Skype for Business Server: Announcing the general availability of Modern Admin Control Panel

[Ravindra_Singh_Bisht]

Hi everyone,

We are pleased to announce the general availability of Modern Admin Control Panel (MACP) for Skype for Business Server 2019 Control Panel,

SfB Server Modern Admin Control Panel (MACP) is now released and available to all the customers. Please start using new Control Panel and share feedback and questions on this thread.

For more details and installation instructions refer 5001617

Thanks.

On behalf of the product team,

Ravindra Singh Bisht

Senior Program Manager, Skype for Business Server

[#2]

@Ravindra_Singh_Bisht 

Excellent Work! Others and myself have been waiting for this for some time. Was wanting to inquire on the features within. Also, Are there any plans to bring other items that were in the Silverlight CSCP into the new MACP? The reason I ask is because Silverlight is no longer receiving updates and it doesn't make sense to have two admin centers for similar tasks. This would allow my customers to fully eliminate the need for CSCP and potentially any security vulnerabilities leaving Silverlight around may bring. These Tabs Include:

Topology (There are references to this in the code such as /macp/topology/status)

Persistent Chat (2019 CSCP just has the ability to enable or disable PChat in the deployment)
Clients
Monitoring and Archiving
Security
Network Configuration

Additionally, I wanted to report a bug two bugs with the MACP. Under Users, If you select a user, edit their line URI for example and save, the change will take effect as expected. The problem is though that if you click back into that user, the old data is presented until you refresh the page. The second issue is when you are selecting an option under and of the categories with a menu drop down (Voice Routing, Voice Features, etc), all other open menu options collapse. If you click on home or users when you have the others open, they do not collapse. I would prefer that the menu options now collapse, but not a necessity.

I wanted to also request a feature if possible. When Managing Users, are we able to get a column that displays the Line URI that is assigned to the user when viewing all users? This would be EXTREMELY useful for managing users in my customer's deployments. Additionally, Is there a chance to add an option to set hostedvoicemail policies along with setting forwarding settings via SEFAUtil for a user from the GUI?

Thank you for the teams great work and I look forward to your response!

-Eric

[#3]

@Eric Marsi Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback and comments. Your inputs on the product are very important to us. We will triage all feature requests and bugs as suggested by you, and accordingly will put them in our product backlog for prioritization.  

Thanks.

Ravindra

[#4]

@Ravindra_Singh_Bisht Thank you! 

Since that original message, I did have one more thing come up from my testing. In this CU5 release, the OcsPowerShell svc is no longer accepting remote connections. Below is a comparison between a CU5 FE and a CU4 HF2 FE. The older CU FE is working, but the newer FE is not. Comparing files of the OcsPowerShell IIS Virtual Directories shows 3 files (adfsoauthsetuppartiy.ps1, schema.mof, schema.xml) were updated. Unfortunately, replacing them with the files from a FE on CU4 HF2 does nothing. I will let you know if I can find anything else in this release.

This can also be found on my Twitter: https://twitter.com/EricMarsi/status/1375612876770185216

[#5]

@Eric Marsi Thanks for reporting the issue. We tried to reproduce the issue at our end but unable to do so. Can you please report this issue through Microsoft support and provide more details so our team can do investigate it further. Thanks.

[#6]

@Ravindra_Singh_Bisht 

Unfortunately this is my personal lab environment. I have validated that this in fact an issue on a new installation as well so not sure how it is unreproducible. Is there any options available for me?

Also, I did find another bug in Skype for Business 2019 CU5 (Left), When creating a new Standard Edition FE Pool, no SQL Store is generated and you cannot continue. On CU4 (Right), this is not an issue and you can see its automatically populated and the wizard is able to continue.

[#7]

Hi @Eric Marsi, Remote PowerShell issue has been fixed and released. Please download the latest installer from here.

[#8]

@Ravindra_Singh_Bisht Thanks for tagging me. I have just installed this to find that it unfortunately did not resolve any issues with remote PS. The below image shows that it fails to start the PS Session, but if I remote into a older CU4 FE, it works as expected. Thoughts?

Also The other issue two posts above regarding topology builder is still there and not resolved.

[#9 · Accepted solution]

Hi @Eric Marsi, Remote PowerShell issue has been fixed and released, and it has been verified by customers, who raised the support issue.

Can you please restart the machine or do IIS reset and try again. If the issue still persists, please report the same to Microsoft support and provide more details so our team can investigate it further. Thanks.

[#10]

Can confirm that this is working after a reboot.

Found a resolution for the above topology builder issue which involved a uninstall and reinstall of the management tools for the server.

Third and final note. Is there any plans to update MACP or CSCP to support GUI migrations to Teams once SFBO is terminated in July? The tenant in question is a teams only tenant and any integrations from the gui do not work. See Here: https://www.ucit.blog/post/the-skype-for-business-online-powershell-module-has-been-blacklisted-what...

[#11]

@Eric MarsiPost SfBO is terminated in July, from SfB on-prem you can move user from on prem to "Teams only" through GUI also.

[#12]

@Ravindra_Singh_Bisht 

This no longer works as the Skype for Business Powershell Module that the GUI relies on is blacklisted. Screenshots are on my blog covering this issue. Migrations in the CSCP or the MACP no longer work and can only be done with a move-csuser cmdlet. Any word on if the PG plans to update SFB Server to use the Microsoft Teams Module? Some tenants have this block in place and some dont.

https://www.ucit.blog/post/the-skype-for-business-online-powershell-module-has-been-blacklisted-what...

[#13]

@Eric Marsi  We will be releasing next update for Sfb2015 & Sfb2019 which will address this issue. Until then if you want MACP & CSCP to work then please log support ticket.

[#14]

With Silverlight going EOL and the only browser that can even run Silverlight today (Internet Explorer 11) which won't even be there in Windows 11 and is not recommended or endorsed by Microsoft anymore, we need ALL features of the cscp in this new macp. Your off to a great start and it looks visually fresh. Can we see all the cscp features migrated over to this new HTML5 interface? I know there's work for you to do, it took VMWare quite a long time to get their flash-based UI entirely rewritten for HTML5, but you guys have to do this with the looming Silverlight EOL / EOS coming in a few months. Also its odd you require admin accounts to have SIP enabled. That should be irrelevant to the administration of the platform. I know MS wants people to move to Teams but for those industries where we need on-prem and not fully entrusting the cloud, Skype for Business 2019 is the best IM platform to date, until you allow an on-prem Teams system.

[#15]

Here is some feedback. In the new macp (which looks fantastic btw), I would like to see the topology section added. Its great to see existing topology and all associated servers that you have connected in the environment like exchange or phone system servers, SQL or other application servers that may be tied into the specific environment.

[#16]

@kjstech 

Any news on this?
Thx,

Oliver