Quick Tip: Aries/LPE Phone / Calendar Integration Issues
Problem: Although 3PIP phones continue to improve with each release we find that many companies are still going back to the CX series phones because they are built well and simply work. Recently, I ran into an Exchange integration error that was different then the well documents yellow triangle of death (Jeff’s Post, Ken’s Post). The environment wasn’t anything overly complex – SfB 2015 with Exchange Online (Office 365).
In my scenario, the phone would simply hang on “Connecting to Exchange Server” and never complete. So I wouldn’t get far enough to even get the yellow triangle of death.
I knew the users Proxy Address/SMTP address was set correct as the Lync/SfB Client itself had no problem displaying the Exchange Calendar information. So I started by using Andrew Morpeth’s awesome LPE Log Viewer to see if there was anything in the logs that would point me in the right direction. Looking through the logs the only thing I found that was remotely interesting was this error:
Failed to find smtp email address from local contact model. Waiting for contact card event from the local contact model.
That seemed odd, why was the phone looking for the users e-mail address from the contact card and not the UPN or Proxy Address. So I decided it was time to go back to Active Directory and see if there was anything missing from the user. When viewing the AD Attributes from a working user to a non-working user I found that the mail attribute for the non-working user was blank. For some reason, the provisioning process missed assigning it for this user.
So I went and added the mail attribute to the account and after about 15 minutes the phone calendar integration started working. No reboot was even necessary.
Solution: This was good for a single user fix but it appeared as though we have a few hundred users that were setup incorrectly in this environment. Since the UPN and E-Mail addresses matched for all of the users the fix was simple:
Get-ADUser -Filter * -SearchBase “ou=usersou,dc=contoso,dc=com” | Foreach-Object {
Set-ADUser -Identity $_ -Email “$($_.userPrincipalName)” -Verbose
}
The moral of the story is this. The Lync/SfB Client determines the e-mail address based on the users UPN and/or the Proxy/SMTP Address defined in Active Directory. Aries/LPE Phones determine the e-mail address solely off the mail attribute in Active Directory.
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My business has replaced our PBX with Lync enterprise voice and it has been good so far! Yay!
We are using the HP LPE phones.
Now the interesting rock and a hard place I am faced with.
We wanted all common area phones, the HP 4110, but Snom and HP recently divorced, in the middle of my deployment, and we could not get 100 more 4110 phones. (250 total)
So we had to get 100 HP 4120 instead, which are desktop phones, to complete our deployment.
Our problem uncovered itself when we upgraded the 4120 phones to the latest cumulative update.
It shows an exclamation icon in place of the menu icon and it cannot be dismissed.
So it is always there.
We reset our passwords periodically enough that having users type them into the Lync pop up window and possibly having an issue doing so that causes the phone to be offline, was not something we wanted them to deal with.
Hence the wanting to use all common are HP 4110 Phones.
So we are not connecting USB cables.
There in lies the problem.
Our older firmware CU 4.0.7577.4366 worked without showing the exclamation icon.
But we don’t have that version, it was on a few phones out of the box we tested with and didn’t see the problem early enough to plan around it.
So I am reaching out to see if anyone may know someone at Microsoft, or have their email addresses, could you reach out and see if any of them may be able to find a copy of the 4.0.7577.4366 firmware for the HP 4120 phones.
The Cumulative Update from December 2012.
I have a support request open with Microsoft, but that will follow the approved channels and their official position on offering old updates so far has been a NO, and I doubt any hot fix specific to my scenario is in sight. The answer will be, use a USB cable which I cannot since some of these will not be near computers.
So I have by trying the unapproved channels to get my hands on the older cumulative update which from what I have tested, does not show the exclamation icon when the phones are not plugged in using USB.
I was able to find other older versions, but nothing that far back. All we found was back to 2014.
It appears 4.0.7577.4420 and forward has this issue.
The file may possibly be on a Lync server for a business that is using the HP phones and that has imported that CU.
It’s a Hail Mary, but figured I would try reaching out to see if anyone you know would have any leads on how to obtain that version or a way to eliminate, acknowledge/dismiss the exclamation icon. (Exchange integration not available because you signed in directly on the phone)
Thanks,
Shane Negaard