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

Backup Skype for Business script is coming soon

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The release of Skype for Business Server for On-Premise is just around the corner, and as a preparation for the release, I am going through my Lync 2013 backup script and verifying the commands and version checking for SfB.

As I am upgrading the script for SfB, I am also introducing a couple of new features. Here is a sneak peak of what to expect in the new version.

Select you own password for Private Key protection
When the script is run, the previous version set the password of all certs to "secret". This is now a parameter which you may (and should) change. Simply run the script with the -CertPass option


Send an Email report after the script has been run
Although the script can be run manually, I usually configure a scheduled task to do it for me every (day, week, month or what you prefer). I have now added a function which will send you an email with a brief transcript of the backup. This requires an available SMTP server, and valid to/from addresses.

Running the script with the -SendEmailOnComplete switch trigges the required mandatory parameters: EmailFrom, EmailTo and SMTPServer


This will send an email looking like this to the desired mailbox


The attached log file should look like something like this. And I would like to highlight:
1) A notification regarding Log backup
2) A notification if there are Cs-Certificates in the store where priv-key is not exportable



A shortcut to more information
I have included a switch which should launch your preferred browser and take you to my blog, and display the posts with the Backup-SfB tag. Use the -OnlineInfo to invoke

I have a working beta version of the Backup-SfB.ps1 in our own deployment, and awaiting some feedback from other beta testers. So please let me know what you think of these new features, and if there are others you would like to see in an upcoming release. The release will be announced at Ignite ;)