Haiku #70

[NextHop_Team]

First published on TECHNET on Mar 18, 2011

The answers you seek

Lie not in your heart. They are

In the Lync archive.

Today is March 18 ^th , which, as you probably know, is one of the two most exciting days of the year. After all – what's that? Well, yes, as a matter of fact, March 18 ^th is the Anniversary of the Oil Expropriation Day in Mexico. And yes, now that you mention it, March 18 ^th is also the day that Albert II of Habsburg was crowned the Holy Roman Emperor.

Note . Wow: March 18 ^th is an even better day than we thought. And, speaking of which, happy birthday to Queen Latifah, Vanessa Williams, and former Seattle Mariner Scott Podsednik!

As it turns out, however, we're excited simply because March 18 ^th marks Day 2 of the opening round of the NCAA men's basketball tournament.

Note . Yes, we know: the NCAA insists that this is actually the second round of the tournament. But, then again, that's the same NCAA that would not allow the coaches from Boise State University to attend the funeral of a player they had been recruiting. The player died in a car accident, and the coaches were not allowed to attend the funeral, send flowers, or even mention the player's name because the deceased had not yet signed a letter of intent. In the world of the NCAA, attending the funeral would give Boise State an advantage over any other schools that might be interested in recruiting someone who had just passed away.

And if that makes no sense to you whatsoever, well, that was the whole point.

But even though it's run by the NCAA, the opening round of the men's basketball tournament still marks the two greatest days of the year: 16 games yesterday (including several buzzer beaters) and 16 more today. And if that's not enough (and it isn't) there are 8 more games on Saturday and 8 on Sunday. Could anything be better than that?

To tell you the truth, we doubt it. In fact, there are only two things that could even possibly be better than the opening round of the NCAA tournament: the CsArchivingConfiguration cmdlets, and Men & Soldiers Day in Mongolia.

Note . We apologize, but we couldn't find a lot of information on Men & Soldier's Day; about all we could find was a blog posting in Dutch. (Hey, go figure.) Here's a portion of the … translated … post:

"This day keeps in practice, however, in that you get to +/-10.00uur to the beer and ice cream is (in my case) or that you're after lunch to the vodka is (Sietse & Johan), this depends on the drink that you love your female colleagues."

Beer, vodka, ice cream – could be worse, right?

Fortunately, we do have lots of information on the CsArchivingConfiguration cmdlets: Get-CsArchivingConfiguration , New-CsArchivingConfiguration , Remove-CsArchivingConfiguration , and Set-CsArchivingConfiguration . As you probably know, archiving provides a way for you to keep copies of all the instant message sessions that your users take part in. That's actually much more important than you think: after all, many organizations (particularly those in the financial world) are required to keep copies of all their electronic communication. Archiving, and Archiving server, makes it easy for you to keep copies of all your instant messages.

However, just setting up Archiving server doesn't mean you'll now have a database chock-full of instant messages. Instead, you need to do two other things: you need to enable archiving at the global and/or site scopes, and you need to use archiving policies to indicate which users will have instant messages archived and which ones won't. The CsArchivingConfiguration cmdlets allow you to (among other things) enable and disable archiving.

For example, suppose you want to enable archiving at the global scope. That's fine; after setting up Archiving server all you have to do is run a command similar to this:

Set-CsArchivingConfiguration –Identity global –EnableArchiving ImAndWebConf

And yes, ImAndWebConf is kind of an odd parameter value, isn't it? But that simply tells the Set-CsArchivingConfiguration cmdlet that you want to archive instant messaging and Web conferencing sessions. Suppose you wanted to archive only instant message sessions. In that case, you'd use the parameter value ImOnly :

Set-CsArchivingConfiguration –Identity global –EnableArchiving ImOnly

And if you don't want to archive anything ? Then use the parameter value None (which, by the way, is the default value):

Set-CsArchivingConfiguration –Identity global –EnableArchiving None

Maybe not quite as much fun as beer, vodka, and ice cream, but close. Very close.

Another parameter of interest is this one: BlockOnArchiveFailure. Let's say that you do work in the financial world, and you are required to keep copies of all your instant messaging sessions. Unfortunately, though, one of your employees had a little too much beer and vodka at your Men & Soldiers Day celebration, and accidentally unplugged your Archiving server, meaning that you can't archive any instant message sessions, at least not until the server comes back on line. Is that reason to panic? Well, not if you previously ran this command:

Set-CsArchivingConfiguration –Identity global –BlockOnArchiveFailure $True

When BlockOnArchiveFailure is set to True, the instant messaging service will automatically shut down any time messages cannot be archived; as a result, no one will be able to send or receive instant messages. When the Archiving server comes back online, the instant messaging service will automatically start back up.

And yes, that really is a nice little feature, isn't it?

If you want to, you can create separate collections of archiving configuration settings at the site scope using the New-CsArchivingConfiguration cmdlet. (Why would you want to? Well, maybe you don't need to archive instant messages for everyone , but you do need to archive them for users in the Redmond site.) Those settings can later be removed using Remove-CsArchivingConfiguration. And, of course, you can review all your archiving configuration settings just by calling the Get-CsArchivingConfiguration cmdlet:

Get-CsArchivingConfiguration

Or, if you want to get fancy, you could do something like this, which retrieves all the archiving configuration settings that do not specify Web conference archiving:

Get-CsArchivingConfiguration | Where-Object {$_.EnableArchiving –ne "ImAndWebConf"}

So does that mean that the CsArchivingConfiguration cmdlets are better than the opening round of the NCAA men's basketball tournament? To be honest, we'll probably never know. After all, we're at work today, which means that we can run the CsArchivingConfiguration cmdlets any time we want. But, alas, there's no way for us to watch the men's basketball tournament and do a comparison. Sigh ….

Note . What's that? Are we aware that all the games are streamed live online, and that we could simply put a note on our door that says "In a meeting" and then sit back and watch basketball all day instead of working? Uh, no, no we're weren't aware of that. No, not at all ….