Author Archives: ArmgaSys

Exchange UM Voice Auto-Attendant custom greeting and those pesky system prompts

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Microsoft Exchange Unified Messaging is a very cool tool to put into your corporate telephony arsenal.  You get a very nice, voice activated auto-attendant with some very nice features.
One feature the Exchange UM team didn’t get fully right is customization of the initial greeting.

Out of the box, your voice enabled AA (auto-attendant) will say:

Thank you for calling [your company name] To reach a specific person, just tell me their name

If you are like ArmgaSys, you will want to customize your greeting via the ECP (Exchange Admin Center).  You hire voice talent and record a really nice greeting along the lines of “Thank you for calling my company, if you know your parties extension, you may dial it now or simply tell me their name”.  You then upload your greeting in the UM and are shocked to hear the following:

Thank you for calling my company, if you know your parties extension, you may dial it now or simply tell me their name. To reach a specific person, just tell me their name.

You just discovered a UM system prompt, specifically the Voice AA prompt which says (in a female voice) “To reach a specific person, just tell me their name”

At this point, you have only one option:  You must replace the system prompt with a audio file containing silence.*  Fortunately, this is very easy to do!

The solution:

  1. On your Exchange UM server, navigate to
    C:\Program Files\Microsoft\Exchange Server\V[#]\UnifiedMessaging\prompts\en\
  2. Delete the file vuiAADsearch_Yes_Custom_No_main.1.wav
  3. Make a copy of Silence-250ms.wav
    (This .wav file is also located in the prompts\en directory)
  4. Rename your copy of the silence file to vuiAADsearch_Yes_Custom_No_main.1.wav

That is it!

Warning! Warning! Warning!
Installing cumulative updates (CU) and service packs will revert this file back to its original state.  You will need to repeat these steps after each CU and Service Pack!

 

*Some of you will be asking “Why not just delete the file”.  Well, it is a system prompt which means Exchange UM pretty much requires the file to be there.  Deleting the file can (and will) cause your UM service to fail.

WordPress file and directory security for IIS 7.0 and greater

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It seems when we setup a new WordPress site on IIS (for whatever reason) the question always arises: “What is the directory and file security again?”.  We haven’t pulled the actual metrics, but we suspect this is one of the top 100 most asked questions of all times.

To help our own rather leaky memories, we are putting together this blog entry on our own internal best practices.  Hopefully it helps you as well!

 

Our Best Practices Overview

  • Modify level security is only allowed on .\[WordPress]\wp-content\uploads
  • All other directories are read only
    Why?  This helps prevents malware from infecting your site.
  • During updates (plugin or WordPress itself), the entire WordPress site is set for Modify permissions.
    Important:  Manual updates (XCOPY) are safer but not necessarily easier.  That being said, if you are already on the box setting permissions, you are already in position for an XCOPY update!

 

Initial Setup Details

  1. At the WordPress root directory (.\[WordPress])
  1. Remove all inheritance from the parent objects
    Why?  This prevents the parent directory objects from changing your security without you knowing about it!
  2. Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from your WordPress root directory
    Why?  This guarantees that all WordPress directories get your explicit permissions!
  3. Grant the user IUSR the following permissions: Read & Execute, List folder contents, Read
  4. Grant the group IIS_IUSRS the following permissions: Read & Execute, List folder contents, Read
  5. Grant the group Administrators the following permissions: Full control
  6. Recommended:  Remove the group Users (I.E. grant the Users group no rights to the WordPress directory)
  • At the WordPress upload directory (.\[WordPress]\wp-content\uploads)
    1. Remove all inheritance from the parent objects
      Why?  This configures your upload directory for specific permissions to allow publishing of content!
    2. Replace all child object permissions with inheritable permissions from your \uploads directory
    3. Grant the user IUSR the following permissions: Modify, Read & Execute, List folder contents, Read, Write
    4. Grant the group IIS_IUSRS the following permissions: Read & Execute, List folder contents, Read
    5. Grant the group Administrators the following permissions: Full control
    6. Recommended:  Remove the group Users (I.E. grant the Users group no rights to the \uploads directory)

     

    Update Time Details
    When it becomes time to update your WordPress site, perform the following steps:

    1. At the WordPress root directory (.\[WordPress])
    1. Grant the user IUSR the following permissions: Modify
      Why?  Permissions inheritance will automatically set all WordPress directories to allow modification by the IUSR account.  This will allow updates to be performed

    Important: Be sure to remove both the Modify and Write permissions from IUSR when you are done with your updates!

    Unable to logon due to SQM in the default profile

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    We here at ArmgaSys have started to see a high incident rate of User Profile loading failures.  These failures have different symptoms, but exactly the same root cause.

     

    Symptom #1:  The never ending logon
    This symptom is classically described as:

    1. You sit down in front of a PC you have logged into every day since you started work
    2. You enter your user name and password
    3. You are greeted by the “Welcome” screen
    4. You watch the “Welcome” screen spinner for hours…. and hours… and hours….

    Symptom #2:  New profiles can’t be created
    This symptom is classically described as:

    1. You have called your client services folks over because of the never ending logon
    2. Your client service guy (or gal) logs onto your PC with their administrative account
    3. They receive the always entertaining “The User Profile Service service failed the logon.  User profile cannot be loaded”
      image

     

    Symptom #3: The event log
    Upon reviewing the PC’s event log (which any good Client Service team will do) reveals:

    Event 1509, User Profile General
    WIndows cannot copy file \Users\Default\AppData\Local\…\sqm-data[SEQUENCE].sql to location [A profile location goes here]
    This error may be caused by network problems or insufficient security rights.

    DETAIL – Access is denied

     

    Root Cause
    The Software Quality Metrics software instrumentation system flubbed up a file in your user’s profiles.
    We see this a lot in Visual Studio installs (VS2010 – VS 2013) but have noticed an increase in other Microsoft products.

     

    How to fix
    It is simple!  Find and delete the SQM files listed in the event log

    -OR- (The more draconian approach)

    1. Navigate to C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\
    2. Search for *.SQM (all SQM files)
    3. Delete them!

    Good luck!