News

Microsoft Enables PowerShell To Manage Lync Online Remotely

• By Kurt Mackie
• August 22, 2013

Microsoft this week released the Windows PowerShell Module for Lync Online, which enables remote management of Microsoft's hosted Lync unified messaging solution offered through Office 365.

PowerShell uses a command line interface. While IT pros can use the graphical user interface (GUI)-based Office 365 admin center to control Lync Online, PowerShell scripting represents a way to set policies for multiple users without having to repeat the commands, as might be the case with the GUI.

PowerShell can access some commands that aren't built into the GUI, according to an announcement by Tim Woo, a Microsoft technical product manager. With the module in place, it's possible to manage both Lync Online and Exchange via PowerShell, he noted. A combination of Lync Online cmdlets and Exchange Online cmdlets can be used. The PowerShell solution even works with hybrid deployments that tap both Lync Server 2013 and Lync Online.

Woo offered a short list of some of the commands that are only available through the command line interface of PowerShell, as follows:

• "Managing Exchange Unified Messaging and hosted voicemail policies
• "Managing meeting room endpoint devices with a Microsoft Exchange Server 2013 resource mailbox
• "Granting client inband policies using pre-created policy instances"

In addition, Woo noted that IT pros can use PowerShell manage push notifications that get sent to mobile devices via Lync Online. It's mostly a matter of personal choice on which interface to use, he noted, but PowerShell scripting comes in handy for those repeatable tasks.

PowerShell for Lync Online has a number of specific requirements. It only runs on 64-bit computers using Microsoft's newer Windows operating systems, as described in this TechNet library article. It's dependent on having PowerShell 3.0 installed, as well as the Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant for IT Professionals RTW.

In addition to adding Lync Online PowerShell support, Microsoft announced earlier this month that it has enabled SQL clustering support for Lync Server 2013. Two-node failover clustering is supported on Standard editions of SQL Server 2012 or SQL Server 2008 R2. The Enterprise editions of those systems support up to 16-node failover clustering.