Acano is one of the providers out there that closes the gap between video conferencing endpoints and Skype for Business that includes featuers such as integration with the Skype for Business meeting invite and enables application sharing accross platforms.

Acano has made available a REST api to configure Acano deployments further than just setting it up with the default configuration. My colleague Tom-Inge Larsen has made a PowerShell module so that you can use PowerShell to work with Acano deployments. This is great stuff! Now I can use my existing skill set coming from a Microsoft background to tune the Acano deployments I work with. In this example I want to change the branding of the meeting you are joining with custom welcome screen for SIP and Skype for Business clients

Here is how you do it

1. Download the latest version of the module
2. Unzip it and navigate in PowerShell ISE to the location where you unzipped the .psm1 file
   • cd c:\acano\
3. Import the module, you may need to set the execution policy to unrestricted
   • Set-ExecutionPolicy unrestricted
   • Import-Module .\PsAcano.psm1
4. Get all the cmdlets available in the module
   • Get-Module PsAcano | Select-Object -ExpandProperty exportedcommands
   • At the time of writing there are 161 cmdlets available
   • You will find that the name of the cmdlets matches the names from the API so you can look up the properties and what you need to set in order to configure this
5. Connect to the Acano environment
   • New-AcanoSession -APIAddress Vc-nocore1.contoso.com –Port 445 -Credential (Get-Credential)
6. To create the custom branded welcome screen you need the following
   • A JPEG picture called background.jpg
   • A web server that hosts the picture, if you use IIS you need to enable directory browsing since you are sharing the directory root
   • The webserver only needs to be available to the Acano server, and not the client joining the meeting
   • The picture needs to be less than 500kb and have the dimensions 1920×1200
   • Progressive JPEG is not supported
7. Use the AcanoCallBrandingProfile to create the customization profile
   • New-AcanoCallBrandingProfile
   • Which returns a GUID that you can add a URL to
8. Add a ResourceLocation to the call branding profile
   • Set-AcanoCallBrandingProfile -CallBrandingProfileId c744515d-7292-4d5c-8bbd-bde904eb8fbc -ResourceLocation http://webserver.contoso.com/GlobalCallBrandingProfile/
9. Now you are done! You have now created a global Call Branding Profile
   • You can also create a call branding profile and assign it at the tenant level or at the coSpace level
   • You only need to create one callbranding profile per cluster, since all servers in the cluster will share the same configuration
10. In order for this to work, make sure the license allows for customization, not all licenses from Acano allows for customization. Make sure it is assigned to all servers in the deployment

Resources

• Acano API documentation library: https://www.acano.com/support/documentation/
  • Look for Customization guidelines
  • Also check out the API guide