Celebrating 10 Years as a Microsoft MVP!

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Back from my vacation, I am thrilled to share that I have been awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award for the 10th consecutive year. In addition to being recognized as an expert within Teams, I am have also been recognized as an expert with Microsoft Copilot. This means a lot to me.  Being an MVP has been an incredibly rewarding journey, both personally and professionally. It has provided me with countless opportunities to grow, learn, and connect with like-minded professionals who share a passion for technology and innovation.  The award is not just a title; it's a testament to the hard work, dedication, and contributions to the tech community. It's a privilege to be part of such an esteemed group of individuals who share the same love for technology, and sharing their knowledge about it.  As I reflect on the past decade, I am thankful for the experiences and knowledge I've gained. This recognition motivates me to continue sharing my expertise, mentor

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 :)