Part of managing a support desk is having complicated or “out of the box” issues escalated to you. Sometimes, it is saving the client from themselves. This is one of the later.
Recently we had a company lay off their IT Director due to budget issues. This happens as part of today’s business and is no reflection on the person she was. The issue is, sometimes she was very “close to the chest” on her infrastructure which is making supporting the client after her departure… challenging to say the least.
This week the remaining staff called to let me know that new users in their sister company were not able to see voicemails. They couldn’t dial them from Lync or see them in there Exchange email box. They swore they had set them up the same and were now stuck. I started the troubleshooting by asking for a bit more information, maybe some names. While I was able to get names of users, more configuration information was not available. I started going through AD, Lync and also their tenant on O365. I saw no errors in regards to voicemail or any for UM for that matter. I was starting to get perplexed.
So I started looking deeper, first thing I noticed was that the sister domain was nowhere to be found. Not in the O365 tenant or in their forest. I called the client and they confirmed they moved the sister company to its own tenant, but all users were still using the main company for Lync. This made me look at the individual users and I realized that there was no way voicemail could travel from one tenant to another in the current setup. There were no policies or connections.
I got to thinking, “could it really be that simple?” I received permission to get full access to an older user that had voicemail working. Low and behold, voicemail was sitting in her parent company’s inbox even though she worked for the sister company. I then looked at her rules and sure enough, “Forward all email and keep a copy” was enabled from the web client.
What this taught me was that even though as consultants we may know best practices, don’t always approach a situation with that in mind. Sometimes the easiest path for the client is the easiest answer on why something my not be working as intended.
Myke Schwartz, PEI
