I’ve mentioned before that here at Perficient, we are big fans of Microsoft Lync, and we use it for everything from conferencing to PBX functionality. I’m fortunate to work with a talented team of Lync experts who make the experience for me, as an end user, simple and straightforward.
Last week, two of our resident Microsoft Lync experts teamed up to share their experience around planning for and deploying Lync 2013 on a global scale. As Keenan Crockett, Perficient’s Lync team lead and a senior solution architect, explained at the start of the webinar, if you are looking to implement Lync globally, you first need a firm grasp of your goals and requirements, making sure those requirements align with your goals. For instance, you should be able to answer the following:
- What are your business requirements?
- What are your business goals?
- What are your technical requirements?
- What are your technical goals?
- Have you documented and tracked these goals and requirements?
- Have you communicated these goals and requirements to global stakeholder?
For what you want to accomplish technically, can the business support it financially? By outlining and tracking the answers to the above questions, you should get a clear picture of whether Lync is the right fit for your organization. There are many pieces and phases to deploying Lync globally, as illustrated in the image to the right.
Jason Sloan, a lead technical consultant on our Lync team, went on to describe the business requirements in detail. What does your business demand? He covered server design and pool placement (localization), the hardware vs. virtualization debate, and considerations around your network, the deployment, and PSTN connectivity.
Of course, there was much more covered during the one hour session. You can watch the full replay here.
If you want to learn more about this topic, Jason authored a white paper available for download, “The CIO’s Guide to a Lync Server 2013 Global Design.” Also, don’t miss our last Lync webinar of the year, where Jason and Keenan will team up again, on Wednesday, December 3, 2014, to present Best Practices for Integrating Lync with Your Avaya Environment.
