Supporting Microsoft Lync Architecture

With huge financial savings to be made by fully exploiting the Microsoft enterprise license agreement, organizations needing to make efficiency savings are looking to Lync. Here in the UK and rather surprisingly, this is most prevalent within the public sector. Year on year cuts across the whole sector have forced a thorough re-evaluation of all assets. IT services is an easy target; equipment, licenses, support etc. all add up to a significant investment of Cap-ex and ongoing Op-ex. Move from VMWare to Hyper-V, Oracle to SQL and the PBX to Lync and you have saved a fortune on licenses, ongoing maintenance contracts and specialists within your teams to support the tech. 

No one is implying that Microsoft products are better in some way than the omni-present industry mainstays, rather the opposite, but they are cheaper and the senior management thinking is “migrate all of our services to Microsoft systems and our IT teams can concatenate down to just a few Microsoft guys”, implying that Microsoft SharePoint and System Center occupy the same skill set.

Whichever way you look at it Lync is replacing analogue phone systems and VoIP telephony alike, and bringing with it the deep office application integration that no one else offers, not to mention mobility.
As an organization looking to leverage the benefits of Lync for increased business efficiency and cost savings it’s easy to get it all wrong and difficult to get it right, here’s a few pointers:
Understand the components. Lync is not only gateways, phones, 3^rd party applications, load balancers and the front end / backend roles, but also the IP network, DNS, firewalls, reverse proxies and Active Directory.

Develop and share your UC strategic plan. If your Cisco experts think CUCM is the future, and Microsoft experts think Lync is the future then without buying into some common management direction, the end solution may be watered down, less efficient and provide less up-time.

Do you intend to support in-house or outsource as a managed service. Outsource if you’re moving fast and lack the required skills. If self-supporting, read on.

Align your teams. Retain experts in each key technology and bring them together to provide a shared service for the end users. Realign your teams, or at the least, break down the silos amongst Subject Matter Experts. They should commit to providing 99.999% service.

Choose systems integration partners carefully. Picking an SI with a broad portfolio and deep experience ensures your next decisions and investments will be future-proofed. Using a general Systems Integrator who handles Windows, VMWare, and Exchange may be a mistake. Lync is a complex product you need specialists.

Select components wisely. No less than five gateway manufacturers have at one point entered the market. Three remain. Even prior to Nortel being acquired by Avaya, the LG-Nortel IP phones were being discontinued. Ensure the SI partner offers a broad range of hardware and advice on who is exiting the market and who is investing.

Develop custom SOPs. The first-tier help desk should not always call the Lync expert if there’s an issue impacting Lync, because the issue may well be the Hypervisor, the LAN, or the trunk. Offer training enabling them to qualify issues and triage them to the correct tier-2 expert.

Get comprehensive, custom training. Effective Lync training for systems administrators is hard to come by. You can find installation/administration training on the market, but it’s aimed at certification and so once the system is installed half of the training is redundant. Consider using an expert to help your team understand how to diagnose and resolve issues relevant to your system and not an exam scenario.  

Retain an SME. Ensure you hold the contact details for a Lync subject matter expert, possibly the one that designed the solution. Bring them in at consultancy rates when you hit a problem that can’t be resolved in-house.

It’s easy to sell UC solutions to end users, specifically Lync UC. Unlike much of the IT technology we invest in within business, routers, firewalls, SANs etc. its high impact; the users get to see it, interact with it, it’s a shiny new toy. But it’s providing a critical service and moreover it’s replacing a device which we have come to rely on for even the most trivial operations; the PBX, the telephone. When it works it’s a look into the future of business, when it fails it will be your worst nightmare.