Since kicking things off on this blog in April I’ve written a fair bit about Lync Server 2010 and have really enjoyed sharing the issues and resolutions I’ve encountered along the way as well as announcing our UC User Group events.
2011 has been a really successful year for us at Modality and me personally, with loads of great diverse projects across England. As it’s that time of year, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on what I’ve written about during the year and share the highlights:

Mac Musings

As a Mac user, there was a heavy focus on the Communicator/Lync experience on OS X in a lot of my posts. One of my first posts was comparing Communicator for Mac 2011 to Lync 2010 on the PC.
When Lync for Mac 2011 came out in September, I was one of the first blogs to publish a review of the new client.

Miscellaneous Thoughts

There’s sometimes I sit and think “it would be worthwhile if someone just created a really clear document around how this works” when I’m looking at a particular component of Lync for a customer for based on a question someone has asked on the TechNet forums. As a result, I wrote some stuff about Demystifying Photos in Lync, how Lync uses Exchange Calendar information and How to exclude local intranet URLs when setting up URL filtering.

I also pushed the boundaries a bit in October by looking at CUCI-Lync and why you should think twice.

Interview with a UC Pro

The Interview with a UC Pro series has gone from strength to strength, and over the course of the year I interviewed folks from around the world that lead the way in the community. In 2011, I interviewed these guys:
Alex Lewis, Tom Pacyk, Chris Norman, Adam Jacobs, Jeff Schertz and Tom Laciano.

Exciting news about this concept coming up in 2012, stay tuned for an announcement.

Lync and SQL Mirroring

A started a series dedicated to finding out if SQL Mirroring works with Lync Server 2010, since the only official statement was that it was “not supported”. I set out to determine why this was the case and what happens when you deploy your databases onto a pair of SQL mirror nodes. Check out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. I still haven’t written the part about Group Chat yet, so stay tuned for that in 2012.

Everyone goes nuts over mobile clients

When the new mobile clients became available last week, every man and his dog started doing backflips over getting it up and running. Much discussion occurred on twitter about when the clients became available in the App Store/Marketplaces and then loads of people complained about the lack of features.

To throw my hat in the ring, I got my hands on the iPhone client and published one of the first looks at the client for iPhone.

Bring on 2012

Thanks for subscribing to my blog, I hope I’ve been able to bring you valuable content on Lync Server 2010 this year. I recently received my 3 year UK work permit, so I’m looking forward to another productive year in London and can’t wait to bring you even more Lync related content in 2012.

This morning (UK time) the Lync 2010 for iPhone client (finally) appeared in the App Store. I’ve installed it and run through all of the functionality, and am stoked to bring you a run down of what everything looks like on this long awaited mobile client.

Signing In

When I first fire up the client, I’m greeted with the initial sign in screen to provide my SIP address and password. I can also drop down the More Details option to provide additional authentication/server details:

Once I’ve ready to go I hit Sign In and am presented with a screen telling me I’m being signed in, followed by a one-time run splash screen.

After I’ve been signed in, I’m asked to provide my mobile number so Lync can join me to meetings and so I can use the Call via Work feature.

My Info

When I first sign in, I’m greeted with my own information, showing my note, status and whether simultaneous ringing is on:

From here I can set my status, change some basic options and set my simultaneous ring options:

Contact List

When I touch the Contacts tab, I’m presented with my full Lync contact list in all it’s photo-adorned glory:

When I touch on a user I’m presented with their contact card and all their information. I can choose to IM them, call them or email them:

Chats

From the user’s contact card, I can initiate an IM session with them and go ahead and start sending IMs like normal:

From here, I can then bring up some more options by touching the icon in the right top corner where I can opt to call the contact, send my location or delete the conversation:

Sending My Location

This is a pretty cool new feature – I can send my address and a link to a map in an IM. Handy for telling people where you are on the go.
When I hit Send Location, Lync uses the iPhone’s GPS to locate me on Bing Maps:

Once it’s pinpointed where I am, it shows the approximate address and point on the map (in this case, our office in St Albans ) before I press Send:

Once I’ve clicked Send, Lync sends an IM to the other user informing them of my address and gives them a link to a Bing Map of where I am. Smart.

Finally, if I press the back button (in the top left of the screen), I’m taken to my active chats:

Joining Meetings

From the Meetings tab, I can see the meetings I have on during that day:

Note, this information is pulled directly from Exchange and not from the local iPhone calendar. I verified this by creating an Online Meeting in Outlook and then saw it refresh in Lync Mobile first and not the iPhone Calendar.

When I touch on the meeting, I’m then greeted with the event details and an option to join the Online Meeting:

After I click on Join Meeting, I’m presented with a screen informing me that I’m joining the meeting and that Lync is preparing to call me, shortly followed by an incoming call:

Making Calls

When I press the Phone tab, I’m greeted with a display of my voicemails. By clicking on these, I can opt for Lync to call me back to play these messages to me:

Note that this is mobile carrier voicemail and NOT Exchange Unified Messaging voicemail.  Upon further investigation I have found that this is in fact Exchange UM Voicemail and not your mobile carrier’s voicemail.

I can also press the keypad icon in the top left corner to get a dial pad where I can make calls. These calls are initiated from the Lync server using the “Call via Work” function over the PSTN (Randy Wintle wrote a great post defending this functionality).

This enables Single Number Reach and ensures whoever I call sees the same single work number regardless of which device I use.

Conclusion

It’s fantastic to finally see the iPhone client in the wild and available to the masses. It’s fast, doesn’t churn battery like CoMo did and the calendar integration is tip-top.

As with all IT assets, make sure you evaluate this client properly and set the correct expectations for your users before supporting it. Be prepared for calls to your helpdesk asking about this client and the others (WP7/Android) as they are freely downloadable from the App Store but won’t work unless your backend Lync infrastructure is up to scratch.

It’s that time again. Time for another kick-ass Microsoft UC User Group meeting here in London, this time in January back at our original home of Bow Bells House. This time around, it’s all about mobility baby!

With the Lync Mobility pieces all out in the wild and the Android and Windows Phone clients available, everybody’s talking about the new Lync Mobile client. We’ll be covering the architecture, explaining how it works, how you configure your Lync environment, demoing the clients and much more.
Hopefully the iPhone/iPad app will be in the App Store by then also, so we’ll be able to demo those as well.

We’ve also teamed up with Audiocodes to bring you information about their new mobility and call recording solution and as usual Adam, Tom and I will bring you all the latest Lync Server 2010 news to close up the night.
And it wouldn’t be a user group without a few pints afterwards at the pub next door.

Where: Bow Bells House, 1 Bread Street EC4M 9BE London (Map Link)
When: 6pm, Jan 19th 2012

For more info including the agenda and the registration link, check out the post on the MUCUG London blog here.

Just a quick one to spread the word that Lync Server 2010 Group Chat is now supported by Microsoft on SQL Server 2008 R2. Official word is on NextHop over here.

This is great news after the original announcement in April that SQL Server 2008 R2 was supported for all what I call “first class” Lync Server database requirements e.g. Front End pool, Archiving, Monitoring databases.

To extrapolate from this, here is what it means for everyone using or planning to use Lync Server 2010 Group Chat:

• No longer are two different versions of SQL Server required to be deployed (e.g. 2008 and 2008 R2) in your environment to be in a Microsoft supported scenario.
• Those organisations planning Lync Server deployments today that include Group Chat can design their deployments on a consistent SQL Server 2008 R2 platform and be safe in the fact that they will be supported by Microsoft in production.

Time to go plan your SQL consolidation projects.

Hot on the heels of CU4 coming out, a huge amount of noise was created last Friday as loads more info became publicly available about enabling the Mobility components for Lync. A Partner Network event also took place detailing a lot of high level info.

The Mobility Server install files can now be downloaded here and you’ll want to download the Mobility Guide here also that documents the entire deployment process.
To help you along the way, fellow MUCUG London founder Adam Jacobs has also published a mega comprehensive step by step installation guide over on his blog.

Fellow Modality Systems consultant Ari Protheroe has published a great gotcha post on what not to do to get the Mobility and Autodiscover services installed. Could easily trip anyone up that goes at it like a bull out of a gate.

Also of note, the Mobility content has been added to the Lync Server 2010 TechNet Library:

• Planning for Mobility
• Planning for Mobile Clients
• Deploying Mobility
• Monitoring Mobility for Performance

When will the clients be available?

They’re up on the Windows Phone Marketplace now on the UK store and US store (thanks to Ben Lee for announcing these on twitter and a great overview post of the WP7 client in action).

iPhone and iPad clients should be available this week (wc 12th Dec 2011) and will depend on how long it takes for them to get through the Apple App Store approval process (something all apps are subject to and a process we’re familiar with at Modality).

It’s my understanding that the Android app will appear in the Android Market during this week as well.

What a great way to kick off Monday hey? Awesome to see these clients finally hit the streets and continue the great Lync experience on mobile devices.

This week I’m interviewing one of the legends of the Microsoft UC community, Tom Laciano of Microsoft.
His blog has been a resource I’ve called on time and time again over the years to help me out with a sticky problem or explain something. He’s always provided great LCS/OCS/Lync technical content for as long as I’ve been playing with the product since the LCS 2005 days.

I had the pleasure of meeting Tom at Wave 14 Airlift in Seattle last year and thought it was time I pulled him aside and asked him some questions about his UC career.

• What’s your technical background? How did you end up where you are today?
  My father worked at IBM which influenced me and my brother and sister. The Commodore 64 was the first family computer and then various IBM PC’s. I recall taking a BASIC class at the community college and my Dad even quizzed me at one time to add numbers in Hex. I chose Business Administration in College and thanks to a roommate and my wife then girlfriend I put my resume in for Microsoft starting with DOS 5.x and Windows 3.1 support. I moved over to the Messaging team when Exchange 4.0 was in beta, a short stint in training and back to support when LCS 2003 was first released. I moved to the Product Group working with key customers facing unique deployments or significant challenges and just recently moved to a new team I’ll describe in the next question.

• Can you tell us what part of Microsoft you work for and what your position entails?
  I am now in the Office 365 group with Lync Online in the dedicated space as an Operations Manager. The role is very much a Project Management skillset. My current role is working with existing customers who want to deploy the Enterprise Voice feature set with either a SIP Trunk or On-Premise SBC. While I have a technical background in the product which can help with customer dialogs, I am the person who is responsible for managing the project towards completion.
  

  Tom with his wife and 3 kids

• What first made you get into UC and specialising in Lync?
  It was a bit of luck as when I moved back to support from training, I moved to the Windows Networking team. My first day on the team was a morale event cookout and the guy who was returning from beta was in desperate need of folks he could train on this new product. I mentioned being new with no real work load yet and it sounded like another “verb” application as Exchange Conferencing was, so how hard could that be? J

• What’s your favourite thing about Lync?
  As a remote worker I have two things. First is the integration of presence in websites and Office which helps me maintain a really small contact list. The second thing I like is how easy it is to join a meeting and have video and shared content.

• What was the most challenging LCS/OCS/Lync problem you ever solved?
  I will choose one of the earliest calls I took because it really helped me gain an expertise. I helped the IT Admin for one of the State Supreme Courts setting up LCS 2003 with TLS so the judge could have a secure wireless dialog with his team. The woman I assisted was sharp and patient and through that issue I learned firsthand that documentation can be a great start, but the truth is in the actual behavior of the product.

• If you could think of one feature you’d like included in the next version of Lync, what would it be?
  Having worked with customers in this area for some time I would have to say having Group Chat becoming a first class experience.
  

  Tom with his son at the Speedway

• What do you feel is your area of expertise, where you’d consider yourself a bit of a rockstar?
  I still believe I possess significant knowledge in the area of certificates for the product.

• Your blog is known for being a insightful, consistent resource across the entire lifespan of the LCS/OCS/Lync product. When did you start it and what direction has it taken?
  I started in 2004 and other than just the subsequent versions of the product, I would say the one change has been the inclusion of a few off-topic posts. I still find this one hilarious

• Whereabouts in the USA are you from and what do you think makes your hometown/city great?
  I am from Concord, NC. The Tourism folks would love for me to say Lowe’s Motor Speedway or Concord Mills Mall but I like the older part of the town with its small shops and restaurants. While this is in Charlotte and not Concord, my favorite BBQ restaurant is Old Hickory House BBQ on N. Tryon Street. They have an antique telephone switchboard in the front of the restaurant which I find funny given my work with the next generation of voice technology.

• When you’re not dishing out quality technical know-how, what do you do on weekends for fun?
  My wife and I have 4 kids so most of our time involves coaching their sports and this summer was my first year having “ownership” of her Mom’s garden. Turns out you don’t buy 2 flats of tomato plants or squash and certainly 1 hot pepper plant and not 10 is enough. This meant that this was the first year I learned how to can tomatoes.
  

  Tom's 1st batch of garden tomatoes

  Also, I met my wife in college as she helped start the Women’s Club Soccer team and I was their first coach. This was our first year back playing adult co-ed soccer in about 7 years. I play both goalie and defense, she plays mid-field and forward.