Haiku #84

The meeting will start

In ten minutes. Please wait in

The lobby till then.

Welcome back to the daily Lync Server PowerShell haiku. About all we can say today is this: thank God it's Friday!

Really? Thursday, huh? Oh, brother. It's been a long week ….

But it's also been a week filled with fun and excitement, we hasten to add. For example, not content to be one of the world's foremost practitioners of the ancient art of Lync Server PowerShell haikus, the author of today's haiku has also been busy learning everything there is to know about monitoring and Monitoring Server. Could that mean that, sometime in the near future, we'll be seeing a daily Monitoring Server haiku? Let's see:

Jitter. Lost packets.

Degradation. Delay. That's

Me, not Lync Server.

Well, never mind. We're not convinced that the world is clamoring for a daily Monitoring Server haiku. (Unlike the huge demand out there for a daily Lync Server PowerShell haiku.)

Speaking of which, did we even write a daily Lync Server PowerShell haiku today? We did? OK, in that case, we should probably try to explain that haiku.

Note. Good point: is there any explanation for a daily Lync Server PowerShell haiku?

Today's haiku is all about the CsMeetingConfiguration cmdlets: Get-CsMeetingConfiguration, New-CsMeetingConfiguration, Remove-CsMeetingConfiguration, and Set-CsMeetingConfiguration. The CsMeetingConfiguration cmdlets enable you to configure meeting settings. (That's the kind of insight that only a highly-trained and highly-skilled technical writer such as the author of today's haiku can provide.) What kind of meeting configuration settings? Well, here are some of our favorites:

Parameter Name	Description
AdmitAnonymousUsersByDefault	Determines whether meetings will, by default, allow attendance by anonymous users. (An anonymous user is simply an unauthenticated user which, in turn, is typically someone who joins the meeting over the Internet or without otherwise logging on to the corporate network.)
AssignedConferenceTypeByDefault	Determines whether new meetings will be configured, by default, as public meetings. A public meeting is a meeting that uses the same conference ID over and over again. There's obviously value in that: all your meetings will have the same ID, meaning that a user who has lost this week's invite (but still has last week's invitation) can still join the meeting. That's the advantage of a public meeting. The disadvantages? Well, for one thing, suppose you schedule back-to-back meetings, and the first meeting runs a little over its scheduled end time. While that meeting continues on, participants in the second meeting are suddenly showing up; that's because the two meetings have the same conference ID. It's very easy to get the wrong people into the wrong meeting. This also makes it difficult to go back and access meeting resources. For example, suppose you upload a PowerPoint presentation to a public meeting. A few weeks (and a few meetings) later, you need to take a look at the presentation. Because all the meetings share the same ID, that means all the meeting resources get lumped together. That can make it difficult to track the PowerPoint file you need to look at. So then what's a private meeting? Well, a private meeting is a meeting that is given a unique conference ID, an ID that is never reused. That means there won't be any conference ID collisions, and there won't be any confusion over which resources belong to which meeting.
DesignateAsPresenter	Indicates which users (besides the meeting organizer) are automatically designated as presenters when they join a meeting. You can set DesignateAsPresenter to any of the following values: None; Company; and Everyone. By default, DesignateAsPresenter is set to Company; that means that anyone from your organization that joins a meeting will automatically be tabbed a presenter. If you aren't comfortable with that, well, that's fine: just set this value to None. Note that this refers only to the default value. Regardless of this setting, a meeting organizer can still make anyone (or everyone) a presenter, if they so desire.
PstnCallersBypassLobby	Indicates whether users dialing in using a PSTN phone (like a landline or a cell phone or pretty much anything that isn't a Voice over IP phone) should automatically be admitted to a meeting. If this value is set to False, dial-in users won't automatically join a meeting; instead, they'll be routed to the conference lobby. What do they do in the lobby? Nothing; they simply wait on hold until a conference presenter grants them access to the meeting. (Inside Microsoft Lync, you'll see a message that there are people in the lobby who are waiting to be admitted.)

Pretty exciting, huh? Meeting configuration settings can be assigned to either the global scope or the site scope. That means that if you want all PSTN callers to all your meetings to start off in the lobby all you have to do is run a command like this one:

Set-CsMeetingConfiguration –Identity global –PstnCallersByPassLobby $False

Nothing too complicated there. Ah, but suppose you don’t want to use the lobby for meetings scheduled by users in your Redmond site. That's fine; like we said, meeting configuration settings can be assigned to either the global scope or the site scope. This command uses the New-CsMeetingConfiguration cmdlet to create a custom collection of meeting settings for the Redmond site and, at the same time, sets the value of the PstnCallersBypassLobby property to True:

New-CsMeetingConfiguration –Identity "site:Redmond" –PstnCallersByPassLobby $True

That's really all there is to it. If you later change your mind and decide you don't need custom settings for the Redmond site, well, just use the Remove-CsMeetingConfiguration cmdlet to delete those settings:

Remove-CsMeetingConfiguration –Identity "site:Redmond"

Etc., etc.

Not bad, huh? We'll see you again tomorrow, when we truly can say, "TGIF!"

Note. Sorry; as it turns out, TGIF is short for "Tactical Ground Intercept Facility." What we should have said is this: "Thank God it's Friday" (or, if you prefer, “Thank Goodness it’s Friday”). We apologize for any misunderstanding this may have caused.

Hey, it's been a long week ….