Haiku #49

You have been chosen;

Prepare to meet the future.

LegacyUser.

As you might recall, at the end of the classic movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the hero (Richard Dreyfuss) gets invited to join the aliens on their mother ship and go – well, the movie never does explain where they're going to go and what they're going to do when they get there. However, you know it's going to be wonderful and magical: the look on Richard Dreyfuss' face lets you know that he truly is one of the chosen ones.

Note. Of course, if we can believe the tales of people who claim to have been abducted by aliens, it's more likely that Richard Dreyfuss was poked, prodded, and probed against his will, then drugged up and rudely dumped off by the side of the road, with no idea where he was or how he got there.

Oh, wait, never mind: that's what happens when you join a college fraternity. Our apologies for the mistake.

You can understand why Richard Dreyfuss was so excited to board the aliens' mother ship. For one thing, the script told him that he had to board the aliens' mother ship. Equally important, though, is the fact that the mother ship was so cool, so dazzling, so enticing that there would be no way not to board the ship. Human willpower can only go so far. The Toyota Corolla is a nice little car, but once you've seen an alien spacecraft the only thing you can think is, "Man, I've got to trade in my Corolla and get me one of those!"

The same thing is true of Microsoft Lync 2010. Office Communicator is a great little product, but after you've seen Microsoft Lync, well, let's just say there's no comparison: Lync is so cool, so dazzling, so enticing that there's no way not to want it. Which introduces a problem for administrators: how can you seamlessly (and easily) move your users from Office Communicator to Microsoft Lync?

In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Richard Dreyfuss had to battle his way cross-country and elude hundreds of soldiers and government agents in order to reach the mother ship. We briefly considered using the same method to get people to move from Office Communicator to Lync. In the end, however, we decide to use the Move-CsLegacyUser cmdlet instead.

Move-CsLegacyUser has only one purpose in life: to migrate a user (or group of users) from Office Communications Server 2007 (or 2007 R2) to Microsoft Lync Server 2010. After you have Lync Server up and running, you can move a user by running a command as simple as this:

Move-CsLegacyUser –Identity "Ken Myer" –Target "atl-cs-001.litwareinc.com"

That's all you have to do. That command will move Ken Myer's account from Office Communications Server to Lync Server, homing that account on the Registrar pool atl-cs-001.litwareinc.com. It's not quite as exciting as eluding hundreds of soldiers and government agents, but it is a little bit faster and easier.

When called without any additional parameters, Move-CsLegacyUser will move not only Ken's account but also any policies or dial plans associated with that account. But there's a catch there: that assumes that you have already migrated those dial plans and policies to Lync Server. If you have, then Ken will automatically be assigned the migrated dial plan/policy when his account is moved.

But suppose you decided not to migrate Ken's dial plan; suppose you want to assign him a whole new dial plan after his account gets migrated. That's fine; Move-CsLegacyUser includes a number of optional parameters that tell the system to move the account, but to leave some things (like the dial plan) behind. For example:

Move-CsLegacyUser –Identity "Ken Myer" –Target "atl-cs-001.litwareinc.com" -ExcludeDialPlan

This command moves Ken Myer's user account, but does not reassign him his old voice policy. Instead, Ken will inherit the site dial plan for his new Lync Server site (if such a dial plan exists) or the global dial plan.

And, of course, after the account has been migrated you can go ahead and assign a per-user dial plan to Ken.

Here's a nifty little command: it takes all the users still homed on Office Communications Server and migrates each of them to Lync Server:

Get-CsUser –OnOfficeCommunicationServer" | Move-CsLegacyUser –Target "atl-cs-001.litwareinc.com"

The point being, of course, that you can move users en masse, and not have to move them one account at a time.

Note. En masse? Well, we're hoping it means "all together; as a group." However, seeing as how our French is even worse than our English (hard as that might be to believe) we can’t guarantee that's what it means.

One little catch here. Before you can run Move-CsLegacyUser, you must first install the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) Backward Compatibility interfaces package, something you can do by running OCSWMIBC.msi. (OCSWMIBC.msi can be found on the installation DVD in the Setup folder.) After installing the Compatibility interfaces package, Move-CsLegacyUser can then be called in order to move one or more user accounts from Communications Server 2007 R2 or Communications Server 2007 to Lync Server 2010.

Note. In case you're wondering, the WMI Backward Compatibility Package gives Lync Server the ability to read WMI-based data from Office Communications Server and then merge that information into your Lync topology.

And, of course, one bit of trivia before we go. The third kind in Close Encounters of the Third Kind refers to a scale created by the astronomer J. Allen Hynek. A close encounter of the first kind is simply seeing a UFO. A close encounter of the second kind is seeing both a UFO and the physical effects of that UFO (like crop circles). And a close encounter of the third kind? Seeing an actual alien himself. Or herself. Or itself.

You get the idea.

Hynek's original scale was published in 1972. Since that time, people have suggested additional levels:

· Fourth kind: alien abduction.

· Fifth kind: voluntary communication with the aliens.

· Sixth kind: an alien encounter that results in injury or death.

· Seventh kind: mating between humans and aliens. (That's what we said: yuck.)

There's also the lesser-known Close Encounter of the Eighth Kind, in which the aliens take one look at the human and decide to turn around and go home rather than deal with such inferior beings. How would the author of today's haiku know about that type of encounter? He'd rather not say.