For CIOs looking to improve communication and collaboration while reducing costs, Unified Communications is top of mind. Fortunately, Microsoft Lync integrates with a large percentage of existing voice systems, including Avaya. Last week, we held our last Lync focused webinar of the year on Best Practices for Integrating Lync with Your Avaya Environment. Keenan Crockett and Jason Sloan, both Microsoft Certified Masters on the Lync platform, helped attendees understand how to build a strong telephony platform leveraging the power of Lync and backed by Avaya.
The speakers tackled a number of related topics during the one-hour session, including goals and requirements when planning for this integration, a comparison of Lync 2013 and Avaya Voice components, Avaya integration best practices, and considerations and integration challenges.
Keenan kicked off the webinar by talking about the number of different ways Lync can be integrated into Avaya:
- Direct SIP (Enteprise Voice)
- Remote Call Control (CSTA)
- Client Side Plug-In
He also discussed Lync Mediation Server, which is required for both the Enterprise Voice workload and for PSTN dial-in conferencing workload, and it allows for connectivity to PBX’s, PSTN Gateways, SBCs or SIP Trunk providers. When it came to Avaya integration best practices, the session covered call quality and prioritization planning, audio conferencing planning, and voicemail planning. Jason wrapped up the webinar with an in depth review of the considerations and integration challenges – simultaneous ringing between Lync and Avaya, remote call control, Avaya Agile Communication Environment (ACE), and finally, Lync Call Admission Control (CAC).
This post is merely a summary of the session, which was chock full of information for those looking to integrate the two technologies. You can watch the webinar replay here.
