Decommissioning OCS: Lessons Learned…

Note: I wrote this back in November 2014, but I got rid of my Wordpress site and wanted to move it over to Medium. It was still getting some interest so was worth reposting.

I have recently spent some time decommissioning our legacy OCS 2007 R2 servers and pools from our Lync 2013 environment. I thought I’d put a few hints and tips together as a guide for others that have to do it. This basically covers the stuff I had to spend time figuring out. Hopefully it helps people not to have to spend time on it…

First off, I generally followed the procedures outlined on TechNet. The only problem I found with TechNet is that there are a few places where it either contradicts itself or isn’t quite as detailed as it needs to be.

General Guide

I used this link and a general guide to decommissioning the server roles. It’s not complete or entirely correct though so should be used as a starting point: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/dd572243(v=office.13).aspx

Deactivating Roles

When deactivating roles use the order stipulated here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/dd572548(v=office.13).aspx

Failing to deactivate Conferencing Attendant

Depending on what you’ve read you may have already move the conference directories from OCS to Lync. If so, you’re going to have a problem when it comes to deactivating the Conference Attendant on your pool(s).

To get around this you need to temporarily move the conference directory back to OCS, deactivate it and then move it back again.

To do this, in the Lync Management Shell find the old OCS conference directory by running the folowing:

Get-CsConferenceDirectory | Select Id, ServiceId

You’re likely to see which one was the OCS conference directory as there will be more than one conference directory for your Lync pool you moved it to. The OCS one is likely to be the lower numbered ID.

To move it back run the following:

Get-CsConferenceDirectory -Identity [Number_Found_Above] | Move
CsConferenceDirectory -TargetPool [The_OCS_Pool_You_Want_To_Decom]

Now deactivate the Conferencing Attendant.

You can then move the Conference Directory back using the following command:

Get-CsConferenceDirectory -Identity [Number_Found_Above] | Move-CsConferenceDirectory -TargetPool [The_New_Lync_Pool]

Uninstalling Components

When uninstalling the various OCS components from Add or Remove Programs use the order stipulated here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/dd572507(v=office.13).aspx

Error uninstalling OCS Web Components

When trying to uninstall the Web Components you may see the following error:

To fix this you just need to logon as the local Administrator account for the server and remove it. Simple.

Details can be found here: http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/2015134

Think that’s it for the moment. If I remember anything else I’ll add it.