Driving Success While Adding Video and Voice to Lync Environments

[John Partridge (jpartridge)]

Update: To see the related On-Demand Webinar where I spoke about Best Practices for Video Enabling Your Microsoft Lync Environment, click here.

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Ask any service organization what their top priority is, chances are, the response will be “ensuring our customer’s success.” That “success” does not come easily especially when it requires integration across multiple vendors’ technologies or relies on underlying third party infrastructure to make it all work. Technology vendors are the experts in their solutions, not the customers. Success happens when vendors offer the expertise necessary to ensure a successful deployment.

So when your organization decides to integrate video conferencing or enterprise voice with Microsoft Lync (soon to be Skype for Business), your team should easily find an external vendor who can offer the appropriate expertise. This type of deployment requires a number of areas for consideration that will ensure success, including:

• Is your IP data network and core infrastructure ready for voice, video and web conferencing traffic?
• Does the video technology you’re considering integrate with Lync?
• What voice handsets are available that work with Lync and do they support the voice features you currently require in your legacy PBX and are you prepared to provision and roll out hundreds or even thousands of new phones across your enterprise?
• Do you have plans in place to get the solution up and running and then how will you get users to adopt it?

From planning and deploying to integrating and optimizing, expertise in all of these areas are available to drive success.

Planning & Strategy Services

Planning services, such as Solution Design and Envisioning, give you an in-depth plan to fully deploy Lync into your environment. These services should help you understand how Microsoft solutions will meet business needs. They will also help identify features that align with your business goals, determine UC environment inter-dependencies and architecture options, recognize any limitations, and build a clear strategy, budget and plan to execute.

Proof of Concepts (POC) can help you develop feature/functionality within your environment that maximizes the user experience and minimizes the cost to help you make decisions about how you will deploy Lync. A POC can also guide you through the evaluation and feedback process so that your users may experience new Unified Communications experiences. This can include helping you integrate Lync with your PBX or telephone services, analyze and provision specific use cases with phones, and manage the POC process and criteria.

As your organization plans for the integration of voice or video into your Lync solution, an audit of your network is critical to ensuring consistent high quality performance and the best user experience. Your network must be ready to manage and support video and voice traffic. Polycom has the expertise to help you understand the requirements for video and voice traffic over an IP network. Our network readiness service reviews your Lync deployment and network design and compares it to best practices, identifying areas where changes are required.

Deployment Services

Services are also available to help customers deploy Lync infrastructure components, such as Front End Servers, Edge Servers, and Voice Services. The latter includes SIP trunks and dial plans in either an PoC, a Pilot, or full production deployment scenario.

Whether you are new to Lync and want to start taking advantage of UC features, are using Lync for IM and Presence and want to expand into voice or video conferencing with CX8000 (Lync Room system) for example, or want to integrate Lync with your Polycom solutions to drive video to the desktop and / or enterprise voice (with Polycom VVX or CX voice endpoints, for example), Polycom can be your go to partner for Lync services.

Optimize Services

Once you have the core UC Services working, you can begin to think about Optimizing your UC solution by making it easier to use for your users, adding enhanced features and functionality, and even embedding UC into your business proceses to increase collaboration and productivity.

Seamless integration of video and voice into your Lync environment will drive utilization and user adoption. Polycom experts can provide integration between Lync and the RealPresence Platform, as well as implementing RealConnect and Content Sharing Suite to facilitate the collaboration experience between your traditional room conferencing systems and Lync.

Adoption Services provide consulting, best practices, and guidance to help you be successful when you deploy Lync enterprise voice services to your end users. Polycom will guide you through the organizational processes and preferences that will shape adoption strategy, define the awareness, pilot and training, and helpdesk and operations planning activities you should consider when deploying Unified Communications solutions to provide for a pleasant and predictable end user experience.

Collaboration Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) are customized solutions that may be embedded within your legacy business applications, workflows, or tools that help your business users be more efficient and collaborative in their jobs.   App Development Services are also available to create the integration that’s uniquely suited to your specific requirements.

As you look to video- or voice-enable you UC environment, Polycom can help drive your success in ensuring that Polycom + Microsoft really are better together.   How do you define success for your UC initiatives?