The Microsoft Lync Adoption and Training Kit provides a one-stop shop for prescriptive guidance and resources for the rollout and adoption of Lync clients in the enterprise. The kit also provides customizable, re-usable, rebrand-able user education and training resources, including posters, quick reference cards, short how-to videos, training videos, and e-mail templates. In addition, the kit includes a new Tools and Apps section, which provides buzz-worthy apps such an IM an Expert, the Conversation Translator Add-in for Lync 2010, and useful and customizable training tools, including the Lync Custom Intranet Site and the Lync How-to. This article provides an overview of the kit and shows you how it can be used to speed the usage and adoption of Lync in the enterprise.

Authors: Peter Krebs

Publication date: May 2011

Product version: Lync 2010

Building on the success of the Unified Communications Adoption and
Training Kit

The Microsoft Lync 2010 Adoption and Training Kit builds on the success of the previous kit, the Unified Communications Adoption and Training Kit. Partners, system integrators, and IT pros found that having the rollout resources and the customizable content of the Adoption and Training Kit was an important component to rollout success. Comments ranged from “the Adoption and Training Kit was like a light at the end of a tunnel” to “the Adoption and Training Kit was absolutely useful. Our training is based on the original documentation. It’s absolutely critical that the documentation is customizable.”

Overview of the Lync Adoption and Training Kit

The Lync Adoption and Training Kit offers a variety of enhancements, many offered in direct response to feedback from partners, SI’s, IT pros, MVPs, and trainers.

The Get Started Page of the Lync Adoption and Training Kit

Prescriptive Guidance and Resources for the IT Pro, Help Desk, and Trainer

The Lync Adoption and Training Kit offers prescriptive rollout and adoption guidance for IT pros and project managers, help desk, and trainers. For the IT pro/project manager, a Rollout and Adoption Workbook is available, which provides a project timeline, tasks, and resources for each phase of rollout and adoption.

The Rollout and Adoption Workbook

The Rollout and Adoption Workbook is supplemented by primers, which are offered for each phase of the rollout and adoption process. Each primer offers guidance on how to get started with the phase, along with best practices and an MSIT case study.

A Planning Phase Primer

The Lync Adoption and Training Kit also provides a Resources List that can be filtered by audience or by the rollout and adoption phase, as shown in the following illustration.

Adoption and Training Resources List filtered to show Trainer resources

Training Resources

Corporate trainers often ask “What Works” in terms of training and adoption strategy and resources. The Lync Adoption and Training Kit enables users to easily find a training plan and resources by technology or workload and by user profile. A Training Matrix enables you to click a link and go directly to a training plan for a particular workload and user profile. Training resources, including Quick Reference Cards, short videos, and training videos, can be downloaded, rebranded, and customized to meet the needs of your organization.

Find a Training Plan for Lync Voice and Video

You can download the Training Plan Workbook and select a user profile tab to easily find training and user education resources. In addition, all training assets can be filtered by resource category, resource type, or recommendation.

Workbook for Lync Training Plans

For example, you can select the Information Worker user profile, filter on the IM and Presence resource category, and then filter on only the “Recommended” and “Strongly Recommended” resources.

 

Workbook for Lync Training Plans

From the Lync Training Download Package, you can view Quick Reference Cards and other end-user training materials, including short how-to videos and training videos.

Reusable, customizable Lync training resources

Localized Versions of the Lync Training Download Package

Localized versions of the Lync Training Download Package are scheduled to be available in July 2011. The Lync Training Download Package will be available in German, French, and Spanish. Note that although the end user resources in the Lync Training Download Package will be localized, the Lync Adoption and Training Kit will be available only in English

Tools and Apps

The Lync Adoption and Training Kit offers tools and applications, including a series of Lync add-in applications:

The IM an Expert Page

  • IM an Expert– IM an Expert is a social networking tool that helps the people in your organization who have questions find the people in your organization who have answers. IM an Expert was originally developed by Microsoft Research and allows users to ask questions on any subject using Lync 2010 instant messaging (IM). IM an Expert parses the question to determine the topic area, finds topic area experts in its user-populated expert database, and forwards the question. A willing expert responds to the initial question and follow-up questions using Lync. IM an Expert builds a knowledge base of questions and answers and provides statistics on queries, answers, and perceived quality.

The Conversation Translator Application Page

  • Conversations Analyzer - Conversations Analyzer is an application that reviews your Lync instant messaging (IM) conversation history and gives you scores for your use of trust-building language in day-to-day communications with business associates and friends. Conversations Analyzer applies trust rules to determine the occurrence of words and phrases that have a positive or negative effect on trust. Only your IM conversation history is reviewed. The results are not uploaded anywhere. The scores are meant to be used only by you.
  • Conversation Translator - Conversation Translator provides a real-time language translation service for Lync instant messaging (IM) conversations. With Conversation Translator, both the sender and receiver can converse in their native language, and Conversation Translator handles the translation. Powered by the Microsoft Translator Web Service, Conversation Translator currently supports translation between 35 languages.
  • Information Dashboard - Information Dashboard helps you start a conversation with a remote contact by providing current information about the contact's location. For example, if you are calling a coworker or a client in Shanghai, China, you can open Information Dashboard and enter the location of Shanghai before making the call. Information Dashboard will return the day, date, time, whether you are calling during regular working hours, the weather forecast, and a news feed of articles related to the location. A contact’s location is saved after you set it and is recalled automatically when you start a new conversation.
  • Tabbed Conversations - Tabbed Conversations provides a tabbed conversation window to allow multiple instant messaging (IM) conversations in a single window.
  • Group Chat Stress Tool - You can use the Group Chat Stress package to help verify your Microsoft Lync Server 2010 and Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Group Chat hardware deployment. Group Chat Stress is made up of two applications: Group Chat Stress Tool, a UI application, and Group Chat Loaders, the stress engine (which has no UI). Use Group Chat Stress Tool to create the configuration files for the loaders and to distribute the binaries to the remote machines that will be running the loaders. Use Group Chat Loaders to apply the specified load parameters on the Group Chat Server.

In addition to the applications, the Lync Adoption and Training Kit also offers training tools that can be customized and integrated into an enterprises Intranet site.

  • Lync Custom Intranet Site - The Lync Custom Intranet Site provides a way for you to deliver a version of Lync 2010 online Help that exactly matches the way your organization works. The site includes HTML source code for all Help pages. It also includes all the short how-to videos, Help topics, Microsoft PowerPoint training presentations, and other resources currently available online.
  • Lync How-to - Lync How-to is a user education and training tool that provides step-by-step instructions and short videos for common Lync 2010 tasks. You can customize the content by editing the rolodex.xml file that is provided with the Lync How-to download package. For example, you can:
    • Add, remove, or modify categories, subcategories, and topics to match your deployment.
    • Add or remove videos to match your deployment.
    • Modify URLs for related links, training, and feedback to point to your organization’s resources.
    • Modify branding to use your organization’s name.

The Lync How-to user education and training tool can be implemented as an HTML or Microsoft Silverlight solution on your website.

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