The great Lync Conference of 2013

I had the privilege to attend the Microsoft Lync Conference 2013 held at beautiful hotel del Coronado in San Diego!

The conference started with a keynote showing some great past and coming features of Lync and especially Lync 2013 of course. Lync and Skype will soon federate. Skype is a platform that currently connects some 280 million users who spends 300 billion minutes on the phone per year, it will be a great benefit being able to reach all those persons straight from your Lync client. The federation is scheduled for June of this year.

It was good to learn that the product group sees Mobility as important as well as Reliability; if your first call with Lync fails chances are you will not try again, so work is definitely ongoing in these areas. It was also reassuring to hear that Lync is committed to multi-platforms. We saw demos of Lync VoIP and video on iOS and Android next to windows 8 and Windows Phone. These mobile clients will be available next month through the various "App Stores", so it seems as I can hang on to my Apple products for yet some time.

The Lync room based system / concept were also demonstrated on big touch sensitive screens to be used as whiteboards - looks really neat. The Lync room based system will be available through 4 vendors by this summer. The new Lync 2013 Meeting Gallery view with 4 simultaneous video feeds on a Windows 8 device were demoed as well as video in the Lync 2013 web app running on a Mac.

We also learnt that Enterprise voice will be coming in Office365 within 18 months from now and that the next Lync server version will be released in the second quarter of 2014. It seems as Microsoft is stepping up the pace of improvements and new features for Lync.

After the keynote, the different break-out sessions started, and we got the chance to check out the expo area and mingle with some nice people.

Matt Landis is checking out a Surface device which Tommy Clarke equipped with åäö.

We also took several "deep dives" into stuff like Lync Resiliency, Voice Routing, Interoperability and related subjects.

It was good to meet several of my old students at the conference - here is Lars Ernerdahl - a Lync Enterprise Voice expert from Sigma in Sweden.

Some stuff I picked up which seemed new to me:

• A virtualization whitepaper for Lync 2013 is on its way.
• Announcements around Reverse Proxy planning / recommendations are coming on the UCOIP page.
• Better Boss/Secretary functionality with Lync 2013 and SNOM phones.
• SNOM phones can register towards two SIP registrars at the same time (like Lync 2013 / MX-ONE 5.0)
• Virtualizing SBA's will be possible in Lync 2013.
• SQL mirroring is supported in Lync 2013 - with or without a witness.
• SQL clustering is NOT supported in Lync 2013.
• Encrypted traffic might be an issue for QoS over WiFi - Aruba Networks has solutions for this.
• In Exchange 2013 all backend servers are UM servers.
• Call Admission Control is mutually exclusive to Media Bypass.
• Lync 2013 will detect gateway down and try another gateway much quicker than Lync 2010.

Cumulative Update 1 for Lync 2013 is coming now in February and seems to be a big thing. New features will be added to Lync along with updates as well and we got to hear about these three nice addons:

Location based routing for non-emergency calls

This means routing based on where a user is located in the network, and not only depending on what the user dials. Location-based routing will use the existing sites and regions already configured in CSCP, together with a new policy. All other configuration of this feature will be done with powershell commands.

Server support for Mobile clients

This is the needed backend changes to get voice and video going in the Mobile Clients.

Group call pickup

Roy Kuntz talked about the Group Call Pickup feature in his excellent “Deploying Voice” session. Group Call Pickup means that when you hear another phone ring (can be a drawback with the Lync client software and ring tones not being loud like regular phones) you simply dial the call pickup number assigned to that extension to pick it up.

And besides the technical stuff - we had a lot of fun!

Microsoft Sweden got all the Swedes together before the event even started – thanks guys!

We went on a boat trip with Audiocodes and Plantronics – thanks guys!

The UC Architects arranged a Great Giveaway - and I won a beautiful headset - thanks guys!

And we got the best seats at the Sea World attendee party!

Magnus Algard and Ulf Trolle tried the hands-on-labs available for all delegates.

I tweeted a lot during the entire conference and was real happy to see two of my tweets promoted during the second keynote. 

Matt Landis did a little "Takeaways" Interview video with me, and I had to take the chance to clown off a bit. Around 600 persons from 40 countries attended the conference, 300 partners, 40+ Swedish delegates (and we consumed 2000+ drinks in 2 hours during the welcome reception.) I really think that #lyncconf13 was the best event I attended so far! I loved the content, the people and the party! and I really hope this will become a recurring event.

Localized Lync 2010 Training Material

Through this Microsoft Lync 2010 Training link, you can download Lync 2010 end-user training in a Power Point format.

If your end-users does not speak or read English you can download this material in any of the following 33 languages:

Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian

Another good end-user resource is the Lync how-to webpage found as a part of the Adoption and Training Kit, this unfortunately in English only.

Prerequisites for Lync 2013 on Windows Server 2008 R2

So you have a brand new Windows 2008 R2 server that you plan to use as your Lync 2013 Server. First question is - why not use Windows Server 2012? Well, if you do have a good answer for that, please read on.

You have probably received the Lync installation files as an ISO file, so the first thing you need is some sort of software to access the contents of this file. I would recommend the MagicDisc freeware which you can use to mount the ISO file as a device in your server.

If you tried to run the Lync 2013 setup.exe now, you would see the following message.

So, on to downloading and installing Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1

To install the roles and features required for Lync 2013, open a powershell prompt as administrator and run the following commands:

Import-Module ServerManager
Add-WindowsFeature Web-Dyn-Compression,desktop-experience,RSAT-ADDS,Web-Server,Web-Scripting-Tools,Web-Windows-Auth,Web-Asp-Net,Web-Log-Libraries,Web-Http-Tracing,Web-Stat-Compression,Web-Default-Doc,Web-ISAPI-Ext,Web-ISAPI-Filter,Web-Http-Errors,Web-Http-Logging,Web-Net-Ext,Web-Client-Auth, Web-Filtering,Web-Mgmt-Console,Msmq-Server,Msmq-Directory

Next, you need the following three packages:

• .Net 4.5  
• Windows Identity Foundation 
• Windows Management Framework 3.0

And finally, you need to apply the following fix:
Heap corruption occurs when a module calls the InsertEntityBody method in IIS 7.5

Now you are ready to double-click setup.exe from the Lync 2013 installation package.

One additional prerequisite that you probably would like to load on your server is Silverlight which is required to run the Lync Control Panel.

Happy installing!

Lync Attendant (Switchboard operator) news

First, a big congratulation to Competella who now got their Competella Multimedia Attendant product on Microsoft's Qualified Lync Applications list.

The list contains five major areas of applications.

• Attendant console
• Billing & enhanced reporting
• Contact center
• Health management and quality of experience (QoE)
• Recording

And a total of 18 applications are listed as of today.
It will be interesting to see how this program grows for the benefit of all Lync users.

The second big news is that the Swedish organizations Trio and Visionutveckling are merging, both organizations have developed switchboard operator applications which work for Lync. Visionutveckling is privately held and Trio is owned by Enghouse Systems, a press release about the merger can be found here.

The magazine Telekomidag has an article in Swedish about the merger here.

Lync 2013 Visio icons

There is a new Lync 2013 Office and Exchange (and Lync)Visio stencil containing some 285 300 shapes available now.



Get it here:
Lync Server 2013 Visio Stencil 

And you can still find all the older icons right here...

Lync Server 2010 Visio Stencil
Aastra, Polycom and Radvision Stencils
Microsoft Exchange 2010 Visio Stencil
Office Communications Server 2007 and 2007 R2 Visio Stencils

Lync Client Password Recovery

I have been thinking about blogging about this cool little tool for a long time now
- the Lync Client Password Recovery Tool.

This is simply a tool that dumps out Lync passwords (which also are the user’s domain password) from the local credential manager store found in the Control Panel / User Accounts / Manage your credentials. Now the reason why I have not made a post about this before was because I expected this issue (security hole) to go away in Lync 2013, but today I had a chance to try it with the Lync 2013 Preview client (but still connected to a Lync 2010 Server.)

And to my surprise - the tool still works even with the Lync 2013 Preview client!?

The issue is of course the widely used and very convenient "Save Password" check box found when logging in to Lync.

Checking the "Save password" box in Lync 2013 Preview will however bring up one additional warning compared to Lync 2010.

There is a “SavePassword” setting in the Lync group policy settings that could be set to
0 = "Users do not have the option to save password", that have the following explanation.

"Allows Microsoft Lync to store user passwords.  If you enable this policy setting, Microsoft Lync can store a password on request from the user.  If you disable this policy setting, Microsoft Lync cannot store a password.
Note: You can configure this policy setting under both Computer Configuration and User Configuration, but the policy setting under Computer Configuration takes precedence."
Microsoft Lync 2010 Client Group Policy Documentation

And this could also be quick-fixed with a registry key hack.
reg add HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Communicator /v SavePassword /d 0 /f

I also believe that the Registrar settings found in the Lync control panel / Security / Registrar / Global will have some effects on this.

 
But seriously - I really hope something more is done about this in Lync 2013 - or?
Please comment so that I can update this post soon!

Thanks and greetings to Mr. Remko Weijnen!

Profiles for Lync 2013

Working as a consultant with several customers I spend my days with logging in and out of Lync systems. That is why I love this little tool called profiles for Lync. This tool allows you to enter and save login details to several customers and quickly enter these into your Lync client with a single mouseclick, extremely time saving!

The tool is just updated to version 2 and is also available in two versions, one for the Lync 2013 client and one for Lync 2010.

Get it here:
Profiles For Lync 2013
Profiles For Lync 2010
Thank you Greig Sheridan for this tool!