Parameters

Common area phones are IP telephones that are not associated with an individual user. Instead of being located in someone’s office, common area phones are typically located in building lobbies, cafeterias, employee lounges, meeting rooms and other locations where a large number of people are likely to gather. This presents administrators with a management challenge; that’s because phone use in Lync Server 2010 is typically maintained by using voice policies and dial plans that are assigned to individual users. Common area phones do not have individual users assigned to them.

One solution to this challenge is to create Active Directory contact objects for all your common area phones. (These contact objects can be created by using the New-CsCommonAreaPhone cmdlet.) Like user accounts, these contact objects can be assigned policies and voice plans. As a result, you will be able to maintain control over common area phones even though those phones are not associated with an individual user. For example, if you do not want people to have the ability to transfer or park calls from a common area phone, you can create a voice policy that prohibits call transfers and call parking, and then assign that policy to the common area phone. (Or, more correctly, to the contact object that represents the common area phone.) This command assigns the voice policy CommonAreaPhoneVoicePolicy to all your common area phones:

Get-CsCommonAreaPhone | Grant-CsVoicePolicy –PolicyName "CommonAreaPhoneVoicePolicy"

The Set-CsCommonAreaPhone cmdlet provides a way for you to modify the properties of the contact objects associated with common area phones. Among other things, you can change the contact’s Active Directory display name or the line Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) associated with the phone. You can also use the Enabled parameter to enable and disable the account for use with Lync Server 2010.

In addition, you can configure "hotdesking" for common area phones by using the CsClientPolicy cmdlets. When a phone is hotdesked, users can log on to the phone using their Lync Server credentials. Among other things, this gives users easy access to their contacts. See the help topic for the cmdlet Set-CsClientPolicy for more information.

Who can run this cmdlet: By default, members of the following groups are authorized to run the Set-CsCommonAreaPhone cmdlet locally: RTCUniversalUserAdmins. Permissions to run this cmdlet for specific sites or specific Active Directory organizational units (OUs) can be assigned by using the Grant-CsOUPermission cmdlet. To return a list of all the role-based access control (RBAC) roles this cmdlet has been assigned to (including any custom RBAC roles you have created yourself), run the following command from the Windows PowerShell prompt:

Get-CsAdminRole | Where-Object {$_.Cmdlets –match "Set-CsCommonAreaPhone"}

Microsoft.Rtc.Management.ADConnect.Schema.OCSADCommonAreaPhoneContact object.

By default, Set-CsCommonAreaPhone does not return any objects or values. However, if you include the PassThru parameter, the cmdlet will return instances of the Microsoft.Rtc.Management.ADConnect.Schema.OCSADCommonAreaPhoneContact object.

-------------------------- Example 1 ------------------------

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Get-CsCommonAreaPhone -Filter {LineUri -eq "tel:+14255556710"} | Set-CsCommonAreaPhone -DisplayName "Employee Lounge"

Example 1 modifies the Active Directory display name for the common area phone with the phone number 1-425-555-6710. To do this, Get-CsCommonAreaPhone is first called along with the Filter parameter; the filter value {LineUri -eq "tel:+14255556710"} limits the returned data to the common area phone where the LineUri property is equal to tel:+14255556710. The returned object is then piped to Set-CsCommonAreaPhone, which sets the value of the DisplayName property to "Employee Lounge".

-------------------------- Example 2 ------------------------

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Get-CsCommonAreaPhone | Set-CsCommonAreaPhone -Enabled $True

The command shown in Example 2 enables all the common area phones currently configured for use in the organization. To carry out this task, the command calls Get-CsCommonAreaPhone without any parameters in order to return a collection of all the common area phones. This collection is then piped to the Set-CsCommonAreaPhone cmdlet, which takes each item in the collection and sets the Enabled property to True.

-------------------------- Example 3 ------------------------

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Get-CsCommonAreaPhone -Filter {Description -eq $Null} | Set-CsCommonAreaPhone -Description "Common area phone"

The preceding command adds a generic description to all the common area phones that do not have a value assigned to the Description property. To do this, Get-CsCommonAreaPhone is called along with the Filter parameter; the filter value {Description -eq $Null} ensures that the only items returned are common area phones where the Description property is equal to a null value. This filtered collection is then piped to Set-CsCommonAreaPhone, which assigns the generic description "Common area phone" to each item in the collection.

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