[AusNOG] Experience reports for MS Lync roll-outs wanted

[Mattia Rossi]

Hi all,

having had some requests to publish the insights about MS Lync here is 
what I got so far.
Mostly I'll refer to Lync 2010.

Lync Integrates perfectly in your Office Environment, but it needs 
Office 2007 or higher to work
Lync comes in three flavours: Standard, Enterprise and Plus. These three 
flavours are additive, meaning that for PLus you need the other two 
first too.
These flavours are also only the Client Access Licenses (CAL) which 
allow Clients to connect to the server.
The server software, which is based on Win 2008 R2 server, has to be 
bought separately.
Lync Standard edition can't do conference calls or conference video, 
only peer to peer calls and video
You can join conference calls though, if they have been created somehow 
magically from an Enterprise edition which is somehow magically connected...
The Standard edition is rather simple to deploy (1 server), rather cheap 
and supports 5000 users.
The Enterprise Edition becomes quite complex and gets also expensive:
You need the following servers:

  * Front End Server and Back End Server
  * A/V Conferencing Server
  * Edge Server
  * Mediation Server
  * Monitoring Server
  * Archiving Server
  * Director

Additionally you need an MS SQL Server, MS Exchange Server and AD DS server.
The Back End Server does all the codec work in software with risks to 
run into resource issues.
All of them have to be quite recent versions, so take care.
You need to buy Licenses for the Clients too.
Licenses are cheap if you fall into a category like Charity, Education 
or something similar which MS supports.
Otherwise not.
The desktop client is quite intuitive, and lets you share the desktop as 
well as allowing remote desktop service. You can also share only a 
single app. But not on Mac OS.
With Lync usually you don't use a hardware VoIP phone, but just a 
headset on your PC, although vendors are selling compatible phones.
Lync has a client for smartphones (iOS, Android, Windows Phone, Symbian) 
which can be used to chat and make phone calls.
Calls from the smartphoneclient  use VoIP only if you're on WiFi. If you 
move from one WLAN AP to another within your corporation, Lync relies on 
the Infrastructure to provide seamless transition (You probably need 
some fancy Cisco setup anyways).
If you leave the WLAN, your call will end, and you'll have to call again 
using 2G/3G voice.
No video conferencing support on the smartphone either.
If you're not on the LAN/WAN, and want to participate in a conference 
call, you can dial-in to a conference.
Lync can setup conference calls with users which are on the move on 
2G/3G, if you use a 3rd party provider. It seems to be supported. People 
use JahJah, but reports say that voice quality is terrible.
The conference calls don't support DTMF. So if you need a call center, 
you have a problem.
You can't record calls made from a Lync smartphone client outside the 
LAN to a client, as it bypasses the server completely. If you need call 
recording in any situation, don't use Lync. Try Blackberry MVS. Or 
Cisco/Avaya/Siemens and have a big fat data plan for mobiles ready.
There is no such thing as call transfers from the mobile voice network 
to the company VoIP network.
Lync provides fallback to PSTN and an appliance called a survivable 
branch appliance, which provides Lync services to the branches and also 
includes PSTN fallback.
High availability deployments are possible, but not simple compared to 
Cisco, Avaya and the like.
Traffic engineering seems to be a problem, as the DSCP is set on the 
host, and switches seem to have a hard time trusting the port.
Lync includes a bandwidth calculation tool, which allows you to plan 
ahead for the required bandwidth.
A table about bandwidth usage can be found here 
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-au/library/gg413004%28v=ocs.14%29.aspx
The proprietary codecs use little bandwidth, but make it impossible to 
talk to non Lync clients (mostly a problem for Video calls)
Lync servers can be run on VMs (well, you need a lot of servers for the 
Enterprise Edition), but then PSTN fallback becomes somewhat difficult.
Lync supports IPv6 (at least with Lync 2013). Got v6? (Siemens OpenScape 
even supports calls from IPv4 to IPv6.. Personally I think that's cool. 
But maybe others do as well)

Some generic UCC problems I've also encountered so far and would be 
interested in hearing answers are:
How do you replace Pagers (for example in a Hospital) if you deploy a 
UCC solution
How do you track the location of employees which are moving around a lot 
(Warehouse, Mine, Police, etc.)
How do you get Emergency calls to work properly? With that I mean again 
locate the caller.
How do you deal with phone numbers and renumbering?

The last questions are things I haven't found a proper answer yet. They 
are related to the problem, that you never know whether your VoIP call 
is End to End or whether it's translated into PSTN at some point, losing 
information.

Cheers,

Mat

(I apologise if this email is out of the AusNOG scope)


Am 29.10.2012 11:21, schrieb Mattia Rossi:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm currently investigating the advantages/disadvantages of MS Lync 
> 2010 as UCC solution for a large enterprise with lots of branches. If 
> anyone has any experience already with the roll-out of MS Lync 2010 or 
> any story where its use has been envisaged but then dropped in favour 
> of an Avaya or Cisco or other solution, I'd be interested to hear 
> about it. Positive stories are welcome too of course.
> If anyone has any detailed info about real bandwith usage (not planned 
> bandwith, but real-life experience including possible drawbacks) even 
> better.
>
> Please contact me off list, as this could become a lengthy discussion. 
> I would really appreciate your help.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Mat

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