11th MVP Award Rewarded

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I am actually on vacation, but as I sit here under the summer sun, toes in the pool and a cold drink within reach, I have been waiting for that email confirming that I’ve been awarded my 11th Microsoft MVP Award! As last year, I am being awarded in both the Teams and Copilot category. To say I’m humbled would be an understatement. Being part of the global Microsoft MVP community for over a decade now has been an incredible journey, filled with learning, sharing, speaking, and connecting with passionate technologists from every corner of the world. What is the Microsoft MVP Award? The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award is given to technology experts who share their knowledge and real-world expertise with communities. With fewer than 4,000 MVPs worldwide, it’s an honor to be part of such a vibrant and dedicated group. MVPs contribute through speaking engagements, writing, open-source contributions, and helping others online and offline. You can learn more about the progra...

Enable or edit Lync users based on AdGroupMembership

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In my previous blogposts on Lync user management using PowerShell, I have demonstrated how you can edit  by using an OU search string, or import a csv file. I thought maybe it would be nice to show how to add/manage Lync users by searching for a AD Group. It might be a bit tricky, but it is possible.

I have created a tiny script to prompt the admin for the group name, find users within that group, enable them for Lync and finally enabling the user for Enterprise voice (Presuming the phone attribute in AD is populated in the correct E.164 format, or the script might need adjustment) and setting a specific policy (just because I can, not because I have to).

Something worth mentioning, the set-csuser doesn't seem to like being pipelined to, which is why the get-adgroup is run twice.

The first part of the script is not doing anything, it's just a reminder to import the ad module. The first thing you have to do, is to enter the ADGroup Name (the display name of the group).


When the ADGroup is known to the script, we move on to enabling those users for Lync (skip this part if they are already enabled, but you want to edit users). This is quite straight forward.


But I'm not done yet. I also want to enable the user for voice, and grant him a client policy (These are just examples. Your imagination of PS command combinations is your only limitation).

Doing all I wanted to gave me an unexpected problem. As it turns out, the "get-adgroupmember" will not return the phone property of the user, and it became a challenge to figure out a way to get that property. That is why there are two foreach statements with in this last section. After we get hold of the adgroupmemner name, we can run the get-csaduser with that name (A bit dirty? I know, but it works).


As you can see, the script is fetching the $_.phone attrib of the user, and uses it to create the LineURI after adding the "tel:" prefix.

If you want to take a closer look at the actual script, it can be found right here. Have fun playing with it :)