Skype for Business Enable Shared Line Appearance Script

With the latest version of Skype for Business Server (November 2015) a new feature called Shared Line Appearance (SLA as it’s known in the Skype world) was released.

The details of what SLA is can be found here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3092727

There are many blogs out there which have looked at SLA in detail, so I am not going to rehash other people’s hard work here.

Notable and most worthy mentions:

Matthew Landis (MVP): http://windowspbx.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/setting-up-skype-for-business-shared.html

Mattias Kressmark: http://kressmark.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/ms-ignite-brk3140-voice-of-skype-for.html

The purpose of this post is to provide a script that will enabled SLA on your front end server pool automatically. By default patching your Skype for Business server does not automatically enable SLA, even though the PowerShell commandlets are available after the update. In order to enable you have to add SLA as a server application to your front end server. This can be done using a couple of PS commands. However, I have wrapped this installation into a PS script that will perform the heavy lifting for you.

Script Details

The script will check if your Skype for Business Front End server meets the cumulative update level. If it doesn’t the script will end without making changes to your deployment.

To get the latest CU, please download from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=47690

If your Front End meets the required version, you will be prompted to enter the FE FQDN you want to enable SLA on. Please enter your FE FQDN when prompted.

A further check is performed to see if you have enabled this already, or if subsequent Microsoft updates enable this for you. If so no changes are made.

If SLA is not installed, the script will now install and enable SLA for you.

PLEASE BE AWARE, THE INSTALLATION PROCESS WILL RESTART THE FRONT END SERVICE (RTCSRV) SO PERFORM WITHIN A MAINTENANCE WINDOW