Lync Team Blog

Take Back Your Presence

Cari Dick — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:00:00 GMT

Remember when presence was an indicator of your availability to communicate? It was empowering to know that you could control interruptions and be ready to collaborate with others if they needed you. Fast forward to the era of…Perma-Busy! I am not really sure how it came to be, but a growing number of people are manually setting their presence to Busy and leaving it there all day long. They might continue to IM others, go to lunch, run errands, etc., all while in Busy. In other words, as one popular Lync Blogger says, “Busy is the new Available!”

So many users are using Busy as their “Available” that we’ve all started just IMing Busy people anyway. After all, we know you’re not that busy…so we’ll IM and ask “Are you really busy?” or “Can you IM?” Often, the Busy person says “sure, what’s up?” In other words, they are Available to communicate. So many of us are now simply ignoring Busy status that we’re affecting our coworkers to who use Busy as a real indication of their availability to communicate. Here’s an example: A friend who runs a large Lync deployment shared with me that people at his company are afraid to use Available status because they don’t want to be bombarded with IMs. And just for grins, we asked him during a meeting to be brave and change his status to green to see what happened. Crickets. Crickets happened.

On the other end of the spectrum we have the people who are always Available, meaning Available to communicate. Often, you will IM these people and they say they are busy! Just not Busy on Lync. Chances are, if they had used Busy as their presence indicator, you might have IMed them anyway!

Some folks I know believe that presence status is an indicator of their productivity. For example, my coworker Mark (not his name) sets his presence timeout settings to the maximum (360 minutes). Then he often leaves the office to run errands or grab lunch with his PC still logged in, and presence still set to Available on Lync. Let’s say we’ve got a customer in a Lync Conference who needs to info from Mark, so we’re IMing away at him in a sidebar conversation with no response. So I walk down the hall to Mark’s office, and he’s not there and hasn’t been for hours. So, I’ve just wasted my time and my customer’s time trying to hunt down someone who didn’t have the time to use “Be Right Back” as his status or to set a realistic presence timeout.

Setting an automatic presence timeout is easy. In Lync Options, under Status, you can set your presence to turn to Inactive after you’ve been idle for a set amount of time. You can also set Idle status to change to Away after another set period of time. If you want to avoid situations like the one I experienced with Mark, try setting your timeouts to 15 minutes.

Remember, your presence will also automatically change when you are In a Meeting, In a Conference, In a Call, Out of the Office and Away and Offline. If you set an all-day appointment in Outlook, your presence will show Busy during that time.

So, where do we go from here? I’m asking everyone to start a trend to use presence the way it was intended to be used – to represent your availability to communicate. If you don’t want to communicate, use Busy. If you’re not busy, give Available a try.

If you want more options than the “off the shelf” presence status choices included in Lync, there are free tools available to allow you to customize your own unique settings. See below for an example:

If you have presence stories to share, we invite you to share them in the comments.

Lync-Skype connectivity available today

The Lync Team — Thu, 23 May 2013 23:12:00 GMT

By BJ Haberkorn, Director Lync Product Marketing

We are thrilled to announce the availability of Lync-Skype connectivity for Lync customers around the world.

This marks our first important step in extending Lync’s unified communications capabilities to the hundreds of millions of people who use Skype. This combination enables Lync customers to take advantage of the global reach of Skype to connect and collaborate with suppliers, customers, and partners while relying on the enterprise richness of Lync. This initial set of features includes:

Adding Skype contacts to Lync and vice-versa, enabling presence sharing
Audio calling and instant messaging between Lync and Skype users
Management settings for Lync administrators

The enterprise richness of Lync, now with the global reach of Skype

As Microsoft continues towards the goal of rehumanizing communications from the living room to the boardroom, our approach requires two separate perspectives: end users’ and IT’s. Today’s information workers want familiar technology that enables them to work fluidly and productively across devices and contexts. At the same time, enterprise IT must manage technology for their organizations in ways that meet their full set of requirements, whether concerning support, compliance, cost-effectiveness, or other unique demands.

Microsoft can help enterprises relieve this natural tension by thoughtful product design, such as this combination of Lync and Skype. Lync has been built from the ground up as an enterprise platform for unified communications, and with that comes the richness of capabilities such as administration with Active Directory, archiving and compliance tools, integration with Microsoft Office, extensibility from public APIs based on industry-standard technology, and interoperability with other systems and devices. This has resulted in more than 90 of the Fortune Global 100 having Lync and over five million enterprise users relying on our platform for voice features and functionality instead of a traditional PBX. In parallel, Skype has grown tremendously and now helps more than 300 million people each month stay close whenever they’re apart.

By enabling Lync and Skype to connect to one another, enterprise IT can continue to manage a unified communications infrastructure without constraining the reach of end users. We welcome you to take this first step with us and deploy Lync-Skype connectivity as part of Lync.

What do Lync administrators need to do to get started?

To connect their Lync users with the Skype community, Lync administrators first need to enable Lync-Skype connectivity. Information on how to do this can be found here for Lync Server. For Lync Online, connectivity can be turned on from the Lync admin center within the Office 365 portal. If you already have Windows Live Messenger federation working, no additional steps are necessary to enable Lync-Skype connectivity.

What about end users?

Lync users can connect to Skype from Lync 2010 or Lync 2013, including any of the 2013 mobile clients.

Skype users will need the latest Skype client available from Skype.com. Today, Lync-Skype connectivity is supported from the Windows and Mac desktop clients with more options coming soon as other clients are updated.

Additionally, Skype users must sign in to Skype with a Microsoft account (formerly Windows Live ID) to communicate with Lync contacts. A Microsoft account is the combination of an email address and a password that you can also use to sign in to services like SkyDrive, Windows Phone, Xbox LIVE, and Outlook.com (and previously Hotmail or Messenger). If you use an email address and password to sign in to these or other services, you already have a Microsoft account. If you don’t have a Microsoft account, it’s easy to create one. You can merge your existing Skype account with your Microsoft account for single sign-on across a variety of applications and services.

Seeing it in action

Lync users add Skype contacts by typing their Skype users’ Microsoft account names into the Add Skype Contact window in Lync. Click the Add a Contact icon > Add a Contact Not in My Organization > Skype, then enter their Skype contact information and click OK.

Skype users add Lync contacts by typing their email addresses into the search bar within Skype and clicking Add to Contacts.

Once the recipient has accepted the add-contact request, presence information is exchanged and updated.

To start an audio call from Lync, make the same clicks as if the contact were a fellow Lync user.

The experience appears like a Lync call to the Lync user and a Skype call to the Skype user.

Lync call window

Skype call window

And remember, Skype users need to sign in to Skype with a Microsoft account, which can be linked to an existing Skype ID.

Start connecting today!

Lync Mobile Push Notifications

The Lync Team — Thu, 02 May 2013 23:01:01 GMT

By Girija Bhagavatula, Senior Program Manager, Lync Server Team

If you are a Lync Mobile user on Windows Phone or iOS then you should be aware that starting June 1^st it is possible that some of you might see errors in receiving push notifications to your device. The most likely reason for that may be your system administrator has not updated the required certificates for enabling the federation between your on-premise Lync Server deployment and the Lync Push Notifications Clearing House service in Office 365. The certificate update itself is a very easy process and you can refer your system administrator to the next section titled “Certificate Update” for more details. Most of you will not even see this issue since your system administrator would likely have updated these certificates as part of a Windows Update.

Certificate Update

As part of our ongoing commitment to security Lync team is making a change to the SSL certificate chain that will require our customers and partners to take action before June 1st, 2013. Lync Servers currently use the GTE CyberTrust Global Root and beginning on June 1st, 2013 will migrate to the Baltimore CyberTrust Root. The new root certificate uses a stronger key length and hashing algorithm which ensures we remain consistent with industry-wide security best practices. If your service does not accept certificates chained to both the GTE CyberTrust Global Root and the Baltimore CyberTrust Root, please take action prior to June 1st, 2013 to avoid certificate validation errors. While we seek to minimize the need for customers to take specific action based on changes we make to Lync Server, we believe this is an important security improvement. The Baltimore CyberTrust Root can be downloaded from https://cacert.omniroot.com/bc2025.crt.

The migration of Lync Online Service to use the new Baltimore trusted root Certificate Authority is planned during May 2013. As of June 1st 2013, all of our servers including the Lync Push Notifications Clearing House Service will be on Baltimore certs only. So please ensure that your Lync Server deployments have been updated to trust the Baltimore Root before that.

As an IT Admin, if you perform Windows Updates regularly:

· All you would have to do is validate that the new Baltimore Root cert is already present in the “(LocalComputer) Trusted Root Certification Authorities” cert store on each Microsoft facing Server.

If you do not perform Windows Updates regularly and/or new Baltimore Root cert is not appearing in cert trusted root store:

· You can perform Windows Update for this requirement or import the Baltimore Root to each Microsoft facing Server. You can download the Baltimore Root cert from here.

Push Notifications Flow

If you are wondering about all the jargon around push notifications and have often wondered how the incoming notifications are being delivered to you on the mobile device. Let me take this opportunity to give you an overview. The mechanism used to deliver the incoming notifications to your device differs based on which version of Lync mobile client you are currently using.

In this blog, I’ll cover Push Notifications which is the primary mechanism to deliver notifications on Windows Phone (both Lync Mobile 2013 and 2010) and iPhone/ iPad (Lync Mobile 2010 only). If you are a Lync Mobile 2010 user then Windows Phone and iPhone/ iPad use Microsoft Push Notification (MPNS) and Apple Push Notification (APNS) service respectively. However, if you have recently upgraded your client to Lync Mobile 2013 on iPhone and iPad then you no longer have any dependency on the Apple Push Notification server and instead the notifications are directly delivered to the Lync mobile client using background VoIP sockets. I’ll leave the VoIP socket discussion for a future topic.

The following table captures the different mechanisms used based on your Lync Mobile client and Lync Server versions.

	Lync Server 2010	Lync Server 2013
Lync Mobile 2010 on iPhone/iPad	Apple Push Notifications	Apple Push Notifications
Lync Mobile 2010 on WP7	Microsoft Push Notifications	Microsoft Push Notifications
Lync Mobile 2013 on iPhone/iPad	N/A*	Background VoIP socket
Lync Mobile 2013 on WP7	N/A*	Microsoft Push Notifications

N/A* - you cannot use a Lync Mobile 2013 client against a Lync Server 2010 deployment

At a very high level, most mobile systems don’t allow applications to run in the background to save battery and bandwidth costs. So when you press the home button your Lync app goes into a suspended state and hence can no longer communicate to the corresponding web service in our case the Lync Server. This poses a challenge, Lync being a real-time communication application has the need to receive asynchronous updates from the server for any incoming call or IM. The Push Notification services allows Lync Server to send notifications to the Windows Phone and iPhone/iPad even when the Lync mobile application is in the background and hence not running.

Given that Lync is an Enterprise application with deployments across multiple enterprises and locations it made sense to centralize the push notifications delivery from the various on-premise Lync Server deployments to the MPNS and APNS. The Lync Push Notifications Clearing House service which is hosted in Office 365 centralizes the notification delivery and helps to isolate on-premise deployments of Lync Server from direct communication with MPNS and APNS. Because Lync uses a secure connection to MPNS and APNS, Microsoft can maintain the certificates needed to authenticate with MPNS and APNS on behalf of all on-premise Lync Servers. The communication between the on-premise deployments of Lync Server and the Lync Push Notifications Clearing House is handled through SIP federation. This federation is same as the one you experience when you communicate with your Lync buddies in a different enterprise or in Lync Online or when connecting to your friends on Windows Live. Starting June 1^st if you see errors in receiving push notifications to your device or failing to contact your federated buddies in Lync Online, then it is possible that your admin has not updated the required certificates for enabling this SIP federation between your on-premise Lync Server deployment and the Lync Push Notifications Clearing House service in Office 365 that I had talked about earlier in the blog. See the section titled “Certificate update” for more details.

As an example, in case of Windows Phone user receiving an IM, the invite would flow from the on-premise Lync Server 2010 or 2013 deployment to the Lync Push Notification Clearing House service in Office 365 from where it would be forwarded to the Microsoft Push Notifications Service. From the Microsoft Push Notification Service the invite will be delivered to the Windows Phone device and a notification will be displayed to the user.

If you are a Lync Mobile 2013 user the following diagram illustrates how the Push Notification Service fits within a Lync Server 2013 topology running UC Web API and Lync 2013 Mobile clients.

If you are a Lync Mobile 2010 user the following diagram illustrates the Push Notification Service as it applies to a Lync Server 2010 topology running the Mobility Service and Lync 2010 Mobile clients.

For more information you can refer to the Lync Server blog on Push notifications.

Viewing Shared Media Content in Lync 2013 for iPad

The Lync Team — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 20:26:16 GMT

By Roshin Lal Ramesan, Senior Program Manager, Lync Mobile Team

When you’re in a Lync online meeting using Lync 2013 app for iPad, you can view shared PowerPoint presentations and see desktop and applications shared in the meeting. Viewing of content is supported while attending Lync meetings or ad-hoc audio or video conference calls with 3 or more people. You cannot present meeting content from Lync for iPad.

You can view shared desktop or applications while attending meetings hosted on Lync 2010 server or Lync 2013 server, viewing of uploaded PowerPoint presentations are supported when attending meetings hosted on Lync 2013 server.

While viewing shared content, the backlight is kept on so that you can view the content without the iPad screen dimming or turning off. The on-screen controls also disappear after a short timeout so that you can focus on the content without distractions (a light tap on the screen will bring back the controls when you need it).

When controls are visible (tap screen once if they are not), tap Stop Viewing to stop viewing content. To resume viewing (if content is still being presented) tap the Sharing icon on the top (icon next to video) and then select Start Viewing.

While viewing shared desktop or applications, if the remote screen resolution is greater than iPad resolution (1024 * 768), the content will be scaled down and shown in “fit to screen” mode by default so that you can view the content in its entirety. You can double tap on the screen to view at sharer’s original resolution (“actual size” in Lync parlance) and pan the screen to locate and view content of interest. Or just pinch and zoom the shared screen to find the optimal size you prefer between “fit to screen” and “actual size”.

If the remote party is sharing a specific application which does not take up the entire desktop, you will see the shared application within a larger empty canvas that corresponds to the sharer’s desktop size. Similarly, if the sharer has multiple monitors and is sharing an application on one monitor, you will see the application within a bigger canvas on iPad. In such cases, use the pinch and zoom gesture to increase the size of the shared content to fill the iPad screen.

Note: Lync for iPad does not support viewing or adding annotations on PowerPoint and requesting or taking control during sharing.

Viewing content over Cellular Data connection

Lync iPad app provides a setting to disable viewing of shared content in meetings while attending a meeting over cellular data connection to reduce data usage. This setting, “Require Wi-Fi for Meeting Content” can be found under Options on a Wi-Fi + 3G capable iPad. Default value for this setting is OFF, which means that presented content is shown while attending meetings on cellular data connection. If “Require Wi-Fi for Meeting Content” setting is ON, shared content in meeting will not be shown when you attend a meeting over cellular data network.

2013 is the Year to Move Forward with Lync Enterprise Voice

The Lync Team — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 16:46:00 GMT

By Giovanni Mezgec, GM, Lync Marketing

Last week, I attended Enterprise Connect 2013, the largest conference focusing on the unified communications industry. When Microsoft first came to this show many years ago, we were considered an outsider and many people wondered if our vision of using software to deliver a truly unified communications platform was even feasible.

It’s clear now that we’re considered a leader in unified communications, with a compelling enterprise voice platform and incredible customer momentum. During the conference, Derek Burney was able to give a live demonstration of Lync 2013 — proving that we’ve brought this unique vision to life. I encourage you to watch the keynote for a guided tour of the best that Lync has to offer.

This doesn’t mean that our work is done and customers don’t still have questions for us — the one I heard most at Enterprise Connect was about the Cloud and their desire to purchase Lync Enterprise Voice “as a Service.” Having started with IM/P and perhaps Conferencing, many customers now see the advantages of consolidating their PBXs and using the full power of Lync for Enterprise Voice. However, they are unsure of how to move forward with their existing infrastructure without adding even more complexity to their environment.

The fact is, Lync allows enterprises to move to the Cloud today — on their terms and at their own pace. We enable this by working closely with Cloud Service Providers to let customer requirements determine if Lync should be managed in their own on-premise datacenter, hosted in a partner’s cloud, or delivered by Lync Online as part of Microsoft Office 365.

On this topic, I want to highlight two announcements made at the conference from two of our strategic partners, AT&T and HP, who announced support for customers regardless of whether they choose to deploy Lync. These partners join other market leaders such as BT, Dimension Data, OBS and T-Systems, plus many other Lync Certified Support Partners to offer the IT integration, network management, and end-to-end support that makes Lync a fully reliable and scalable platform to meet your current and future communication needs.

If you are thinking about how to modernize your organization’s communication platform, please contact your Microsoft account executive who, along with your preferred Service Provider, can get you started with an envisioning workshop and network assessment.

--Giovanni

Lync 2013 Mobile: Starting, adding and switching between communication methods

The Lync Team — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 21:50:58 GMT

By Angela Chin, Program Manager, Lync Mobile Team

Lync’s mobile clients now have voice and video over wireless as well as IM all in one place. You can start, add and switch been each of these communication methods easily from within your application. Switching between conversations on Lync mobile is also quick and easy.

Starting and adding communication modes

The easiest way to start an IM, voice or video conversation is from a contact card. You can launch a contact card from you Contacts list, conference participants lists and several other places within the app. Once you’ve found the right contact, tap on the button that corresponds to type of conversation you’d like to have. Audio and video calls will start right away. To start an IM conversation, just send your first message.

If you already have a conversation going with someone and you’d like to add a call or IM to the conversation you can do so from the buttons in your iOS navigation bar or WP application bar.

If someone else in the conversation has already started showing their video and you want to add your own video you can do it from your video call controls on screen.

Controlling your call when after it’s started

After you audio or video call is started all of your call controls can be found on screen. From these controls you can place the call on hold, turn on and off speakerphone, launch the dial pad, control your video and end the call. If you are in a video call, your call controls will fade out after a few seconds. Just tap the screen to bring them back. Your mute button is always located in the top right corner, even when other call controls fade away.

Navigating between modalities in the same conversation

If a conversation has both IM and voice or video you can use the iOS navigation bar or WP application bar buttons to help you navigate between modes. For example, if you’re watching the video in a call, but would like to read a new IM in the same conversation you can tap the IM button to display IMs for that conversation. You can also move between IM and audio/video by swiping left or right on the screen.

Quickly go back to a call

If you need to look up a contact’s information or leave the conversation window for some other reason it’s easy to quickly return to your call. An active call indicator bar will appear at the top of your screen. Tapping on this control will bring you straight back to your call. On iOS this bar may be collapsed so you can see the content below it. Tapping on the collapsed bar will also bring you back to your conversation. You can expand it by swiping to the left on it if you just want to read the call information or mute yourself without actually navigating to the call.

Video Interop in Lync

The Lync Team — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 17:11:00 GMT

By Shelly Marston, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Lync

In my role on the Lync Marketing team, I look after Lync Meetings — audio, video, and web conferencing — and the video workload. So I was particularly attentive in Tony Bates’ keynote at Lync Conference 2013 a month ago, especially to the commitment of delivering interoperability with third-party video teleconference (VTC) vendors in the next 12-18 months. As I met with customers, partners, and analysts at the show, they all wanted to better understand what this will look like when delivered and what is available to them today. With Enterprise Connect 2013 starting today (Mar 18-21 in Orlando), I thought it was a good time to share the details of those conversations with you. I’ll do my best to answer their questions and more below, as well as provide some context around why this topic is important.

Interoperability: An Overview

Interoperability is a means or mechanism that allows disparate systems to work together.

Historically, point-to-point video and video conferencing capabilities in the enterprise have been delivered by hardware-based video teleconference (aka VTCs) or telepresence systems. Enterprises that have embraced these traditional video conferencing solutions over the last 5-15 years are likely to have invested significant budget for hardware and maintenance. These deployments are commonly a single vendor’s solutions resulting in assets from Polycom, Cisco/Tandberg, or other vendor VTCs deployed in conference rooms distributed across the enterprise’s locations.

These same enterprises, now ready to deploy Lync as a unified communications platform, are looking for ways to preserve their capital investment in these systems by using the VTCs as audio/video endpoints accessible to and from Lync. Alternatively, some customers may have an active video conferencing user community and plan to augment their solution offering with Lync. Others view Lync as a legitimate replacement to VTCs or telepresence. They might choose to leverage interoperability between Lync and VTCs/telepresence systems in the interim while migrating end users from the hardware estate to Lync.

These concepts are not unique to video. There are obvious parallels to Lync interoperability with legacy telephony solutions. In order for customers to deploy Lync Enterprise Voice, the ability to communicate with the existing telephony estate may be required — from IP-PBXs to Gateways to Session Border Controllers — whether as an interim solution or for long-term coexistence. As a result, we have grown the UC Open Interoperability Program (UCOIP) to include more than forty SIP Trunking providers and dozens of infrastructure providers across the telephony spectrum.

To some extent, the scenarios specific to video are a reflection of the unified communications maturity curve and the journey our customers take when deploying and adopting Lync in their enterprises.

Video Interoperability with Lync Today

So how do customers achieve video interop today?

Microsoft supports the Microsoft Lync Video Interoperability Program (VIP) which tests and qualifies partners’ video solutions to provide interoperability with Microsoft Lync Server 2010 and Lync 2013 to provide a premium experience for customers. The program offers support, via the Lync Partner Engineering team, to third parties as they navigate the technical documentation and understand the finer details of the signaling and media implementations in Lync 2013.

This allows partner companies who participate in VIP such as Polycom, LifeSize, Vidyo, and Radvision (Avaya) to deliver solutions that allow video interoperability between Lync and VTCs. Many of these partners will also be attending Enterprise Connect 2013, so feel free to visit to their booths for more details.

What about Cisco?

Customers with Cisco/Tandberg VTC investments frequently ask me if Lync 2013 interoperability with Cisco/Tandberg is possible today. And if so, how?

Microsoft has, by referring to the guidelines of the Video Interoperability Program (though Cisco is not participating in the VIP), advised Cisco on the specifics of Lync 2013 signaling and extension updates required to support the new features and leveraging H.264 AVC for higher quality experiences.

A basic assessment concluded positively that interoperability between Lync 2013 and Tandberg VTCs with Video Communication Sever (aka VCS B2B UA) was achievable with minor modifications of the VCS. With Lync 2013, transcoding is no longer required. Hence, there is no need for the expensive Cisco Advanced Media Gateway. In this new interoperability mode, the codec used natively by both systems is H.264 AVC resulting in a higher quality video experience for the end user than was the case with Lync 2010 interoperability. H.263 is no longer required.

I sincerely hope Cisco continues this partnership by submitting its solution for further testing and/or qualification in the Video Interoperability Program. When customers ask me what they can do to promote progress in this regard, I suggest that they encourage Cisco to participate in the VIP.

"Built-in" Video Interoperability

I am energized by what the future holds for Lync 2013 video interoperability!

As announced by Tony Bates at Lync Conference 2013, Lync will support video interoperability, with Cisco/Tandberg VTCs specifically, within 12-18 months. With this capability “built in” to Lync, third-party gateways or MCUs (including Cisco VCS) will no longer be required to achieve interoperability.

Interoperability “built in” to Lync will:

Reduce complexity
Eliminate the need to purchase and/or maintain additional equipment
Provide more choice to enterprises as they deploy and adopt Lync as their unified communications platform

Ultimately, we think this will help customers achieve the above goals I mentioned in the overview, while simultaneously unlocking the full potential of Lync!

For others, interoperability will be a “means to an end” for an interim period as they consider transitioning to Lync 2013 clients and Lync Room Systems. Lync Room System is a great option for new investments, such as new conference rooms or where there is a need to increase capacity. Between Lync mobile apps and Lync Room System, we have delivered a comprehensive suite of clients with the most to offer across IM, presence, Lync Meetings, and P2P audio/video capabilities.

If you’re attending Enterprise Connect 2013, stop by our booth! You’ll see the new Lync — including our new Lync Room System solution — and have an opportunity to question the experts. I hope you enjoy the show, and I look forward to continuing this dialogue in the coming months!

Lync 2013 March VDI Update

The Lync Team — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 19:17:00 GMT

The first update to the Lync VDI feature since Lync 2013 shipped is now available! If you use Lync 2013 in VDI mode (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) then you should apply the below patch.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2760556

Why is Lync 2013 Mobile asking me to use Lync 2010?

The Lync Team — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 17:25:11 GMT

By Jason Lewis, Program Manager, Lync Mobile Team

We have been seeing some feedback asking “Why is Lync 2013 Mobile asking me to use Lync 2010?” The short answer is your Lync Server does not support Lync 2013 Mobile apps, you will need to continue using the Lync 2010 Mobile app.

The long answer is…

Lync 2013 Mobile relies on Unified Communication Web API (UCWA) that comes with February 2013 Cumulative Update for Lync Server 2013 or later, which Lync Server 2010 does not provide. If you are connecting to a Lync 2010 or Lync 2013 RTM Server you will see the message ”You can't sign in with this version of Lync. Please install Lync 2010”. On the other side, Lync 2010 Mobile relies on Lync Mobility Service (MCX) which is included on Lync 2010 and Lync 2013 Servers. This allows Lync 2010 Mobile users to sign into either version of Lync Server.

Another common question is why can I sign into Lync 2013 for Windows 8 app but not the mobile app. The answer is that the Lync 2013 for Windows 8 app is not built on UCWA and thus does not have the February Cumulative Update for Lync Server 2013 requirement.

Lync 2013 Mobile Apps Available for Windows Phone, iPhone, iPad and Android

The Lync Team — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 17:03:19 GMT

By Jason Lewis, Program Manager, Lync Mobile Team

Last month at Lync Conference we showed our Lync 2013 mobile clients and shared that the apps for Windows Phone and iOS would be available in March. Today, I’m excited to share that the Windows Phone app is available today and that the app for iPhone and iPad ~~have been submitted and should be available this week~~ are available now. **Update (4/1)** The Android app is also now available. Lync 2013 Mobile brings a number of improvements and new features. We will dive into these in depth in future blog articles, but for now here is a quick look at a couple of my favorite new features.

VoIP & Video
This was our number one feedback item in app stores and forums, and we listened. Now you can make and receive VoIP & video calls from all Lync 2013 Mobile apps.

Desktop & Application Share Viewing (iPad only)
Improving on the ability to view PowerPoint in meetings with Lync 2010 Mobile iPad 1.5 release, we have added desktop and application share viewing. Now when in meetings you will not miss content shared by others.

I encourage you to download and use the Windows Phone, iPhone, iPad and Android apps today and let us know what you think!