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...

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 ;)