11th MVP Award Rewarded

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...

More additions to the Backup-SfB script

The Backup-SfB script was just released, and keen eyes might have noticed the version 4.00 has been updated to 4.00 C by the time of the release.
I had several beta testers run the 4.00 release, and most of them ran it without too many comments. But I received two important requests:

  1. Please try to minimize error output from the script
  2. I don't know how to capture certain devices.
So here are the three minor, yet important changes to the script

Backup Common Area and Analog Devices
This request was simple enough: Neither the user nor the db backups hold any information on Common area phones or Analog devices. That's why the "backup-basics" function now will run get-cscommonarephone and get-csanalogphones and pipe it to a couple of csv files in the bakcup directory. 
From these files, it should be easy enough to import the information required back into SfB upon restore through a script.

CS Announcements
Although this information is present in the CMS configuration, I was asked if not this could be added as a standalone extra in the same way as the polices and voice settings are.
As it only took two lines of code, I decided it was a good idea to do so.
Included in the bakup are now two new files. A list of unassigned number ranges, and a list of cs announcements (The voice prompts should already be a part of the file backup)

Error handling
Error handling isn't my strongest powershell skill. After all, I'm only a UC techie trying to learn this stuff. But I have been requested on several occasions to quiet down the blood red text in the output of the script. In order to do so, I have now set the default error and warning handling to -silentlycontinue, unless you use the -DebugSQL switch.

I have tried to capture any missing backup files we would expect, so please read the transcript for errors. And then run the script again, with the -debugsql switch to capture the real error.