This question was asked by a college based out of Florida looking to deploy Lync for their 1500 faculty and staff. They had redundant WAN links and wanted to determine what a SBA provides. Screenshots from Lync product team.
If I have redundant WAN links, what benefits does a SBA provide for my branch offices?
An SBA provides the following benefits:
What are my Branch Office options for Lync Server?
You have three recommended options available to you.The first is no SBA for 25 users or less. The second is an SBA for 26-1000 users and the third option for 1001-5000 users is a Survivable Branch Server or Lync Std Edition Server with a Media Gateway. For remote sites with more than 5000 users it is recommended to deploy a full Lync infrastructure with a separate pool.
The idea here is you could use WAN as your primary and have a fallback for PSTN for high availability. For the small branch scenario, some UC phones allow for dual registration where you could fall back to an alternate VOIP provider is need be.
Does an SBA provide inbound and outbound dialing during a WAN failure?
End user experience when using failover to PSTN.
The answer is yes. Here are the features that work during resiliency mode in the branch office:
What are the Lync features which don’t working during a WAN outage in the branch office?
Who are the SBA partners available for Lync Server 2010?
How do I deploy a SBA?
I put together a summary of the required steps. For more specific details visit here.
How can I provide redundant Response Group Service with Lync if my primary datacenter fails?
If you stretch your Lync pool across datacenters you can accommodate this.
This has been a question asked by several customers. I just stumbled across this new useful feature comparison matrix on TechNet. I pasted them in below.
Matrix is here on TechNet.
What is in this release?
This release includes a huge new feature my education customers have been asking for. The ability to share a Mac desktop/PowerPoint/other desktop content with other Lync users including PC users, etc. I can think of the troubleshooting helpdesk scenarios as well! There are also some important bug fixes for Communicator.
PC users can now see Mac desktops for content consumption!
How do users get it?
13.1 is currently available to you through MAU through Communicator's first updater. Users will need to install MC13.0 and then apply this update.
Read more on the Communicator 2011 13.1 update here.
This was a question from a school district in Colorado looking to retire Avaya and replace with Lync Server 2010. (screenshots from Lync product team)
I found this great new matrix available listing all of our Lync optimized or Communications ready IP phones:
For a list of all Lync optimized IP phones, headsets, USB phones, PCs, cameras, speakerphones, etc visit here.
What are some of the new Lync IP phone capabilities?
Rich new UI with contact and caller photos. Phone UI can be pushed from Lync server as updates are released.
Incoming calls have photos from other Lync callers Calls can be sent to parking lot, transferred, etc.
The number one feature I like is the ability for the IP phone to read your Exchange calendar and Join conferences right from the phone without any dialing/pins (note: only applies to CX600 and 6725ip). This is a nice click to join feature if you don’t have the IP phone tethered to your PC with a USB cable. Conferences visually show participants and who is actually talking in the meeting.
Common Area Phone – can be locked down with powershell Hotdesking scenario where users can log into a common area phone
How do I manage the IP phones?
IP phones are managed centrally from the Lync update server. IP Phone reports can also be pulled:
Device specific reports:
You don’t have to. In Lync we have the option of setting the enhanced privacy mode where only people in your contact list can see your presence. To do this you have to change the CSPrivacyOption by set-CsPrivacyConfiguration – EnablePrivacyMode $True. It’s important to note that these settings are not honored by earlier client versions. Also – if the user logs in with an earlier client than these settings will be reset.
I wouldn’t do this in a lot of scenarios as this would polarize the environment. Who is considered special enough to warrant this and who isn’t. If you have well defined school policies on who can block and who can’t then this provides an option for you. Restrictions also prevent a lot of the adhoc collaboration as you will not be able to communicate with these people. I would test with your policies and see if this makes sense. Great it’s there but we don’t enable at Microsoft as we have an open door policy and I can communicate with anyone in the company via UC.