Lync Server 2010 unites enterprise telephony, IM, video, audio conferencing, and Office apps.
Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2, which was released in early 2009, does a credible job of providing presence awareness, instant messaging, conferencing and voice capabilities. Still, these services aren’t always integrated, and thus aren’t easily managed by IT staff. For end users, the lack of integration means maintaining various sets of contacts and working differently depending on the application.
Watch a slideshow of what we love about Lync
That’s all history with Microsoft Lync 2010, which officially ships on Dec. 1, and replaces OCS. We’ve been testing the software for several weeks and we find that Lync integrates well with Exchange, Active Directory, SharePoint and Office.
Lync also makes a strong case for becoming either a companion to an existing PBX via SIP, or an eventual PBX replacement. Lync’s overall voice capabilities still lag behind competitors like Avaya and Cisco, and enterprises aren’t likely to rip out their existing PBXs, but companies planning ahead for their next voice upgrade should give Lync a look.
For our evaluation, we setup four Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machines – for Exchange, SharePoint, Active Directory and the Lync server. Microsoft specifies that a single Lync 2010 server can handle 10,000 users with dedicated hardware and about half that through virtualization. By pooling severs, you can manage 100,000 users – and unlimited pools are theoretically possible. Based on performance monitoring of our testbed, these figures appear to be accurate.
Your technical staff should be able to manage Lync 2010 servers without much additional training. That’s because Lync includes the same type of PowerShell command-line tools that are included with Exchange Server, Active Directory, and other Microsoft server products. Moreover, there’s a Silverlight-based GUI (Lync Server Control Panel) that should improve productivity of administrators for day-to-day tasks, such as server monitoring and reconfiguring voice features.
Persistent presence
The end-user experience centers on the Microsoft Lync 2010 client app. It’s visually rich, providing photos of contacts, which are color-coded with presence status. We used the prominent search field to query our Active Directory Server to find contacts, which can be grouped in many ways. Another benefit of this coupling: fly-out “contact cards” display greater information, including phone numbers and where the contact fits within your organization structure.
Lync Server automatically draws information from a user’s Outlook calendar, such as location information or status. Besides the standard Available and Busy status (which were available with OCS) Lync lets you add a note, such as “in a budget meeting.” We appreciated other details, too. For example, presence status also indicates whether a user is signed in from a mobile device or IP phone that cannot accept instant messages.
Presence information and integration extends to SharePoint, Outlook, and other Office applications. In practice, this “click to communicate” feature saved us time when collaborating on projects. Hovering over a person’s presence icon in SharePoint, for instance, displayed a menu that let us immediately start an IM or voice conversation.
Like OCS, it was easy to invite others to join in the conversation. But with Lync, now they can reside outside the firewall. This public IM connectivity let us communicate with Yahoo!, Windows Live, and AOL users. Also new, and perhaps more important, Lync lets you use all collaboration features with Microsoft Communication Server users on another company’s corporate network.
Lync Instant Messaging offers a multitude of other capabilities, from filters that alert you to conversations that mention you by name to viewing an activity feed of what your contacts are doing. However, we found the Skill Search the most useful. It uses information from a person’s profile in SharePoint to find experts in your organization – or just those with shared interests.
Conferencing in one place
Historically, conferencing involves juggling multiple resources – voice, screen sharing, video – each handled with a different application. Lync 2010 performed very well in removing these boundaries. The meeting tools integrated into Outlook 2010 let us schedule a meeting with one click – and the same ease extends to participants when they join a meeting; clicking a link in the e-mail invitation launches Lync 2010. (Communicator for Mac 2011 hooks in to OCS/Lync servers, giving Apple users access to conferencing and most other Lync Server features).
Audio conferencing is the staple of many meetings and Microsoft provides all users with an experience that mirrors more traditional audio bridge services, such as a dial-in phone number and access code. However, the Lync client’s VoIP capability eliminates the need to enter these details, while adding a lot of conveniences, such as identifying who is speaking and giving the moderator options to mute participants.
Consumers popularized video conferencing with products such as Skype. The unified Lync client brings the same ease of use to business communications. Selecting the video option in the Lync interface let us instantly add video to a conversation with a colleague. When there are multiple participants in the conversation, Lync detects the active speaker and displays that person in the active window. Depending on your network bandwidth, Lync supports HD video (1,270 x 720 pixel resolution) for single conversations. The only limitation was that HD video wasn’t available for video conferences among multiple parties.
Importantly, Lync integrates with third-party video conferencing system, such as those from Polycom. This should let businesses use existing video conference rooms and also communicate with partners who have video conferencing endpoints.
Just as adding video to a meeting is easy, so are using whiteboard, application and document sharing. Microsoft doesn’t add any radical functions here. Yet we liked the way everything is contained within the Lync window. For example, a PowerPoint presentation appears to the right of the presence pane, so you’re not dealing with multiple windows or a different set of commands.
We successfully recorded meetings – capturing audio, video, meeting content and annotations. The content was then exported to a single .WMV-format movie file for later playback.
We didn’t experience any performance problems with conferencing. However, Microsoft lets large organizations install separate Audio/Video (A/V) Conferencing Servers; these can be running on separate physical hardware or the A/V role can be run on an existing Lync 2010 server.
Voice of the enterprise
Enterprise voice may be the real story with Lync 2010. At the basic level, Lync integrates with almost any PBX system through Session Initiation Protocol or a qualified gateway.
More significant, Lync Server 2010 also provides most of the telephony features of a traditional IP PBX. The system works with a variety of IP phones, such as the new Polycom CX 600 (which runs Lync 2010 Phone Edition that includes presence awareness on the phone), and Jabra headsets.
In testing, we found Lync Server 2010’s telephony capabilities generally complete. We successfully used the Lync 2010 desktop client to place and receive voice calls using both the VoIP network and through a PBX.
For this test we used a Jabra Pro 9470 system with a wireless headset that connects to a traditional phone, PC (through USB), and cell phone using Bluetooth. Calls were initiated directly from our contact list and made with the standard phone. Next, we directed incoming calls to our softphone (employing a Jabra Biz 2400 USB headset), which also showed a notification on our PC with the caller’s information gleaned from the corporate directory.
More advanced functions were easily accomplished by pointing and clicking with the Lync interface, including transferring a call from our work phone to a cell phone or routing the call to someone else. Users can choose from many call forwarding options.
The IP voice quality was clear and natural with the Jabra 9470, the new Jabra Speak 410 USB speaker phone, and the wired headset. At the same time, voice consumed very little network bandwidth, about 28Kbps.
A separate application, Lync Server 2010 Attendant, lets receptionists and call centers manage high call volumes. The attendant, which runs in full screen mode, let us perform directory searches, click once to transfer calls, and get the same presence awareness that’s part of the overall Lync product.
If there’s one current weakness we found, it’s with mobile phone support (currently limited to Nokia and some Windows Mobile 6.5 devices). However, Microsoft representatives said iPhone and Windows Phone 7 Lync apps would be released in 2011.
Lync Server 2010 hits all the right notes for hosting meetings and handling peer-to-peer collaboration – with a well-designed interface, a long list of functions, and time-saving server administration tools. Organizations probably won’t select Lync purely as a replacement for their PBX right away; competitors such as Avaya and Cisco are well entrenched in enterprise with excellent products. However, because telephony is part of Microsoft’s solution, it’s an important part of the ROI equation; pricing of Lync is about the same as PBX-only solutions. Therefore, decision makers should consider Lync’s complete capabilities in future infrastructure and budget planning.
Finally, Lync is very open, as it’s based in SIP/Simple, XMPP and Voice XML specifications – and has an open API. This extensibility has already enabled many third-party hardware manufacturers to create Lync-qualified devices, and for developers to embed presence and other Lync functions within their applications.
Heck manages portals for a large pharma company and writes about enterprise applications. He can be reached at mikeheck@comcast.net.
