Recently I was involved in a project where we were moving all Lync users from a Lync 2013 server deployment to the cloud. The Substitution Squad was also moving their mailboxes to deject.

Since deploying SfB Hybrid is a very directly forward process nosotros weren't excepting any issues. Everything was prepared and Proxy Bypass was configured. We even managed it to move a SfC federation from server to hybrid. This is may be another blog postal service.

When nosotros tested the get-go users in SfB Online everything was good except that we had problems calculation/removing contacts. This was likewise true, when we were creating groups and tagging users for status changes.

We got „Cannot add, remove, or move contacts or groups at this fourth dimension. Please endeavor over again after"

Later a few Google searches we were certain that this is non related to Exchange Autodicover but we picked upwardly the thought that it can exist the „contact list provider".

Start thing we checked for the on-prem users was the contact listing provider. This can be done in the client via the „configuration information". This was prepare to Lync server. All adept. Then we checked if UCS was enabled On-Prem. This was the case at a global level. Not then good.

But this was it. The other steps required (e.g. server to server authentication) to enable UCS were not completed.

Then we discovered that for all of the server users we got the following result („Ready to Migrate") which confirmed  that the contacts of the users were not moved over to exchange but were still on „lync server". This was a skillful thing.

Testing the UCS condition for a single user is besides possible via:

$cred = Get-Credential "Advertizing\garth.fort"

Test-CsUnifiedContactStore -TargetFqdn sfbpool@contoso.com -UserSipAddress sip:garth.fort@contoso.com -UserCredential $cred

For our users this resulted in:

"User has not been migrated. Verify that the user a mailbox in Substitution and that the user has been migrated"

The state of affairs in SfB Online was a bit different. UCS is disabled by default. But the SfB Online users had UCS as the contact list provider for some reason.

We tried moving the SfB users to server and so back to online. For some users this worked. Just afterwards a while UCS became active once more. We also tried disabling UCS at a user level before moving the users to SfB Online again. But this doesn't changed anything.

Then we started looking at „Invoke-CsUcsRollback" but we expected that this wouldn't piece of work for user being on Lync server considering the integration with substitution was not setup properly. And this was indeed the Case.

"Invoke-CsUcsRollback : Failed to configure the whorl back bit on Commutation"

But it turns out that this worked, if you run this against SfB Online for a user being in the cloud and having UCS as the contact list provider.

Afterwards a few seconds the client switched to „Skype for Business organisation Server" equally a contact list provider.

We were quite happy that this helped because the remaining options are not and so nice:

  1. „Invoke-CsUcsRollback -Fore" -> Users will loose their contacts
  2. Move Exchange Online Mailbox back to On-Prem -> Y'all don't want to be that guy telling this to projection squad if they already moved hundreds of mailboxes to the cloud.

What we learned:

  • Cheque the condition of the contact list provider before a doing a SfB/Exchange Online migration
  • Expect at the client and at the server side configuration
  • UCS is non supported in the deject even though Technet states otherwise
  • To avert this problem, try the rollback on-prem before you motility the mailbox to Exchange Online

The "why this happened" is not 100% clear. The server situation showed that contact migration to exchange was not completed but information technology somehow completed after the user was moved to cloud. And so doing a rollback for the SfB Online user is the right choice.

Sources:

https://dirteam.com/dave/2015/02/19/issues-with-unified-contact-store-in-combination-with-lync-on-premises-and-exchange-online/

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/aid/2614614/how-to-integrate-exchange-online-with-skype-for-business organization-online-lync-south

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2811654/lync-contact-list-is-empty-or-read-only-after-a-user-due south-substitution-mailbo

https://docs.microsoft.com/de-de/skypeforbusiness/deploy/integrate-with-substitution-server/use-the-unified-contact-store