Administration

This section reviews common administration tasks for Lync Server. As mentioned previously, the focus is primarily on the use of the PowerShell-based Management Shell. The most common administrative function is enabling a user for Lync Server. For example, to enable the user Rand Morimoto with the SIP address of [email protected], you use the following command:

Enable-csUser –Identity "Rand Morimoto" –RegistrarPool
"cspool.companyabc.com" –SIPAddress "sip:[email protected]"

This example explicitly specifies the SIP address to be used. Lync Server can also automatically generate the address using the SIPAddressType parameter based on a number of options including first.last name (firstLastName), email address (emailaddress), UPN (userPrincipalName), and SAM account name (SAMAccountName). This is helpful when enabling a large number of users and when specifying the actual SIP address isn’t practical. To enable a user with a SIP address that is his email address, use the following cmdlet syntax:

Enable-csuser –Identity <user Identity> -RegistrarPool <front end
pool FQDN> -SIPAddressType EmailAddress

Obviously, enabling a user can also be done in the Lync Server Control Panel. However, it’s often faster to simply use the management shell.

Let’s look at a more traditional PowerShell concept applied to Lync Server: the Get-CsUser and Get-CsAdUser cmdlets. On the surface, you might think these cmdlets are almost identical; however, that is not the case. They are actually different. The biggest difference is that Get-CsUser returns results only for Lync Server–enabled users. So, if users are currently enabled or the Identity parameter is specified to be a nonenabled user, the cmdlet won’t return any data. Get-CsAdUser returns data for both enabled and nonenabled users.

That leads to the question, “Why not use Get-CsAdUser all the time?” The answer is the cmdlets return different information when used appropriately. Table 5.2 displays the attributes returned by each. As you can see, Get-CsAdUser returns general Active Directory information, whereas Get-CsUser returns Lync Server-specific information. There is a small bit of overlap, but only where Lync Server references a generic Active Directory field.

Table 5.2 Information Returned by Get-CsUser and Get-CsAdUser Cmdlets

There are many similar cmdlet relationships in the Management Shell. In fact, you can write a book to explain the various cmdlets, their syntaxes, and how to link them together to accomplish different tasks.