Interview with a UC Pro – Tom Pacyk

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Next up in the new series of Interview with a UC Pro, we’ve got Tom Pacyk. He represents the State-side UC bloggers and has helped me out loads of times in the past through his blog and on Twitter. Here’s what he’s all about:
  • What’s your technical background?
    I started out working the helpdesk (didn’t everyone?) of the engineering department while going to school. I actually had fully planned on working mostly with web design and development, but in the end I couldn’t spend all day looking at code. I did internships for a few years at Motorola before landing a full time gig there as a Windows System Administrator where I got my first taste of Exchange and LCS. Shortly after that I got into consulting for Microsoft UC products and I think I’d have a very tough time ever going back to a regular job at this point.
  • What organisation do you work for and what’s your position?
    The company I’ve been at for almost 2 years now is called ExtraTeam (www.extrateam.com). My role there is Principal Systems Architect and I spend my days working mostly with Lync or Exchange projects.
  • What first made you get into UC and specialising in Lync?
    I’ve always been fascinated with the different ways people connect. Growing up my friends and I were big users of AOL IM and then moved on to using Skype pretty heavily when it first came out. When I took a new job in Portland, OR I started doing more and more with collaboration right around the time the OCS 2007 Beta came out. I was blown away with how cool it was and have been working with it ever since.
  • What’s your favourite thing about Lync?
    The Enterprise Voice features are huge for me since I do a lot of work remotely and am always moving to different spots. So having my phone number follow me around without any special set up on my end is a big advantage.
  • If you could think of one feature you’d like included in the next version of Lync, what would it be?
    I’d like to see more attention given to the Mac client. It’s in a pretty sorry state today compared to what’s available for the PC. We’re seeing lots of businesses using Macs more and more in the workplace, but it’s really tough to give those users a great experience with the current client.
  • What do you feel is your area of expertise, where you’d consider yourself a bit of a rockstar?
    I think our company is unique in that while we have a Microsoft practice with a bunch of MCMs we also have a fantastic Cisco practice filled with CCIE voice experts. So I’ve been able to learn more about Cisco UC than I ever expected, but I think that has translated to doing great Microsoft and Cisco UC integrations for customers. We’ve got some fancy tricks that I don’t think too many people are doing.
  • Tell me about your blog. When did you start it and what direction has it taken?
    I believe it shifted into its current focus on technology around the time I moved out to Portland, OR from Chicago so that would have been early in 2007. It’s had a few lives already – originally it was just a personal blog and I think for awhile I was using it document all my concert adventures. It turns out people are generally more interested in fixing these cryptic Microsoft errors on their screen than reading about someone’s 25th Pearl Jam show so I’ve been running with the technology theme since then.
  • Lastly on a bit more of a personal note, where are you from and what do you think makes your city great?
    I’ve been a little bit of all over so far, but right now I’m living smack in the middle of San Francisco, CA. It’s a fun town and there is definitely no shortage of things to do. Prior to that I lived in Portland for 2 years, but I actually grew up in the Chicago suburbs and went to school at Purdue (Boiler Up!) in the cornfields of Indiana.

Many thanks for the contribution Tom! Really great to hear about your background and how you got into UC.

You can read Tom’s blog at www.confusedamused.com and find him on twitter at @tompacyk

Communicator Web Access Observations in a Lync Environment

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I’ve recently deployed Communicator Web Access into what was basically a greenfield environment (no previous versions of OCS or LCS) and came across some interesting stuff in the process.
Usually when you deploy CWA, you’ve already got an OCS 2007 R2 Standard Edition or Enterprise Edition pool deployed, and the CWA deployment goes in nice and easy. Throw Lync into the mix without any existing R2 infrastructure, and you get some interesting behaviour.

Environment Preparation

Prior to deploying our Lync environment or any CWA components, we need to update AD accordingly for OCS 2007 R2 first. I won’t go into the details here because Randy Wintle has already done a good job of it.

Once AD is good to go, we can start building the CWA server.

Want to use Web Enrolment? Think again

Because there is no existing OCS 2007 R2 infrastructure and no Admin Tools to run against it, we can’t use the Certificate Wizard. My next step was to try using the CA’s web enrolment tool to retrieve a certificate.

I attempted this, and could request and retrieve a certificate fine. However, when it came to assigning this certificate for CWA to use, the Deployment Wizard would throw back an error saying please use a valid certificate and wouldn’t let me proceed. There is however, an alternative method.

Using a Certificate Request Policy File

To get a certificate for CWA that it likes, we need to go deep on this one and create a Certificate Request Policy file. We will use this to create a Certificate Signing Request on the local computer which we can use to request a certificate from the CA. For the process below, you can download an example one here.

Instructions:

  1. Copy the certificate request policy file to the server. Make note of where you copy this to (e.g. C:\).
  2. Log onto the server corresponding to the filename. Open CMD and run the following command:
    Certreq –new C:\SERVERNAME.txt SERVERNAME_Out.txt
    (change the filename to whatever it is you’ve named the file and then give the _Out file any name you like).
  3. It will generate a SERVERNAME_Out.txt for each one you run. These are our CSR (certificate signing request) files that we will submit to the Web Enrolment Tool.
  4. Open up the CSR file in Notepad, copy the contents out and use it to request a certificate using the Web Enrolment tool. ADCS will spit out a certificate for you and it’ll work for CWA.

This can be a bit tricky, so let me know in the comments if you have any troubles or questions.

Server Activation

If you’re deploying CWA into a Greenfield environment with no previous versions of OCS, you must have at least one OCS 2007 R2 pool deployed. This is because during activation, the CWA Deployment Wizard looks for a valid pool in AD to list in the drop-down menu as the next hop. If there’s no pools present in AD, the Activation Wizard will fail.

So there’s a few things to think about and plan for when it comes to deploying CWA into your new Lync environment. Any questions or comments, drop them below.

Interview with a UC Pro – Alex Lewis

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I think what makes the UC Pro community so valuable is the strength of its members and contributors. From around the world we have a plethora of very capable people who live, breathe and love Unified Communications, and love helping others realise the value.

I thought it was time we brought these guys forward and found out more about them. To work out why they’re helping drive the adoption of Unified Communications and why they’re some of the most sort after, go-to guys in the industry.

Kicking off the first of what will be a continuing interview series, I’ve got Alex Lewis in the hot seat.
He’s a stalwart of the UC community and a long time twitter compadre of mine. Here’s what he had to say:

  • What’s your technical background?
    I started out in aerospace (satellite design), so communications in general but a bit different than what I do now. I moved on to working for a CLEC on the east coast as a network architect and was responsible for building out the first VoIP network in the US and one of the first DSL rollouts.
  • What organisation do you work for and what’s your position?
    I am the UC practice lead and principal consultant for Convergent Computing in Oakland, CA (USA).http://www.cco.com
  • What first made you get into UC and specialising in Lync?
    I first got into Lync with Exchange 2000 IM server but didn’t take it on as my main focus until just before the launch of OCS 2007 and became an MVP for LCS/OCS. Since then, I’ve spent my time evangelizing UC and doing UC projects cradle to grave. I really enjoy doing a design for a customer then sticking around for the implementation and deployment. There’s something really special about that moment when you see the light go off and they “get it”.
  • What’s your favourite thing about Lync?
    This may sound strange from a guy who spends all his time working on the back end servers but I love the client! One client for everything from IM to telephony to conferencing. My big pet peeve is vendors who claim a “unified” solution then band-aid everything together.
  • If you could think of one feature you’d like included in the next version of Lync, what would it be?
    That’s an easy question!! Mobile clients for all major platforms with voice and video over the data channel. Now that tablets are prevalent, they become a great communication and collaboration endpoint.
  • What do you feel is your area of expertise, where you’d consider yourself a bit of a rockstar?
    I think the biggest value I bring is the ability to mate technology to business goals. UC isn’t cool because it’s new and shiny, it’s cool because it solves a myriad of real business problems with positive results in lowered costs and increased business revenue.
  • Tell me about your blog. When did you start it and what direction has it taken?Alex Lewis After being a rather prolific blogger, running hyperconnectivity.com for Nortel and being on point for MS UC blogging for Network World, I’m on a bit of a hiatus. I would be open to returning to blogging if the right opportunity came up.
  • Lastly on a bit more of a personal note, where are you from and what do you think makes your city great?
    I’m from the bay area in California, in the US. One of the few places you can surf and snow ski in the same day. I love all the outdoor activities and the fact we have gorgeous weather 300+ days a year. I’m an avid scuba diver, motorcycle enthusiast and re-learning rock climbing.

Many thanks for the contribution Alex! You can find Alex on twitter at @alexlewis.

Stay tuned to hear from another UC Pro from the blogosphere in the next few weeks.

Demystifying Photos in Lync

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I came across a post on the TechNet forums recently where someone was asking a lot of questions about how photos are implemented and managed in Lync. Given that there aren’t many examples around of the behaviour, I thought it was worthwhile writing this up and including some screenshots.

How are photos controlled?

All control over how photos are displayed in Lync is done via a client policy. You can control this part of a policy either by modifying the default global client policy or by creating a new client policy and assigning this to the users you want the control of pictures to apply to.

Determining what is currently configured

To find out what control of photos a policy is applying, you can run Get-CsClientPolicy to retrieve all the current configuration of a client policy. The configuration item you’re looking for is DisplayPhoto.

How do we implement this?

For this post, I’ll assume we have an existing policy called PhotosControl that we’re going to modify to achieve this. You could either modify the existing Global client policy, or create a new one using the New-CsClientPolicy cmdlet.

We’ll be using the following Lync Server Management Shell cmdlets to demonstrate this:

Set-CsClientPolicy – This will allow us to change the configuration of the client policy.
Grant-CsClientPolicy – This will allow us to assign the client policy to a user or group of users.

There are three configurable options in a Lync client policy that control how photos are displayed, and these are defined as variables of the -DisplayPhoto switch.

Allowing any photo to be shown in Lync

This setting will allow the user to either specify a URL, use the AD or SharePoint stored photo, or turn off photos altogether as illustrated below.

Set-CsClientPolicy -Identity PhotosControl -DisplayPhoto AllPhotos

This configures the client policy called PhotosControl to allow the user to display any photo in Lync (by specifying a URL, using the corporate photo, or displaying no photo at all).

To assign this to a user, we run Grant-CsClientPolicy -Identity sip:justin.morris@justin-morris.net -PolicyName PhotosControl

The results on the client endpoint are shown below.

When we open up Options in Lync, this is what we see. The user has the option to show a picture from a web address they input, the default corporate picture from AD/SharePoint, or no picture at all.

Showing photos from Active Directory only in Lync

This setting will display the AD or SharePoint stored photo, but will also give the user the option to turn off photos altogether as illustrated below.

The cmdlet syntax for this as as follows:

Set-CsClientPolicy -Identity PhotosControl -DisplayPhoto PhotosFromADOnly

Now, we already assigned the policy to a user in the last section, so all we need to do is sign out and sign back into Lync to see what the resultative behaviour is.

When we open up Options on Lync, here’s what we see. The user only has the option to show the default corporate picture from AD/SharePoint or no picture at all.

And this is reflected on the main UI of Lync accordingly.

Disabling photos completely in Lync

This setting will display no photo at all and Lync will drop back to only displaying the small, square presence icons. To other users, they will see no photo of you on their contact list.

The cmdlet syntax for this as as follows:

Set-CsClientPolicy -Identity PhotosControl -DisplayPhoto NoPhoto

Now, we already assigned the policy to a user in the last section, so all we need to do is sign out and sign back into Lync to see what the resultative behaviour is.

The results in the main Lync client UI look like this:

Very similar to what things looked like in Office Communicator 2007 R2. Great for when you want to deploy Lync but don’t want the UI look and feel to disrupt users too much.

And if we open up Options, we see that the My Picture tab is completely gone and we can’t change anything.

Conclusion

As you can see, there is a very granular level of control over how photos are presented in Lync. Using the cmdlets above you can mix and match as to which users can and can’t display photos and whether they can display any photo they like or only what you’ve imported into AD/SharePoint.

Hope this helps you determine how you’ll deploy photos and as always, any questions/comments below.

The latest on Lync from TechEd 2011 North America

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A presentation went up this afternoon (GMT+1) from TechEd 2011 NA by Kirk Gregersen titled Lync 2010 & the Future of Productivity. It’s about an hour long and covers a lot of content. It is somewhat high level, but there are a few things covered in this video that are well worth the watch (I’ve highlighted the super important ones in bold):

  • How the user experience is the key focus of the product group. It remains pretty high level for the first 10 minutes and includes a demo of Lync (focusing on contact card pervasiveness in Outlook, SharePoint etc).
  • Live demonstrations of:
    • The language translation app running on Silverlight.
    • The meeting schedule and join experience.
    • PowerPoint controls in a meeting, allowing a user to jump back and forth through slides.
    • The meeting recording experience.
  • Mobile client demos (32 minutes in) of Windows Phone 7 and iPhone.
  • Case study videos from LA Fitness, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Herrenknecht.
  • More demos of application development and client extensibility:
    • IM and Expert including how questions are asked, how an expert provides data on their knowledge and the interaction that takes place between the question asker and the answerer via the bot on Lync.
  • A demo of Polycom multi-party video conference.
  • A brief overview of the Lync Roadmap for 2011.
    • US and UK pilot around online voice later in the year.
    • WP7, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Nokia clients coming by end of calendar year.
  • A few words on the Skype purchase and what this means for Lync. “We (the Lync Product Group?) have been working on this as far back as January”.
    • Compares Lync to Skype, and how there is an interesting opportunity to marry the two via networks/federation.
    • The first public comments from the Lync team on the Skype integration.

You can view the presentation here. Some really exciting developments today, mostly around seeing the iPhone mobile client in action for the first time. Let’s hope we see Lync showcased some as TechEd NA rolls on.

Excluding local intranet hyperlinks when configuring URL filtering for Microsoft Lync Server 2010

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Recently I needed to setup URL filtering on Lync Server for a project. Pretty simple task you’d think, but I needed to exclude local intranet hyperlinks from being blocked as well. I found out that this is much easier said than done in Lync.

The Problem

Everything exists in the Lync Server Control Panel for this, and there is advice here on TechNet to configure it, but it’s very vague and only scratches the surface as to what is actually required. To get this working, you need to add the URLs you want to exclude to the Local Intranet Sites zone on each Front End Server, as per TechNet.

URL filtering in Lync Server 2010

The URL Filter page in the Lync Server 2010 Control Panel

Sounds easy enough right? Wrong. Because the Lync Front End Server service now runs under the Network Service account, you can’t just open up your Internet Options and pop them in there, you need to open Internet Options as the Network Service account.

Usually to execute an application under a different account, you can use the runas command, which would look like this:

runas /user:”NT Authority\Network Service” “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe”

This doesn’t work properly though, because you’re prompted for the Network Service password, which we don’t know (because this is a system account). The way around this then, is using the PsExec tool from SysInternals. The process to point you in the right direction for doing this is detailed here by Ben Parker (hat tip to Paul Nearney, a fellow Modality rockstar for bring this to my attention).

So using PsExec, the command we want to run is:

psexec -i -u “NT Authority\Network Service” “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe”

This then fires up Internet Explorer for us, but we’re greeted with this when we open Internet Options:
internet options when opened using Network Service account

The Internet Options dialog when executed under the Network Service account

Pretty useless really, because we can’t change anything! We can’t click on Sites to add the URLs we want to exclude, so we’re stuck. This is where I escalated this problem to Microsoft.

The Workaround

I engaged Microsoft PSS and after some investigation and reproduction of the issue, the engineer (thanks to Debasis Mishra) and the Lync Product Group identified this as a bug and came back with a workaround.

To get this working today, we need to do a bit of registry hacking to add local intranet URLs manually to the Local Intranet zone:
The Network Service like all AD objects has a SID and that is unique and common across all. The SID of Network Service account is S-1-5-20.

  1. Launch the registry on the Lync Front End server and browse to HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-20\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\ZoneMap\Domains (in case you don’t find ZoneMap and Domains, create new keys with these names in the Internet Settings key).
  2. From here, we can add the first Intranet site which is, let’s say for example http://contoso.com.
  3. Under Domains, create a new key and name it contoso.com.
  4. Next, create a DWORD with name http and set the value to 1. You can do the same for https if you need this.
  5. Similarly for a second site, create a key and name it contoso.local for example.
  6. Here you need to create DWORD(s) for each protocol you want to allow. Let’s say one with the name https and the other with the name ftp. Set the value to 1 for both.

    Excluding local intranet URLs from filtering in the Windows registry

    Excluding local intranet URLs from filtering in the Windows registry

  7. Once done, restart the FE service and you should now be able to send IMs with the intranet URLs you’ve specified e.g. http://www.contoso.com

And there you have it, that’s how you do it my friends. A bit convoluted right now and messy, but it get’s the job done. Hopefully a hotfix will be released in an upcoming Cumulative Update and the documentation will be updated.

Let me know if you have any problems with it in the comments section below.

My take on Microsoft’s purchase of Skype

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So, today it all went down. There were rumours floating around since Sunday that either Facebook, Google or Microsoft were going to snap up Skype. Commence a flurry of observations and comments as to why one or the other would/should buy Skype.

Fast forward to Tuesday and it’s all a done deal. Microsoft have purchased Skype for some $8 billion in cash. A hefty sum to pay, considering eBay sold Skype to a bunch of investors for only $2 billion only 2 years ago. They have had some awesome growth since then however, and have delivered new functionality to the market like video calling from the desktop to the mobile.

There were blog posts and news articles everywhere saying it was soon to come and each was speculating on why this is strategic for Microsoft, how it will affect consumers and what will happen to Skype when they become part of Redmond. This all cumulated in a press release and live conference this afternoon (London time) that announced a few things:

  • Skype will connect users with Lync, Office 365, Outlook (does this mean a Skype Outlook add-in?) Windows Live and Xbox Kinect.
  • Enhance Lync for our enterprise customers (interoperate with Skype).
  • Continued commitment to non-Microsoft platforms for Skype.
  • An entirely new business division will be created under the current Skype CEO’s (Tony Bates) leadership “Microsoft Skype Division” and Bates will become the President of this division, reporting directly to Steve Ballmer.

Here’s an interesting question, what will happen to David Gurle the current head of Skype’s Business division? He’s a previous Microsoft employee, and he used to head up the LCS team in Microsoft. Will he want to stick around and bring some value or will he jump ship quick smart?

Also, what will the Lync interoperability look like? Will it be via the Edge Server? That’s the obvious integration point really. They need to deliver every communications modality, not just IM and audio/video. What about archiving and compliance? Security? I can only see this interoperability being delivered in a new version of Lync.

With 600 million users registered and 30 million online at any one time, that’s a huge population of users to connect the existing business communications (running Lync) world to.
It means that any seat in any business and any home can connect to each other using IM, audio/video or collaboration. Not to mention people running Xbox Live with Kinect. Now that’s a pretty exciting nirvana to look forward to.

How can I integrate Cisco UCM with OCS 2007 R2 or Lync?

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Recently I completed a white paper that details a lot of information regarding the many ways you can integrate OCS 2007 R2/Lync Server with Cisco Unified Communications Manager. This covers Remote Call Control, CUCiMOC and Simultaneous Ringing (a flavour of Enterprise Voice) and includes loads of screenshots to actually give you a visual idea of what the user experience looks like.

It’s up over on the Modality Systems blog, and you can check it out here.

Office Communicator 2005 and Lync 2010 Client Coexistence

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What if you have a supported back-end server version (e.g. OCS 2007 R1) to coexist with Lync, but you’re running Office Communicator 2005 out on the desktop? What happens when you want to migrate?
It’s going to be pretty rare that you might encounter this kind of scenario, but I did recently and it’s worth documenting the behaviour we observed.
Unfortunately there’s no pretty screenshots in this post, so use your imagination. 🙂

The Environment

The situation I encountered was an OCS 2007 R1 backend with all clients running Office Communicator 2005. We deployed a new Lync 2010 Front End pool in the same forest and the two pools happily talked to each other (as OCS 2007 R1 and Lync Server 2010 coexistence is supported).
It was only until we begin running client testing that we started to notice weird things happening.

The Behaviour

If you have one user using Office Communicator 2005 and another user using Lync 2010, you will see strange behaviour if the session is initiated from the Lync user to the OC 2005 user.
If the Lync 2010 user polls for presence of the OC 2005 user in any way, whether this is by searching the address book for a user, expanding a distribution group or exposing their name in Outlook, the OC 2005 user will get a Add to Contact List notification. This detracts from the way things usually work, where you can get presence of a user without first adding them to your contact list.
When I tested this same scenario using OC 2007 R1 and Lync 2010, I couldn’t reproduce the issue.

My only guess is that there is a difference between the SIP INFO packets Lync 2010 and OC 2007 R1/R2 send to get presence information, and the way OC 2005 interprets them.

Obviously this is not ideal, and will most likely pose an unacceptable issue during a period of coexistence whilst migrations are occurring. Given that hundreds of these interactions could occur a day per user in a large environment, this presents a massive support issue for your internal IT helpdesk.

The Solution

In the end, you have two options depending on how long your period of coexistence will be and how complicated/large your environment is. These are:

  1. Migrate from OC 2005 to OC 2007 R1 on your existing OCS 2007 R1 backend, then migrate your users to the Lync 2010 backend and upgrade your clients to Lync 2010.
  2. Migrate your users to the Lync 2010 backend and upgrade your clients to Lync 2010 all in one go, effectively having no period of coexistence.

In conclusion, TechNet documentation defines that this kind of coexistence is “only supported if Communicator 2005 is on a federated network” and now we know why. I’d say this has something to do with what the Edge Server does to the SIP packets on their way in and out of the network.

Communicator for Mac 2011 compared to Lync 2010

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This is a pretty hotly discussed and contentious topic, the experience on the Apple Mac for users connecting to OCS 2007 R2/Lync. In the past, you’ve been able to connect using the Mac Messenger client, but now we’ve got Communicator for Mac 2011. In this post, I’ll give you a rundown of the client from what I’ve experienced with daily usage, and also draw some comparisons to the Lync 2010 that runs on Windows.

The Rundown

It’s not as pretty or as full featured as Lync is, but it gets the job (75% of the way) done. To summarise this nicely, I’ve written up a list of pros and cons compared to Lync.

Pros:

  • Comparable IM/Presence experience.
  • Enterprise Voice Capable.
  • Full Outlook Persona Menu Integration.
  • Peer to Peer (P2P) audio and video calling.
  • Desktop Sharing.

Cons:

  • No pictures.
  • No dialling from the Search field. PSTN number must be dialled from dedicated snap-out dial pad.
  • No visual voicemail (or voicemail controls at all for that matter).
  • No control of call forwarding/simultaneous ringing.
  • No location information services.
  • No tagging for status change alerts.
  • No changing of privacy levels.
  • Audio device experience is complete rubbish compared to Lync.  A bit more about this below.
  • Conversation history is not saved to the Exchange mailbox. Rather it is saved in flat-file format in Communicator itself.
  • Complete experience is basically the same as Mac Messenger. Just the branding/titles have been changed really.

To expand on this, I’ve included some more details and screenshots below on certain areas to give a better insight into how things look in the UI.

Contact List

I’ve sanitised a few of these images, and the text and fonts look weird, but that’s just my dodgy skills in Paint. 🙂 You get the general idea of what goes where.

Obviously we have presence here as expected, and any group you’ve created in Lync is reflected in the client. No pictures here unfortunately. I can search the GAL like I can in Lync and return corporate users.

Communicator Contact List

Conversation Window

In terms of what things look like, you get the general conversation experience, but it’s not as polished and natural as the Lync client. It does however feel very “Mac”, but this is because it’s basically Mac Messenger anyway.

Conversation window

Outlook Integration

Full integration with Outlook 2011 is available from Communicator for Mac. Presence icons light up next to user’s names in emails, both for corporate and federated contacts.

Persona menu

When I hover over a presence icon I get the above persona menu, which looks markedly different to the persona menu in Outlook 2010 on the PC and more “Mac-like”. I can initiate an email, IM, audio or video call or add the contact to my contact list in Communicator from here.

Conferencing

Conferencing is pretty straightforward, and you invite users using the Invite button in the top of the window. I can send IMs like I normally would in Lync and I can also escalate this to an audio and/or video conference.

communicator for mac im conference

Delivered in a recent update, we now have desktop sharing, which wasn’t delivered in the original 2011 release. The Share Desktop button is exposed both in the main UI window and in a conversation window and works as you’d expect, popping out to the right hand side to view the users desktop.

Communicator for Mac Desktop Sharing

Enterprise Voice

The Enterprise Voice experience is very disjoined compared to Lync. Rather than being able to dial a PSTN number directly from the search field like you can in Lync, you have to first click the Call button in the main Communicator window, illustrated below.

EV Step 1

After you do this, a side panel pops out the left hand side of the main Communicator window with a dial pad, a field to enter a phone number and a drop down list to select a contact from your contact list to dial. Note that a number you put into the field does honour Lync normalisation rules.

Communicator for Mac Dial Pad

So you go ahead, enter your number and hit Call and you get the following things happening. First, Communicator starts dialling the number and you get a ringback sound in your speakers (the “ring ring” sound):

Ev calling

Then, when the other end picks up, the call becomes active and you talk like you normally would:

Ev call in progress

Pretty intuitive, straightforward and does like it says on the tin.

As mentioned above, there is absolutely NO control over call forwarding. When you receive an incoming call, there is no way to forward it to another number or to voicemail. It just goes unanswered. Bad.

Audio Device Experience

As mentioned above, this doesn’t even compare to Lync. I can select the preferred audio device to use in Lync easily in the main window and this is very clear for users with illustrative icons.

There is absolutely no such experience in Communicator for Mac, and I have to manually change audio devices in System Preferences, which is a global change for audio output.

Audio output OSX

Audio input osx

This could be an OSX limitation though, as I don’t think it can differentiate between different devices to use for audio and communications purposes.

In conclusion, Communicator for Mac 2011 is essentially a “there is a Mac client” answer for Microsoft Lync, ported from another application. It’s targeted at filling the holes where an organisation may have a team of creative/alternative users on Macs that need a client other than Lync Web App to deliver most UC workloads to. It works well for basic IM, presence, desktop sharing and some conferencing, but there are many holes that broaden the gap between it and Lync.

The official statement is that Communicator for Mac 2011 is an “R2 Experience”, with the biggest difference I think, is there’s no unified meeting experience. You still need to join meetings created on a Lync Server using Lync Web App. Finally in terms of minimum system requirements, you need to be running Mac OS X v10.5.8 to run Communicator, and you need to be using Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 to get the integration benefits with Outlook. Hope this has helped you understand the Mac client a bit better, and enables you make an informed decision around your organisation’s requirements. For more hardcore details, download the Communicator for Mac 2011 Deployment Guide here. Feel free to leave me a comment if you have any questions.