If you have previously established direct federation connections between OCS and many federated partners that you explicitly allow, the thought of having to manually re-enter these federation settings [...]]]> During the edge migration stage of an OCS to Lync migration, you will likely need to re-establish existing OCS federated partner settings on the new Lync Edge pool.

If you have previously established direct federation connections between OCS and many federated partners that you explicitly allow, the thought of having to manually re-enter these federation settings in Lync isn’t very appealing.

Whenever a lot of manual administration is required, PowerShell comes to mind. Indeed, in this case it can be used to ease the pain of having to manually retype the federated partner domain, and optionally, the associated edge server FQDN.

In this post I provide a small PowerShell script that you can run on your OCS 2007 R2 Edge server that can be used to export your existing federated partner settings in the format of another PowerShell script that can be run to re-import those settings into Lync.

Caveat – your existing OCS partner federation settings could differ slightly. It is important to understand what this script is doing (it is straightforward) and tweak it to your configuration.

The following script runs on the OCS 2007 R2 edge and utilizes WMI – specifically the OCS 2007 R2 MSFT_SIPFederationPartnerTable class – to export a list of the federated partner domains:

Get-WmiObject -class MSFT_SIPFederationPartnerTable | ForEach-Object

{

   $domain = [System.String]$_.Domain

   $edgeProxy = [System.String]$_.EdgeProxyAddress

   if ($edgeProxy -eq "")

   {

      write-output "New-CsAllowedDomain -Identity `"$domain`" -MarkForMonitoring `$True"

   }

   else

   {

       write-output "New-CsAllowedDomain -Identity `"$domain`" -ProxyFqdn `"$edgeProxy`" -MarkForMonitoring `$True"

   }

}

Save the above script to a PowerShell .ps1 file (e.g. EdgeFed.ps1). To run it in Powershell you will likely first need to set the ExecutionPolicy to allow scripts to run:

> Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

Invoking this script on the OCS Edge server (e.g. run “.\EdgeFed.ps1” in a PowerShell command window) will produce output similar to the following:

New-CsAllowedDomain -Identity "contoso.com" -MarkForMonitoring $True

New-CsAllowedDomain -Identity "fabrikam.com" -ProxyFqdn "im.fabrikam.com" -MarkForMonitoring $True

.

.

The script exports each federated partner setting and formats it into a Lync PowerShell “New-CsAllowedDomain” cmdlet which will add the partner as a new allowed federated domain in Lync.

Pipe the output of this script to another .ps1 file that can used on your Lync Edge (i.e. run “.\EdgeFed.ps1 > LyncFedSettings.ps1”).

To import the allowed federated partners into Lync, put the output file (e.g. LyncFedSettings.ps1) on your Lync Front-End or Edge server and run it in the Lync Management Shell.

You can see the new federated partner allow list with the Get-CsAllowedDomain cmdlet, or in the Lync Control Panel (External User Access | Federated Domains).

If your OCS federated partner settings differ from the explicit allow list method, and you need an automated solution, take a look at the WMI Classes for Office Communications Server. There is probably a WMI class that exposes these settings and can be scripted, and you can just modify the script above.

Addition OCS to Lync Migration Articles

• Microsoft TechNet – Migration from Office Communications Server 2007 R2 to Lync Server 2010
• InsideOCS – Lync & OCS Migration Top 10
• InsideOCS – Quick Tip – External Contacts with Lync Coexistence

Everything worked as planned except the [...]]]> I was involved in a recent Lync migration where a new Lync pool was deployed side-by-side with an OCS 2007 R2 pool. Several pilot users were moved to the new Lync pool and the OCS 2007 R2 edge server was still being used for external Lync and OCS user services.

Everything worked as planned except the Lync users on the new Lync pool were getting the infamous “Presence Unknown” for both Public IM (PIC) contacts and their Federated Contacts.

All the basics were checked – connectivity between the new Lync pool and the OCS 2007 R2 edge, certificates, etc…, and everything looked okay.

What solved the problem in the end was rebooting the OCS 2007 R2 edge server.  After the OCS edge server was rebooted, all of the PIC and Federated contacts for the new Lync pool users started to work.  I am not sure exactly what effect rebooting the edge had, but wanted to pass it along in case it helped someone else.

You can download it here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=17500.  It is just over 18 Mb.

The list of issues it addresses can be found in KB article 2559123: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2559123.