I see that CBT Nuggets have just announced the release of their video training course Microsoft Lync Server 2013 70-337.
This course covers all the key parts of the syllabus for the 79-337 exam along with some exam preparation tips and a case study to help you further prepare.
I've not yet looked at the videos in the course, but CBT Nuggets material is usually of a good standard. I'd be interested in any feedback.
Ever since Microsoft introduced Live Communications Server, customers have been asking how they can virtualize the product. During the OCS years, I constantly heard requests for support for Virtualisation. But the answer remained: no support. Eventually Microsoft did the work necessary to validate fully the product in a virtual environment. The result is that, today, you can fully virtualize both the Lync server and the Lync client product. But it’s not all that simple – virtualization just adds more opportunity for problems.
While many workloads are a great fit for virtualization, Lync is a real real-time application. As such, there can be performance related issues that are not even noticeable with other workloads. These issues manifest as poor audio and video resulting in a poor service to the user.
In a recently published White Paper, Lync Server 2013 Virtualization White Paper Microsoft provides full guidance for planning a Lync Server deployment in a virtual environment. The white paper descries how to configure Lync Server 2013 in a virtual environment, including both the host and the guest VMs. Also included are the most important Key Health Indicators (KHIs) that you should watch both when performing a capacity test prior to deploying, and later during deployment.
If you are planning a Lync deployment in a virtual environment or if you want to consider virtualizing part of your existing Lync infrastructure, you really should read this paper.
One of the major changes between Lync 2010 and Lync 2013 is the integration of Lync with Windows Fabric. Windows Fabric is described as ‘a Microsoft technology used for creating highly reliable, distributable an scalable applications’. Windows Fabric is designed to enable replication of application related data across multiple application servers. These application servers work in parallel to provide fault tolerance and scalability. Windows Fabric ensures the information needed for these applications is delivered reliably to each of the necessary servers.
Lync uses Windows Fabric to move information previously held in a back end database (and hence a bottleneck) to the front end servers. This eliminates the need for each Lync Front End server to use network resources to obtain application information – it’s available locally.
In the case of Lync, this change enables better scaling as well as providing resilience (a front end server can continue to work in the case of errors elsewhere in your network). While pretty much all of the complex stuff, with respect to Windows Fabric, is done auto-magically for you, it is important to understand what it’s doing, why and some of the issues arising.
One of key issues that arises from the integration of Windows Fabric and Lync is the recommendation of always having at least three ES servers in an ES pool. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg412996.aspx for the details of this limitation.
For more information on the integration of Lync 2013 and Windows Fabric, see Richard Brynsteson’s post on the Mastering Lync blog.
Last week, Microsoft held their annual Lync Conference in Las Vegas. If you attended the conference, no doubt you missed some sessions – but all is not lost. If you were, like me, unable to go – all is not totally lost.
Superstar MVP Tom Arbuthnot has a script that will enable you to download all the sessions – PowerPoint's and videos. See Tom’s Blog for the PowerShell script to download sessions, along with some instructions on running it.
However: this script is currently only of use to attendees – those who did not attend will need to wait a while before Microsoft will release the material to a wider audience. As soon as I hear that this is available, I’ll blog it!
As I write this, Microsoft is running their annual Lync conference in Las Vegas. I would have liked to attend, but such is life. Up to about now, the news has been dribbling out, but UClarity a Swedish firm has summarised the first day’s news. You can read it here: http://www.uclarity.se/lync-conference-2014-dag-1/ but the content is in Swedish. Users of Chrome get offered a translation automatically, but if not, try going here: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.uclarity.se%2Flync-conference-2014-dag-1%2F&act=url
Lync joins other Microsoft products in the billion dollar club! With the release of the Q4 earnings, Microsoft has disclosed that is now taking in over one billion US$ and revenue grew 30% This is fantastic news to those of us watching in the Lync space.
As part of the earnings call, Microsoft also divulged that Skype delivered 162 billion call minutes this quarter. My wife calls her dad every day and they chat for an hour – so I know where a few hundred of those minutes come from – but 162 billion is a lot of call time. I suspect many telcos would love to have that call volume (well that volume in PAID calls anyway!).
Tom Arbuthnot has a few more comments about this over on his blog. It makes interesting reading.
It’s been a quiet week for Lync News as all the interesting stuff is happening at the Lync Conference in Las Vegas. One very interesting tit-bit is the news that Microsoft is aiming to deliver Lync/Skype video chat interoperability by the middle of this year. At long last!
Paul Thurrot has more information over on his WinSuperSite, including some good background to this announcement. You can read it here: http://winsupersite.com/skype/microsoft-track-deliver-lyncskype-video-chat-interop-mid-year.
In that article, Paul also discloses that there will be a Lync application for Android tablets, although he did not name the date.
I am looking forward to hearing more of the news from Las Vegas and the Lync conference. I was hoping we’d also hear a bit more about the next version of Lync – but so far not much news.
One of the big changes with Lync has been Microsoft’s approach of investing in a particular product for a particular function/feature and then have other products leverage that investment. This really makes sense on two levels. First, product groups are not each re-inventing the same wheel. Second, it really makes the ‘better together’ argument more real and less hype.
For example, with Lync 2013, all contact information is in a single Unified Contact Store which is maintained by Exchange 2013. The architecture for that looks like this:
Microsoft has just published an awesome set of posters that illustrate all the current sets of feature integration along with loads of links and more information. I find this a fantastic Lync resource (if only the Microsoft Learning courses were as well described!
You can download these posters (it’s a 9 page PDF) from http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=311975
I have setup a Paper.Li weekly newsletter of news on UC and in particular Lync. You can see it: here. You can also subscribe (free) and get an abbreviated version in your mail box every Monday Morning. The mail can be clicked to get to the full content. The language is set to English, with coverage from around the globe.
In Lync, and indeed with almost any VOIP product, call quality can vary. This variation can be caused by a number of factors, including network delay, jitter, packet loss, and under powered PCs. Diagnosing the causes is difficult if you don’t have all the facts.
Microsoft has issues a pair of new tools< PreCall Diagnostics Tool, that run on Win 7 (desktop) and Win 8 (as a metro/modern app). You can get the Desktop application here, and the modern app here.
To understand more about the tool(s) and what the out means, take a look at an excellent blog article by Byron Spurlock.
Microsoft’s Lync server has a great feature called E911 – Emergency calling mainly for the UK and Canada. I teach Lync and find this topic to be of only minor interest in the UK and Europe mainly because we do not have E911 service over here (yet, anyway!).
Gary Williams has just published a great blog article entitled Is it OK to Place a Test Call to Emergency Services. His answer is Yes and he goes about telling how to do it. I have to say, I’ve always been quite nervous about testing out calls to 999 – and have only twice every had to call it for real.
But Gary’s article makes it clear that yes you can do this and also makes the good point that not testing it can be life threatening if it doesn’t work. He sets out how to do it in the article and it’s pretty simple. Gary also notes another potential gotcha – Lync will add a leading “+” to the number (e.g. if you dial 999, Lync ‘dials’ +999). Thus it’s vital that you have your routes are set up expecting this.
I just love how the market is creating little useful add-ins to increases the functionality and value of Lync. The most recent one I’ve found is a product called SuperToast. It’s made by Modality Systems and you can read about it over on Modality’s web site.
SuperToast is a Lync application that notifies a Lync user of any missed instant messages and telephone or video calls. If an instant message is not acknowledged within a certain timeframe, or a call goes unanswered, SuperToast pops up a window in the centre of your screen, notifying you of any missed items. It stays there until you click it away and add any subsequent missed IM’s or calls to the list.
The value here should be obvious. For all too many IT Pros, and Information Workers, it is all too easy to miss an incoming instant message or call from a colleague, partner or even a customer. Combine that with the difficulty of being able to see when or what IM’s and calls you have missed. SuperToast avoids important queries going unnoticed.
Microsoft publishes lots of information about sizing and even has a neat free capacity calculator you can download (Did I mention it was free!). But knowing where to start and what to look out for is harder especially for those who don’t do a lot of sizing work.
In browsing around, I found an interesting post that looks at a proposed sizing for 1500 users, consisting if three Front End servers, plus more. The author was asking for advice and the rest of the post is just that advice.
If you are planning on deploying Lync, this might make good reading and is certainly good food for thought.
Lync Server’s Enterprise Voice feature aims to enable you to replace your PBX. Enterprise voice helps you to get your users to use either a soft phone, the Lync client, or replace their existing desk phone with a Lync Phone.
Lync Phones are full IP phones – they contain some sort of computer and OS that either runs the Lync Phone Edition client or runs a compatible client. Both modes enable the phone to participate fully in your Lync environment.
One of the bigger players in the VOIP and Lync market is snom, and they’ve just produced a simple free eBook entitled: Using Microsoft Lync with Voice and snom Lync Qualified Phones. This is a 4 chapter book that covers an overview of Lync Phones, how to provision and customise Lync phones and how to integrate PC/Phone and Lync.
The eBook is free, but to get it you must first register with snom, which you can do on their website. The book itself is here.
The book is a good introduction to the Lync Phone even if you choose not to use snom phones.
A SIP Trunk is a connection from your telephony solution to the PSTN via a SIP Provider. For Lync, this means the route to the PSTN is via the SIP provider, with all the signaling traffic being SIP and the audio being sent via RTP. This avoids having to have a local gateway to convert the signaling and audio into what the PSTN interface requires. SIP providers can be a cheaper PSTN Interconnection alternative to going direct to your local PSTN (e.g. British Telecom).
This means the PSTN connection is at level 3 in the ISO stack, not level 2 (which the normal PSTN connection uses). Someday, in the not overly far future I suggest that all PSTN connections will be via direct SIP, although it may take a few decades to get there.
Sip Trunks can provide many advantages. They can often be a cheaper PSTN Interconnection alternative to going direct to your local PSTN (e.g. British Telecom). They are also are a lot easier and faster to provision than traditional Level 2 connections. And, in many cases, you can create a short term trunk (e.g. for some event) more cost effectively than a traditional PSTN line.
With Lync 2013, SIP Trunks are very easy to integrate into your environment and can provide great cost savings – if nothing else, you don’t need separate PSTN gateways! If you are planning on deploying Lync Enterprise Voice, SIP trunks are something worth looking at.
Enterprise Connect Webinars are holding a 1-hour webcast on Jan 29th at 19:00 GMT – sadly late in the day for the UK, but mid afternoon EST and late morning on USA’s west coast. This web cast will describe the opportunities and challenges of SIP Trunking and will feature a detailed case study. You can signup for the webinar on line: Here.
While most of us use January to look forward to what’s coming in the next year and getting up to speed with the challenges, I find it often useful to take a look back at what happened last year. To that end, Irwin Lazar of Nemertes Research as set out an interesting look at 2013, in an article entitled ‘The UC Market Year in Review’ which was carried by the NoJitter site.
Lazar focused on four primary technologies that stood out on 2013: Cloud, Lync, UC Mobility and Video. The cloud continues to receive a huge amount of attention from a variety of vendors not least Microsoft. Lazar believes that the Cloud will only grow more important over the coming year.
As for Lync, Lazar notes that Microsoft is making inroads into the IP Telephony market, with 13% market share, which Avaya is tied at 13%, but Cisco continues to lead with 32% market share. Lazar predicts that Microsoft will continue to make waves and will aggressively target it’s competition, although at present Lazar claims Lync is significantly more expensive to operate than some of the competition – something no doubt that Microsoft will address in the next version of Lync.
Mobility is also a feature that was being adopted widely during 2013, a trend that Lazar predicts will grow significantly in 2014. Lazar expects that percentage of employees using tablets as their primary work device to climb to over 20% in 2014. Video too is likely to go ballistic as it becomes ever easier to record video which translates to a demand for Enterprise style YouTube capabilities.
An interesting paper, and certainly it ties in with the kinds of questions and issues I’m seeing in the forums and in my courses. And if you take the time to read his article, make sure you look at the comments – some interesting observations there!
One nice feature of Lync (and OCS before that) is the Server’s ability to provide clients with details of errors that occurred whilst the server was attempting to process a SIP command sent from the client. This is done by extending SIP to enable both client and server to report errors to each other. A new SIP header, Diagnostics, is used to report errors The idea is that if the server has an error, the client can get more information and possibly provide better information both to the end user and to any help desk support engineer.
This extension, snappily known as MS-OCER, an hot it is used is defined in the Client Error Reporting Protocol document you can download from Microsoft at: http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/F/16F4E321-AA6B-4FA3-8AD3-E94C895A3C97/%5bMS-OCER%5d.pdf
The PDF file, which runs to just under 200 pages, describes The details of the protocol plus full details of every Error ID including the reason for the error, are included in this document. This is a document that is likely to be of great value when you are troubleshooting!
Interestingly, although the document was last updated last November, there appear to be no Lync 2013 specific messages – only those for Lync 2010 and earlier. I assume that the Lync 2013 errors are the same as for Lync 2010, but there’s nothing I can see in the document to confirm that.
I just found an interesting white paper, produced by Mindlink Software. It’s entailed The value of Persistent Chat in Incident Management, Support and Business Continuity. The paper, which is short, starts form the premises that a) the workplace is changing and b) email is not a panacea in this new world. In areas such as incident management, business continuity and support – the ability to share knowledge quickly and communicate efficiently is vital. With geographically dispersed teams, increasing mobility and the constant challenge to do more with less. The paper concludes with some great use cases for PC and a more in-depth case study. Sadly, there is no economic justifications presented – these would have been very useful in helping readers to gauge likely ROI.
If you are planning on deploying Lync, or considering upgrading to the latest version, you should consider adding in Persistent Chat into the mix. With Lync 2013, you no longer need loads of extra servers to support PC – you can co-locate the PC servers on your front ends and utilise existing SQL Server for the databases needed by PC.
With Lync (as with OCS), your client is partly configured, in band, from the server and partly based on locally set registry keys. Things such as your contact list are obtained from the server once you are fully registered. Other things, such as whether to check spelling as you type, are set via registry settings. In a number of cases, these registry settings can be overridden by client policy settings. For example, you could set the registry to show emoticons, but disable it via client policy.
Richard Brynsteon has written two excellent blog posts that map every client setting to the registry entry that controls that setting. As well, Richard shows where the registry setting can be overridden by a suitable client policy.
Part one, which sets out information on the General and Personal tabs can be found: Here. Part 2 sets out information on the Contacts List and Status tab can be found: Here.
