Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Archiving : Configuration

Open the Lync Server Control Panel, which can be found at https://<pool_FQDN>/Cscp/.

After the Lync Server Control Panel is open, click the Topology button in the left bar. Find the new Archiving server in the list or search for it using the search box at the top. Ensure that there is a green check mark for Service Status, as shown in Figure 1. This indicates the archiving service is running and responding.

Figure 1. Examining Archiving Service Status

Scroll down in the left bar and click the Monitoring and Archiving button. This brings up the settings menus for the Monitoring and Achiving Server roles. Because Call Detail Recording and Quality of Experience Data are Monitoring functions, skip directly to the Archiving Policy tab. Here, you see the default Global Policy. Select it and click Edit–—Show Details.

The available options are

• Name—The name of the policy

• Description—Your own notes to identify the policy

Along with two check boxes:

• Archive internal communications

• Archive external communications

By default, the check boxes for archiving internal and external communications are cleared. To enable archiving for these types of communications, check the boxes and click Commit in the upper area of the interface.

Archiving Configuration Tab

Now move to the Archiving Configuration tab. Again, you see the default Global Policy. Select it and click Edit—Show Details. The available options are

• Name—The name of the policy

• Archiving settings—Including three options in the drop-down list:

  • Disable archiving

  • Archive IM sessions

  • Archive IM and web conferencing sessions

Along with two check boxes:

• Block instant messaging (IM) or web conferencing sessions if archiving fails
  
  
• Enable purging of archiving data
  
  

If purging is enabled, there are two radio button options:

• Purge exported archiving data and stored archiving data after maximum duration (days)
  
  
• Purge exported archiving data only
  
  

If the “days” option is selected, the administrator has the option to define how many days the archived data is stored.

If any changes in this policy are made, be sure to click Commit in the upper portion of the interface.

Create Site and User Policies

In addition to modifying the default Global policy, administrators have the ability to create additional policies.

For a user policy, repeat steps 1 and 2 but choose User policy and follow these steps:

This results in the creation of multiple policies that can be used to manage archiving.

To apply a user-based Archiving Policy to a user, perform the following steps:

1.	From the Lync Server 2010 Control Panel, click Users in the left pane.
2.	Click Find in the search area to view the list of enabled users.
3.	Double-click the user you want to modify.
4.	Scroll down to Archiving Policy and choose the policy you want to apply from the drop-down list, as shown in Figure 2. Figure 2. Choosing Archiving Policy
5.	Click Commit.

Using PowerShell for Configuration Tasks

For administrators who prefer to do all their configuration tasks through PowerShell, Lync Server 2010 supports the capability to read and modify the archive policy and archive configuration through cmdlets:

Get-CsArchivingConfiguration
Identity                   :Global
EnableArchiving            :ImAndWebConf
EnablePurging        :True
PurgeExportedArchivesOnly:False
BlockOnArchiveFailure      :True
KeepArchivingDataForDays   :14

These cmdlets can be modified through Set-CsArchivingConfiguration. For example, the following cmdlet updates the archive retention period to 15 days.

Set-CsArchivingConfiguration –Identity Global –KeepArchivingDataForDays 15

For the policy, use Get-CsArchivingPolicy:

Identity                   :Global
Description          :
ArchiveInternal            :True
ArchiveExternal            :True

This cmdlet returns the same set of information for each policy that has been defined.

To modify a policy, use Set-CsArchivingPolicy as shown in the following example:

Set-CsArchivingPolicy –Identity Global –ArchiveExternal:$False

Using Cmdlets for Configuration Tasks

As one might logically expect, the policies and configurations can also be created through cmdlets, for example:

New-CsArchivingConfiguration –Identity "site:New York" –EnableArchiving
ImAndWebConf –EnablePurging:$True –PurgeExportedArchivesOnly:$False
–BlockOnArchiveFailure:$False –KeepArchivingDataForDays:21
–ArchiveDuplicateMessages:$False

Notice the last argument set in this command—ArchiveDuplicateMessages. This is a good example of where there are options available through the cmdlets that aren’t exposed to the GUI tools.

The power of using cmdlets to manage an application, such as Lync Server 2010, becomes readily evident when you are dealing with a large implementation. By scripting the configuration of the entire environment, you are able to eliminate the human error introduced by having a distributed group of people perform repetitive tasks. Similarly, the script written to perform the configuration immediately becomes the documentation of the configuration. If later changes need to occur, you can perform queries to find the objects and modify them at the same time. If you plan to manage the environment in this manner, it becomes helpful to put some thought into a logical naming convention for policies and configurations. This enables you to search on some common value in the policies and configurations to select them for modification.

In a similar manner, PowerShell-based cmdlets make it easy to pull configuration reports from a large implementation. For example, imagine that your company announced a policy that all IMs will be retained for at least 30 days. More than likely, someone will ask you to make sure all your configurations retain messages for at least 30 days. Rather than scrolling through the GUI to find configurations with values under 30, you could simply run a cmdlet such as the following to produce a report of all configuration where the CachePurgingInterval is less than 30 days:

Get-CsArchivingConfiguration | Where {$_.CachePurgingInterval –lt "30"} | select
Identity


					  

However, if you were going to do that, why not fix it all on one shot?

$Array=Get-CsArchivingConfiguration | Where {$_.CachePurgingInterval –lt "30"}
Foreach ($Name in $Array)
{
$Var = $Name.Identity
Set-CsArchivingConfiguration –Identity $var –CachePurgingInterval:30
}


					  

This report searches all configurations in the topology and sets any that have a CachePurgingInterval of less than 30 to 30 without touching any that were already higher than 30.