Chat Room Management by End Users
As noted previously, chat room management can
be handled not only by Lync administrators, but also by end users who
are delegated low-level administrative permissions to the chat room
configuration. This level of administration can be performed simply by
using the Lync 2013 client. End users can be delegated permissions to
manage various aspects of the chat room configuration by being assigned
the following roles:
• Creator—Users who
are assigned as creators for a category can create new chat rooms
within that category, and can change all the properties of the chat
rooms they create, with the exception of the chat room category.
• Chat Room Manager—Users
who are assigned as chat room managers can change all the properties of
the chat rooms they manage, with the exception of the chat room
category. This includes adding and removing members from a room, adding
and removing managers, and disabling (but not deleting) a room.
The management activities handled by creators
and chat room managers are performed using the Lync client, which
initiates a connection to the chat room management web pages that are
included as part of the Lync web components on the Front End Server.
The following procedure is used to manage a chat room using the Lync
client:
1. Log on to the Lync
2013 client using an account that has been enabled for Persistent Chat,
and has been assigned as either a creator in a Persistent Chat category
or a manager of one or more chat rooms.
2. If the user has
been enabled for Persistent Chat, the Chat Rooms icon automatically
appears as the second icon from the left, as shown earlier in Figure 10.12. Click on the Chat Rooms icon to display the Chat Rooms section of the Lync client.
3. Double-click on one of the rooms from the list to open it.
4. Click on the (...)
symbol at the lower-right corner of the window, and from the list of
options that appear, click Manage This Room.
5. At the prompt, enter the credentials of the user with creator or chat room manager rights.
6. The Edit a Room page now appears, as shown in Figure 3. Adjust the properties of the room as needed .
Figure 3. Editing a chat room using the Lync 2013 client.
7. When finished, click Finish to save the changes to the chat room.
Persistent Chat Troubleshooting
Troubleshooting for Persistent Chat starts
with the basics, which consists of the Event Viewer and the Services
console on the Persistent Chat Server. Error messages that are logged
for Persistent Chat appear in the Lync Server portion of the Event Log
under the Applications and Services log heading, and this is typically
the first place to look when you are experiencing problems with
Persistent Chat. There are also several Windows services installed as
part of the role installation on each Persistent Chat Server. Two of
these services are specifically related to Persistent Chat: the Lync
Server Persistent Chat service, and the Lync Server Persistent Chat
Compliance service. Both of these services are set to start up
automatically when the system is turned on, and need to remain started
continually for the Persistent Chat service to function. Additional
information about the Persistent Chat environment can also be quickly
retrieved by executing the following command using the Lync Server
Management Shell: Get-CsService -PersistentChat.
If the Persistent Chat services are started
and the Event Log does not provide helpful clues as to the cause of an
issue, an additional useful tool for troubleshooting a Persistent Chat
problem is synthetic transactions. Synthetic transactions can be used
to test sending and receiving messages in a chat room between two
users. You can initiate a synthetic transaction using the Lync Server
Management Shell by executing the Test-CsPersistentChatMessage cmdlet. Sender and receiver credentials are supplied as parameters, and you obtain these by first using the Get-Credential cmdlet to store the credentials in variables that are referenced within the Test-CsPersistentChatMessage cmdlet.
The following example shows the commands used
to execute a synthetic transaction, testing the sending of chat room
messages between two users who are members of the chat pool named
Design:
Click here to view code image
$cred1 = Get-Credential "companyabc\david"
$cred2 = Get-Credential "companyabc\kevin"
Test-CsPersistentChatMessage
-TargetFqdn lyncentpool.companyabc.com -ChatRoomName Design
-SenderSipAddress "sip:david@companyabc.com" -SenderCredential $cred1
-ReceiverSipAddress "sip:kevin@companyabc.com" -ReceiverCredential
$cred2.
The first and second commands cause
interactive prompts for the password of the sender and receiver users,
respectively. After these credentials are entered, they are stored in
the variables that are referenced in the third command. The end result
is then displayed as either Success or Failure, as shown in Figure 4. If the transaction fails, an error message is displayed to assist in further diagnosing the cause of the issue.
Figure 4. Persistent Chat synthetic transaction used for troubleshooting.
