This week we see a really important update for companies using Lync for Mac 2011. A big thanks goes to 2 customers in our Lync Online Dedicated environment that persevered and pressed through the analysis as the behavior had an odd pattern. Customers...

Are you an IT manager or a partner working with a company needing additional flexibility around user management with Lync? Stefan Plizga has a tool http://lumt.codeplex.com/ described as: Lync User Management Tool (LUMT) enables administrators to manage...

February 6 Update : (Happy Birthday Sophia!) After writing this post, we posted the 14.0.4 update for the Lync for Mac client - http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2778095 . The customer and I are still monitoring his situation but initially it looks positive...

When you see, hear or read about Office 365 the dialog is almost always about the broad offering we refer to as Multitenant or Shared, however there is a small group of customers deployed in our Dedicated environment. The regions currently providing voice...

Thanks to my teammate Andre for sharing this great switching method using the wheel button on the mouse. Download the Mouse and Keyboard Center 2.0 (formerly IntelliPoint and IntelliType Pro) http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx...

We have a recent post for Lync Server 2010 on NextHop http://blogs.technet.com/b/nexthop/archive/2012/09/10/how-to-automate-your-new-account-creation-process.aspx and I was looking for input as I reviewed the article and tool and thought it to be a solid...

I have worked with Group Chat for some time and it was always a love/hate affair. What the product offered was well understood and when used right helped reduce the need for email. The downside was the solution was difficult to install and manage (this...

October 19 update due to a follow up question from a peer This article speaks to a known issue under Vista http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928906 You can check the network properties of the connection and see if Windows displays this as a VPN...

Update June 28 - Want to see what happens when your personal blog recieves professional editing? See this post on Next Hop - http://blogs.technet.com/b/nexthop/archive/2012/06/28/how-to-create-visio-and-excel-output-from-a-tbxml-file.aspx I encountered...

I visited Redmond at the end of March and while there we were discussing certificates and PKI. Nick a recent Lync Microsoft Certified Master (MCM ) was sharing how he explained how certificate authorities worked and he gave me permission to post on his...

Last week I had a problem where Outlook would not connect to my Exchange server while I was remote and using Direct Access. Having some knowledge of Outlook troubleshooting I jumped straight to creating a new profile which failed as Outlook was in an...

One of my peer PM's received a question from a Lync Online dedicated customer for end user mobility content and he shared the culmination of that request Adoption and Training Kit: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/confirmation.aspx?id=9642 ...

A customer asked me to test this behavior and sure enough when using the Phone tab, if you try to type the + sign it is reported as Character not valid. If you type too fast and add digits the error goes away yet the number won't be dialed. While...

Look Dad, there’s three of you  Working from home means the kids come in the office at times and during the winter break my 4 year old wanted to sit on my lap as I worked. I was using the next version of Outlook when he made the above comment. It...

Having been in my new role for just under two months I feel I have come to understand better what the dedicated offering is and will share for those that may have wondered. I am focusing on Lync as I work in this area but I believe that this could apply...

I became aware of this promotion due to following Chris Norman on Twitter @VoipNorm where he tweeted a blog post http://voipnorm.blogspot.com/2011/11/ultimate-voice-career-promotion.html     As part of advertising this I received a direct email...

Check out the December 9, 2011 Dilbert cartoon!  

There was a question today on the behavior with the update in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2415902 which adds further text to the presence states for IM Only and No Voice. The question is why are the text phrases different and the reason is we are...

PIC, the ability to IM between OCS/Lync with AOL, MSN/Hotmail/Live and Yahoo! is a great feature but during December each year any problem customers face hit one additional hurdle – Datacenter Lockdowns. The purpose of a lockdown is to bring stability...

Just a quick professional update – I recently started a new role with Lync Online for our dedicated offering as an Operations Manager. I have worked with this technology since LCS 2003 and am excited about this new role focusing on our online offering...

This just proves that even being in the group that builds and owns the product you can still stumble across a cool feature. The contact card not only displays the persons time zone but what time it is there. This is certainly helpful the more you work...

While Microsoft maintains a list internally, we do not publish the company names that we federate with directly using OCS and Lync. Matt Landis has this blog post where he is gathering that data for those interested. Thanks Julian for the comment...

October 21 - Microsoft Lync for Mac 2011 client update released today This update addresses two known issues: Lync for Mac sign-in into Office 365 Installation of Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2 causes Lync for Mac to become inoperable The Lync for Mac client is...

We had a report among some of our internal users of sign-in failures. Based on the log with numerous NTLM authentication failures that there is possibly an issue/bug with special characters in the password. This user reported the use of (¥) which works...

So you or a team member has a Mac and is using the Lync for Mac client and now they want to explore their sharing options. Start with the feature comparison chart here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg425836.aspx   You will notice they...