October 7th, 2011 | Tags: , ,

With the recent “Indian Summer” well and truly behind us (Brits) I thought what what better way to welcome in the Autumn season than posting a brief update on what is happening in the world of Microsoft UC 🙂

First up, Lync on the Mac – it has been known for some time (even with the equivalent R2 client released a year back) that Lync on the Mac was lacking in capability. Which is why the new Lync for Mac client has received a very warm winter welcome. This is now available for download via TechNet, MSDN and the Microsoft Volume Licensing site.

Then there is Skype and Microsoft, the purchase was announced back in May and only today did the EU bless the deal. This is great news because it might mean we’ll start to see tighter Skype integration start to appear within the relevant Microsoft products – Lync often referred to as a key driver behind the deal.

Mobile still remains to be one of the most common asks and with the release of Windows Phone 7.5 (aka Mango) the Lync mobile client can only be more imminent than ever with a target date no later than the back end of 2011 – if I were a betting man (and I have no inside information on this) I’d imagine this will hit your corresponding smart phone market place some time pretty soon.

Microsoft Lync 2010 “awareness materials” are also available for download, a great resource for driving successful Lync workplace deployments, it can also be customised to fit in with your corresponding company “colours”

Another great download is a plug-in developed by the folks at “Project Leadership Assoc.”, called Lync Social. This free plug allows you to post Lync status updates directly to Twitter and LinkedIn via the Lync client – nice! (for a installation instructions, a fellow Lync MVP, Tom Arbuthnot has a guide here)

Lync CU3 client, server and phone updates also went out in July and hit Windows Update in August – in case you didn’t know this process typically takes a month to work it’s was through the Microsoft update quaranine.

Last but by no means least I, along with Justin Morris and Tom Arbuthnot setup a new London-based Microsoft Unified Communications User Group (or MUCUGL for short!). We had our first event in July and our second event is due later this month, I have to say I really underestimated how much satisfaction I’d get out of bringing like-minded folks together – it was great and I’m looking forward to the next event on Polycom Lync Interoperability on October 20th.

To learn more about MUCUGL and register for the event head here.

Now back to sweeping the leaves from my driveway…(apparently an endless job!)

September 20th, 2011 | Tags: ,

Then help is at hand (if you are in London on 20th October 11 of course) as the next MUCUGL event is a unique opportunity to learn more about what Polycom can offer enterprises looking for enhanced conferencing capability. The October agenda can be found below, register now to avoid disapointment!

In this, our second MUCUG gathering, the kind folks at Polycom have offered to host the event at their London Executive Briefing Centre, or EBC – naturally we agreed!

“The Polycom® Executive Briefing Centers and Solutions Centers offer exciting experiences that are unlike any others in the world of corporate briefings. At a Polycom center, you can explore the full range of our solutions hands-on, and easily envision how they can work specifically in your business.”

In our first session Mike Adams (Polycom Customer Experience Manager) will be running a series of Polycom/Lync integration demos – it’ll be a 6pm sharp kick-off, so if you are late you might miss out!

Then what better way of demonstrating Polycom’s telepresence but by Mike Stacy and Jeff Schertz (Polycom Solutions Architects and Lync MVPs) joining us to present on Audio/Video Conferencing and Interop in Lync Server.

Finally Tom, Justin and Adam will provide an industry update and focussed Lync guidance/sharing.

A full agenda can be found below, we’re looking forward to seeing you there!

Date: Oct 20th 2011 Title: Lync Server Conferencing and Interop
Times Topics
18.00-18.40 – (Mike Adams, Customer Experience Manager) Polycom Telepresence and Lync Server Interop Demonstration
18.40-19.00 – (Networking) N/A
19.00-19.30 – (Mike Stacy and Jeff Schertz, Lync MVPs) Audio/Video Conferencing and Interop in Lync Server
19.30-20.00 – (Chalk/Talk & Gen. Update) Focussed Lync guidance/sharing, latest resources and speaker specific updates. (All)

Registration: here

Location:

Polycom Executive Briefing Centre
69 Old Broad St
Dashwood House (16th Floor), Broadgate
EC2 London
United Kingdom

September 9th, 2011 | Tags: , , ,


Those that use Mac OS will no doubt be aware that there are a number of limitations within the Communicator for Mac client, most notable being that inability to experience the full conferencing capability of Lync (Lync Web App does go some way to address this).

Also unlike the PC Lync client it is unable to hookup to Office 365 or “Lync Online”, but fear not…help is at hand. Last night the Office for Mac blog announced that the Lync for Mac 2011 had been “released to manufacturing”, great news for Mac users and as with other Cocoa-based apps it looks very Apple-esque!

For a detailed Mac Communicator and the Windows Lync client comparison i’d recommend reading an article on Justin Morris’s blog here also for the full announcement head here. A video tour of the new Mac Lync client due for release in October is below…

August 26th, 2011 | Tags:

I’m a big fan of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant reports, they are well written and extremely credible analysis. I myself  have subscribed and find it incredibly useful – over time I have had to succumb to the fact that I can’t always be on top of all that is leading in enterprise technology.

So with that said a couple of days back Gartner refreshed their annual UC MQ report, first and foremost it will come as no surprise that Microsoft have managed to sustain their pole position for the sixth year running.

I won’t dig too deep into the the detail (as a link to the full report can be found below) but I thought picking out key changes within the respective 2010/11 quadrants (see illustration below) would be of value, from this we can glean the following:

  • + Alcatel-Lucent have moved up from “challenging” to “leading”
  • + Siemens have moved up from “visionaries” to “leading”
  • + Hauwei Technologies are new on the UC scene (just when you though these guys only manufactured 3G dongles?!?)
  • + Digium (the folks that make Asterisk) have at long last entered the quadrant, specifically within the niche players market
  • – Interactive Intelligence  have dropped from “visionaries” to “niche players”
  • – IBM have been overtaken by NEC
  • – SAP have dropped off all together

For a full read of the report, it can be accessed here (no Garter subscription required)

A couple of months back my workplace decided to embark upon OCS federation and the enablement of public Live Meetings, a little late to the party I know – but better late than never! 🙂

When we originally planned our deployment (3 or so years ago) we decided to use internal SIP addresses only (i.e. firstname.lastname@company.local) so as a part of our move toward OCS federation we were forced to shift to public facing addresses (i.e. firstname.lastname@company.com). This of course resulted in a change to our existing SIP addresses and two migration pain points:

  1. Live Meeting scheduling data was now invalid and required updating (manual intervention seemed to be the best option here)
  2. Default Exchange UM addresses, stored within Outlook, were incorrect. I’ll go on to explain this in more detail

The scenario I am depicting here is one where you initiate a play on phone call via Outlook and you are presented with the dialogue below:

Given that my SIP address has changed to adam.jacobs@imaucserver.co.uk  this UM call would no longer route correctly. Therefore every time play on phone was initiated I needed to manually change the drop-down list to adam.jacobs@imaucserver.co.uk – which becomes very annoying over a prolonged period of time.

The play on phone number is initially set by OCS when you enable a user and specify their SIP URI, when SIP addresses are subsequently updated numbers are added and the old address left as-is. In addition the numbers are not re-prioritised – the default number will still be set to the previous address. To change this default setting I at first I started crawling the registry and discovered multiple references to my old SIP address – I realised pretty quickly that the scope for damage was high and chance of success low-to-medium! 🙂

I am ashamed to admit that the solution to my problem was far more simple, it was within the Outlook voicemail options (see below):

With this updated my default address for Exchange UM play on phone was now correct and I no longer needed to fiddle with the drop-drop. 🙂

July 25th, 2011 | Tags:

The latest batch of Lync cumulative updates are detailed below:

Update: Lync CU3 updates are now available via Windows Update

Server-side updates

Client-side updates

  • Lync 2010 (Communicator) – KB25715423 – download (x86 / x64)
  • Lync 2010 Group Chat Client – KB2500446download
  • Lync 2010 Phone Edition (Polycom CX500, CX600 & CX3000) – KB2529977download
  • Lync 2010 Phone Edition (Aastra 6721ip & 6725ip) – KB2529978download
  • Lync 2010 Phone Edition (Polycom CX700 & LG Nortel 8540) – KB2577593download