This is a great tool to analyze your Lync deployment and should be leveraged on a daily/weekly basis as part of your Lync Server operational best practices. The BPA will scan your Lync infrastructure, report errors, warnings and information about the settings and configuration.

The BPA validates your Lync infrastructure versus a list of our Lync Best Practice configurations, hotfixes, service packs, etc maintained by the Lync team. We update the list of best practices frequently as configurations, hotfixes, best practices evolve.  The Exchange 2010 built-in BPA is another great tool to provide the same functionality against your Exchange 2010 infrastructure.

The Lync Server 2010 BPA can be downloaded here.

The Lync BPA TechNet documentation is here.

One of my customers recently asked me about group policies and Office Communicator. With Lync 2010 these traditional group policy settings are now accomplished via in-band provisioning or server-based client policies. Keep in mind there are still some group policy settings that are still required for bootstrapping but beyond that we have moved to server-side provisioning. Lync client provisioning is done via powershell cmdlets or by using the Lync Server Control Panel.

Most of the CSClientPolicy parameters correspond to the OCS 2007 R2 Group policy settings.

In-band provisioning settings that are server-based provide a consistent end-user experience for people who are not joined to the campus domain, or who join using devices or remote clients. This helps management in our schools that have a huge portion of the workstations as unmanaged. As a plus these settings are taken immediately vs. logout and login again.

Lots of policies can be set including:

AudioVideoBirate

AllowCallForwarding

EnableP2PVideo

IM archiving

Calendar State Publication

DisableFreeBusyInfo,

etc.

I started to research in-band provisioning and did find an article by one of my peers here. Thanks Daniel!

Microsoft Lync Server 2010 requires either full hardware load balancers to be leveraged for a redundant production rollout or leverage  the new option which is a combination of hardware load balancers for DCOM and web traffic combined with DNS load balancing for the remaining Lync traffic. See Greg’s post here for more on using DNS load balancing with Lync Server 2010.

For a list of Microsoft UC qualified load balancers visit here. This list will be updated for Lync Server 2010 in the near future. There are several excellent HWLB partners slated for Lync Server 2010 qualification. F5 has developed a Lync Server 2010 deployment guide for customers and you can grab it here under ‘Microsoft’.

If your Lync server deployment route is heading towards a HWLB only deployment, below are a couple of F5 (hardware load balancer) deployment scenarios (screen shots from the F5 Lync Server 2010 deployment guide):

Some other useful information from the  F5 deployment guide is around ports, persistence, SNAT needed is listed in the matrices below:

For Lync Edge server load balancer settings for EXTERNAL NIC (from F5 deployment guide):

For Lync Edge server load balancer for INTERNAL NIC (from F5 deployment guide):

For Lync Front End  server load balancer settings (from F5 deployment guide):

For Lync Director server load balancer settings (from F5 deployment guide):

The Lync product team came out with my favorite protocol style of poster for Lync Server 2010. Perfect for your cube or wall!. Check out some snips from it below:

View or grab poster with zoom it or download it

There is also the new Lync Server 2010 Tech Center on TechNet.

Grab the new Lync Server 2010 planning, deployment, migration, operations guides along with the complete Lync Server powershell cmdlet reference all in one searchable CHM file here. A Lync administrator’s must have file on the desktop.

Some nice animated Lync videos on Lync Server 2010 setup and migration from OCS 2007 R2 here: First run videos

Official Lync Server 2010 RTM documentation is now available here at  Lync Server 2010 Technical Library. The repository for all the official Lync Server 2010 documentation.

Cool Lync blogs to check out:

• Next Hop – has great rollup information and product team posts
• Lync Server 2010 Powershell blog – has some awesome scripts and information on the cmdlets you can leverage to manage Lync Server.

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.

OK. We don’t support WMI and now the WMI script for bulk user load doesn’t work for Lync clients. I haven’t tested this myself yet but appears that Jeff Fuillet has created a script for doing this with Lync. This tool provides the same type of functionality as LCSAddcontacts.

From ExPTA {blog}

The purpose of LyncAddContacts is to add the same contact groups and contacts to multiple users programmatically.  For example, you may want to import a contact group called "Company Contacts"  that contains contacts for everyone in the company.  Here's how it works:

1. Create a template (source) user in Lync with the contact groups and contacts that you want to export.
2. Run the LyncAddContacts tool to export the source user's contacts
3. Run the LyncAddContacts tool again in import mode and target the user or OU that you want to import the contacts to.

For more information on the tool I would download from his blogsite. Great stuff Jeff. Thanks for recognizing the gap and providing a solution!!!!

In some cases you may want to reduce the workload on servers or stage deployment of all the features of Lync until …. (the servers can support the load, the network upgrade is complete, etc). When you did this in OCS 2007 R2 you had to enable GPOs to stage deployment. In Lync most client policies are enabled as in-band from the Lync Control Panel or from Powershell. So what does the experience look like for the user? Do they see that they could do that feature but for some reason the IT team has turned it off? No. They don’t see it.

Looking at a user configuration in the Lync Server 2010 Control Panel I can apply policies to that user. In my case I decided that in telephony audio and video are disabled as shown below.

After I commit this change for the user and log that user out. This is what they see in the UI. The option for calls is grayed out.

If I decided to have a conversation with Holly I can see that Audio calls of any kind have been disabled as well as video calls. In my case I still wanted to enabled conferencing capabilities but this could also be removed to have just IM enabled.

This gives you lots of flexibility in how you deploy. Obviously the greatest value is when all modalities are available but proper planning and deployment are always necessary. Take care.

The OIP has been updated to include Lync 2010. If you are looking for what PBXs provide Direct SIP, Gateways, SBA information, etc. Then I suggest reviewing the updated site here.

Some cool Lync dev training available if you are looking to extend Lync into your line of business or web applications:

Microsoft Lync Server 2010, Microsoft Lync 2010 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 provide the communication platform for developers to rapidly build solutions that integrate and extend communications into their business processes based on familiar tools and skills.

The Unified Communications "14" Training Course and the Unified Communications “14” Developer Training Kit provide deep technical training on all aspects of the Lync Server 2010, Lync 2010 and Exchange Server 2010 SDKs to give developers the skills they need to be productive developing communications driven business processes.

This training course includes 22 videos and 20 hands on labs, including the following: