Lync Made Real-World Ready by UC Performance Management

Nearly 3 million enterprise users now rely on Microsoft (News - Alert) Lync. Existing Microsoft purchasing arrangements are used by many organizations to access Lync licenses. This rapid adoption of Lync has therefore become a strong propellant for UC growth.

Some adjustments are required for support teams to be UC-ready. Apart from learning each other’s language, IT staff must be prepared to carry out some skill sharing. When a business with no existing experience with the requirements for achieving high fidelity deploys enterprise voice, voice traffic may not receive the required priority. As the network architects are unaware of the current voice calling patterns during the early stages of VoIP deployment, network links can become congested.

As problems are experienced in the telephony domain, the venture into VoIP may then be considered a failure. The actual causes might however be underlying network factors, bandwidth or incorrect QoS settings, or missing VoIP configuration. The transition from silos of server, application and telephony expertise to real-time unified communications management must therefore be accelerated for everyone’s advantage. The vital differences in the way user satisfaction and tolerance are measured needs to be understood when making this transition.

In order to integrate Microsoft Lync server and application performance with voice quality management, it is possible to build new management skills. This can be done by correlating Lync server performance with call activity, infrastructure capacity and voice quality in real time. A successful Lync deployment is needed for businesses introducing new unified communications capabilities to existing PBX telephony platforms. A complete solution needs to be provided by ensuring that the server, network and telephony teams work together. Technologies from multiple vendors are likely to be incorporated by any UC ecosystem. New services and applications must be therefore learnt by IT personnel and end-users.

Time, resources and training can be saved by using a single interface in the management solution. Resource overhead and training requirements are reduced by unified management. Consistent and consolidated views of performance, usage and capacity across the entire UC ecosystem are also provided. New technology success is ensured with successful performance management. A quality user experience and satisfaction with new Lync technologies is also ensured.