I'm a UC Blog

Earlier today SteveB announced the release of Office 365, the next iteration of Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Services or BPOS. As a side note Office 2010 SP1 was also released to the web and can be downloaded here for x86 and here for x64.

As a part of the Office 365 offering comes Lync Online, a hosted version of Lync Server 2010. In actual fact you can even get an on-premises Lync Plus CAL (this includes Enterprise Voice) should you opt for the Office 365 E4 Plan.

So what are the differences between the two on-premises and hosted or live editions of Lync? I found a great feature comparison matrix in the Lync Online for Enterprises Service Description, it even illustrates the difference between Lync Online and Office Communications Online.

Updated table now available here

If the answer is yes, then Justin Morris Tom Arbuthnot and myself would welcome you to our first Microsoft Unified Communications User Group London or MUCUGL event.

This recently formed user group is being run by Justin, Tom, John Lamb (a fellow Lync MVP) and myself, if you’d like to learn more about us, then head to the MUCUGL website here. Alternatively if you would like to know more about the user group, head here.

In this, our first MUCUG event, the first presentation by Adam Jacobs will introduce Lync Server and some high level differences over OCS. In the second session Justin Morris will talk about the resilience capability available in Lync Server, demonstrating how the Microsoft UC stack could replace an enterprise PBX.

We’d also like to encourage attendees bring their own topics for a chalk and talk session, for example, particular adoption or environmental barriers (existing voice setup, business case suggestions or integration opportunities).

Finally Tom Arbuthnot will cover off an industry update, including notable new resources, announcements and futures. Q. & A. and then to the pub!

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

Registration: here

On the off chance that you are new to Lync Server 2010, I have embedded below a video presentation taken at Microsoft UK Tech.Days 2011, where I introduce (at a high level) the differences between OCS 2007 R2 and Lync Server 2010.

A while back I paid homage to a great movie director, namely Stanley Kubrick and the accuracy of his UC predictions made within 2001: a Space Odyssey.

But my memory was jogged when I saw a fellow MVP (Kevin Peters) tweet out a 1950’s instructional video on “How to dial a telephone number” –  for me nothing matches a British video made in the late 1960’s predicting telecommunications in the 1990’s. Not only is this scarily accurate but very funny too.

For those that have not seen this already, enjoy!

Vodafone UK have been very busy ensuring that they are well equipped to embrace UC, building upon their existing product portfolio…enter Vodafone One (not to be confused with Vodafone One Net/Express, their SME equivalents).

Vodafone One enables businesses to fully converge it’s fixed and mobile telephony and yes you guessed it with Microsoft Office Communications Server as the core enabler for a fully immersed fixed or Windows desktop experience.

My workplace had already deployed OCS (no surprises there…) when we decided that we needed deeper mobile integration, ideally at carrier level. We chose Vodafone One as best fit and we haven’t looked back!

I’ll be speaking at one of their road shows later this week, focussing primarily on the business drivers behind UC and how we at First Rate delivered these enablers with OCS and Vodafone One.

I’ll also make my decks available (later this week) via the resources section on the blog.

For more information on Vodafone One, head here

I had an interesting Lync Edge Server encounter a week or so back and I thought I’d share the solution to my problem, especially given that Google (or Bing for the matter) didn’t shed any light on the issue.

The scenario (for me anyways) was whereby I had pushed a blank policy to my Edge Server, the basic thought being that I’d clear and start anew. This unfortunately led to a complete disconnect between my Central Management Store (CMS) and the replica (or local) CMS database.

The error (illustrated below) generated two event IDs (14611) & (42012) – there were other subsequent errors, but these were the root cause.

All was of course not lost, with some very clever PowerShell magic I was back up and running!

First off I needed to amend/publish my topology, including the required parameters I originally wanted to replicate to the Edge Server. Given the issue on-hand I was required to export the topology using the Export-CsConfiguration cmdlet (see below)

This created a zip file on the root of C: (see below)

Now I had a copy of my configuration or topology, I needed to load this onto my Edge Server. This process will be familiar to the initial Lync Server setup, although without the wizard UI. Once a copy of my exported topology had been copied to the Edge Server (in my case I copied Config.zip to C:\) I needed one more PowerShell cmdlet to complete the task – Import-CsConfiguration (see illustration below)

Note the -LocalStore parameter, this intructs the configuration data to be imported to the local computer instead of the Central Management store.

Finally I’d suggest you restart your Edge Server, you could just head straight for services.msc and start the services manually, but I’m lazy and opted for reboot 🙂

I hope this helps…