out?

True story. There have been times, when we sat down to write up one of these solutions, where we had to sit there for a while and think about what the answer to the question actually is. And we're the ones who wrote the question in the first place.

We should also mention that both Ella W. and Ramkumar R. came up with another, equally-valid answer. Both of them picked Disable-RTFIM. Why? Well, as Ella noted, "Set-CsClientPolicy.DisableRTFIM is different because if you want to set plain text you need to also set DisableHtmlIM to True." And she's right; to truly disable fancy formatting in instant messages you need to use a second parameter in addition to DisableRTFIM. The other parameters in the challenge worked entirely on their own: for example, if you want to disable poor network warnings then all you have to do is use the DisablePoorNetworkWarnings parameter. There's no need to tack on an additional parameter in order to suppress those warning messages.

Needless to say, we're impressed.

And, needless to say, there's yet another challenge waiting for you this week as well. We think that this week's challenge is a tricky one. But, then again, we also expect that you guys won't have very much trouble coming up with a solution. 

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