I have never been more proud to be a part of an organization than I have as part of the Perficient team at Microsoft’s 2016 Worldwide Partner Conference.
On the first day, we sponsored and participated in Microsoft’s community outreach event in support of the George Hull Centre for Children and Families. The non-profit charitable organization is one of Ontario’s leading multidisciplinary, innovative children’s mental health centers.
We were honored to be one of only four partners to work with Microsoft to donate, deliver, and set up PCs, TVs, Xboxes, and Surfaces for the Hull Centre houses.

VIDEO: Get a behind-the-scenes look at the community outreach event at the George Hull Centre. 
Tony Pagnusat, National Alliance Director at Perficient, and Christopher Wagner, Alliance Manager at Perficient, were the driving forces behind getting us involved in the outreach event. They spent the day upgrading the center’s sorely-needed technology, which is being used to help children and families learn, study, relax, and recover.
We were later honored in front of all the Microsoft Enterprise Group team and worldwide enterprise partners for the work that Perficient delivers across all three Microsoft regions in the U.S.
I had a chance to speak with a couple of the folks from the George Hull Centre, and they told me personally that this meant a ton to them. It made me so proud to be a part of Perficient and Microsoft and to be able to participate in this outreach event.

Tony and Christopher are pictured center in gray shirts in this group photo:

TY @Perficient_MSFT@newsignature@softchoice@championsg for going above & beyond. @georgehullcentr@msuspartnerpic.twitter.com/JmcYhQBc9p

— Ahinsa Mansukhani (@Ahinsa_M) July 11, 2016
 

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I hear from a lot of people that they don’t want to use video. Even though Lync makes it a snap to use, people have all sorts of arguments as to why they don’t want to use it. But the real cause, I think, is that people have grown used to not putting much effort into communicating on the phone and video changes that.
One of my absolute favorite books, Infinite Jest, contains a 10-page satirical rant about why people (in the novel) didn’t want to use video calling. The number one reason: video forced people to actually pay attention during conversations. And this made people uncomfortable. People have grown used to multi-tasking while on the phone & it’s pretty tough to multi-task when you are supposed to be looking someone in the eye during a video call. People also are forced to look, speak, act just like they are in person; this requires one to shower, shave, smile. In the book, the rise of video calling gave birth to a hilarious new cottage industry of manufacturers creating life-like rubber masks for people to wear so they could “look their best” without putting any real effort into it during video calls.
If you aren’t going to read the whole book (it is pretty long) then allow me to take an excerpt from the section on the “demise” of video:

Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allow you to presume that the person on the other end is paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation … lets you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you can look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you can even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet — and this was the retrospectively marvelous part — even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fugue-like activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided. 

Video telephony renders the fantasy insupportable.

[Video] callers found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly over-intense listener’s expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those caller who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fugue-like doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking extra rude, absentminded, or childishly self-absorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress.

It’s obviously satire – highlighting the fact that people can become so addicted to multi-tasking and living in their own self-contained bubbles that it can become difficult and stressful to deal with people directly. We multi-task but never really consider that the person on the other side of the “conversation” is multi-tasking, too. The end result is a total waste of time with neither party paying any attention to the other. Even though we are talking, we aren’t communicating.

I contend that in today’s workplace, audio-only calls are productivity killers. Audio-only conference calls are the worst of all. But injecting video into the conversation can, and really does, work wonders.
The Real-Life Case for Video
Within the Unified Communications team here at Perficient, we’ve made an effort to use Lync video whenever we can over the last year and a half. The results of this effort have been amazingly positive. We have seen that an increased use of Lync video has directly lead to:

1. Higher employee retention/satisfaction
2. Increased productivity due to shorter calls
3. Better interview process (video versus phone interviews)
4. Ability to better cover wider geographic territory

Retention
Our team is spread out all over the country yet we manage to maintain close relationships among ourselves, even the most geographically distant, because we frequently communicate face-to-face. Close relationships are what keep employees happy, but it traditionally has been hard to maintain those kinds of bonds over just e-mail and phone calls. I didn’t believe it until I started doing it; it makes a huge difference.
Productivity
I know that nobody wants to consider “productivity” when doing ROI studies for Lync because productivity is not associated with hard cost savings; it’s “squishy”. Fine, leave it out of your ROI. But on a personal level, if you want to be in meetings less & cut calls short, I promise you that switching to all-video will do that within a week. The main reason is that it cuts down on multi-tasking. It’s tough to maintain eye contact AND simultaneously fiddle with something else on your computer.
Hiring
We are a consulting company and have talented employees all over the country. When we bring a potential new employee in for interviews, I can’t always rely on being able to have everyone fly in to meet the candidate. Sometimes we have an interviewee in Chicago that I’d really like to have speak with a member of the team who is in Kansas City. But it’s not worth it to fly in for a 30-min meeting. Historically this left us with two options: a mere phone call with the “right” person; or have an in-person interview with someone local, even if they are not the best person to conduct the interview. I can say with confidence that a well-executed video interview is worth 1,000 phone calls.
Geographic Reach
We hire all over the US and we work all over the US. Because of item #1 above (retention) I feel confident having employees work remotely anywhere. And having employees living and working everywhere means that we are able to reach markets and effectively serve them without actually having brick-and-mortar offices. I’d estimate that close to half of our Unified Communications projects have been delivered outside a brick-and-mortar geography. This simply would not have been possible without the use of video to create and maintain relationships among teams.
Conclusion
If you can’t be there in person, video absolutely is the next best way to communicate with another human being.  I believe that video makes for more effective communication and ultimately leads to people getting stuff done. We have absolutely seen the benefits first-hand here at Perficient.
Moral of the story: put forth a concerted effort to use video daily and see the positive changes it makes. Even if it requires you to wear “Infinite Jest”–style rubber masks.

This is part 5 of a twelve post series. To see an index of all twelve posts click here.
On the Fifth day of Lync’mas my UC Team gave to me: 5 ways to access Lync!
One of the major value propositions that Lync has going for is that it’s so easy to access Lync from anywhere, making it easy for people of all stripes to connect. People forget how remarkably well Lync 2013 works across disparate devices:

1. Desktop computer (Mac or Windows)
2. Desk phone
3. Mobile phone (Windows, iPhone, Android)
4. Tablet (iPad, Windows)
5. Browser (IE, Safari, Firefox)

There are Lync clients for nearly every major platform method of access. Multi-device / multi-browser / multi OS; Lync is meant truly to enable communication anywhere, anytime. It’s the first major UC platform that’s made to run on the Internet and all its connected devices. This is built in to the product, not just retro-fitted bolt-on components jammed together. Lync’s architecture is fundamentally based on secure communications over common Internet ports & protocols – which is what allows the native extension to so many different devices anywhere on the Internet.
And with Lync 2013’s updated mobile clients due out in 2013, two users will be able to use just about any modality – IM, voice, video, conferencing, content sharing – using any combination of the above mentioned clients.
Imagine this scenario: A CIO on a Macbook IM’ing a VP who is using Windows 8, who escalates the conversation to an audio conference, to be joined by a consultant using Surface (me?) speaking with the CEO who is connecting in with her Android phone, pulling in an outside business partner via Firefox who’s sharing her desktop and using her web camera for video, being listened in on by an IT manager at home on his Internet-connected Polycom IP phone. This isn’t the stuff of fantasy, this is reality. This is what it means to “unify” communications: one unified application across a multitude of people, devices and locations.
Lync is how the world will stay connected in a BYOD, post-PC, consumerized IT (I’m running out of buzzwords here, forgive me) universe.
So on this 5^th day of Lync’mas, let us celebrate the many ways Lync lets us stay connected!

This is part 2 of a twelve post series. To see an index of all twelve posts click here.
On the second day of Lync’mas my UC Team gave to me: two paired pools!
Introduction
Lync 2010 was a breakout version for Microsoft’s UC platform. The major improvements in voice, video and conferencing shot Microsoft to the upper right sector in Gartner’s “UC Magic Quadrant” reports. For those of us that had been working with OCS and LCS, Lync 2010 was the everything we had been hoping for: unified client, unified application, unified user experience. Perfect, right? Well there was only one hitch: enterprises were seeing all this “unified” business as fancy-speak for “all your eggs in one basket” and they didn’t see much redundancy in the basket.
Client after client that I talked to was VERY excited about Lync and the unified features it brought to enterprise communications. But the common refrain was that they were too afraid to move all voice, video, and conferencing to a platform that didn’t have a great DR story. For those of you too young to remember, Lync 2010 had 3 main options for “DR”:
1)      “Metro” DR – involving a stretched SQL cluster (ick) across a metro-area network, requiring extremely low-latency links, high bandwidth, snapshot replication of SQL data, and a network team that was willing to do all this. Unsurprisingly, we never had a single customer take us up on this design.
2)      Backup Registrar – involving a separate Lync Standard Edition server or separate Lync Enterprise Edition pool to act as a “backup”. In the case of a failure of a user’s primary Lync server, the client could be redirected to the backup registrar. This allowed phone calls to continue as well as IM. But no presence, no conferencing, no contact lists, no address book lookup. Etc. etc. Truly, this was better than nothing, but a full DR story it was not.
3)      Backup and Restore – not awesome for obvious reasons.
Frankly none of these options set anyone’s mind at ease. As a result, many large enterprises were reticent to make Lync a “Tier 1” application – mission critical with a real DR strategy. So Lync was relegated to Tier 2 status, befitting only things like IM/Presence, desktop sharing etc. And this was a real shame. For as great of a Unified Communications solution as Lync 2010 is, lack of DR seemed to force many people to not deploy voice or audio conferencing, depriving Lync of a lot of its “unified” power.
So what’s the deal!?! Why were the Lync DR options so unappealing in 2010? The answer, as it turns out, was not with Lync itself, but rather in the way that Lync was using SQL.
Lync 2010 Limitations
I won’t spend lot of time dwelling on the past, but the Lync 2010 architecture was based on OCS, which was based on LCS which was IM-only, which was never designed to be mission-critical. That architecture had all of the important “stuff” happening in the separate SQL back end server: presence, contact lists, conferencing configuration. So if SQL went down, all the real guts of the system were gone with it. And when you are storing real-time presence info in SQL, replicating that info (available, busy, away, in a call, and so on) is a noisy, intensive business. It’s true that SQL itself could always do replication – but Lync’s problem would then be determining which SQL server was “active” and how to get Front End servers registered with the right Back Ends under which conditions, and on and on. In short: as long as Lync was using the old architecture which placed all the configuration and high-volume transactions on a single backend SQL server (even if it were clustered), DR was going to be very limited.
Lync 2013 needed to radically depart from the old architecture in order to provide better DR, which would in turn get more organizations to put all their communication eggs in one unified (but redundant) basket.
Lync 2013 Paired Pools to the Rescue
If SQL was the cause of so many of Lync’s DR sorrows, then the first order of business was to rethink SQL for Lync 2013. 2010 relied on the Front Ends being very tightly integrated with the SQL back end. 2013 blows this model apart by moving a lot of the former “back-end” functionality right into the Front Ends themselves. With the Front Ends no longer so reliant on a Back End SQL server, Lync 2013 can now just take advantage of Front End replication (handled by the newly-introduced “Lync Backup Service) whereby a copy of all the important user data will be replicated to a Front End server in another Lync pool. This is called “paired pools”.
Lync 2013 paired pools build on the above-mentioned “Backup Registrar” concept introduced with Lync 2010: if your primary pool failed, users could register to another pool located elsewhere. But now with 2013 you’re not also stuck with the above-mentioned crummy limitations of 2010 failover. Yes! In 2013 you get voice, you get video, you get presence, you get conferencing, and you get contact lists! All critical functionality will remain intact during a DR failover with paired pools.
What I like the most about paired pools is that a Lync pool that is serving, say 3,000 users in California can be paired with a Lync pool that is serving 3,000 users in New York. Each pool’s “day job” is to serve its local users. But secretly, in the background, the two pools are replicating all their info to each other in real time. So if a hurricane strikes New York rendering the data center inoperable, all users can be directed over to California & the California pool will do double-duty for a while until service is restored in New York. The reason I like this so much is that you don’t have to have a set of idle Lync servers waiting in a lonely DR site somewhere for this to work. You can use actual in-production pools so you don’t need to waste extra resources on servers / software that will (hopefully) never be used.
Now it’s true that a couple services won’t fail over in paired-pools (Response Groups & CAC). But one can still argue that all critical functionality does remain intact during a disaster, which is the requirement of most organizations’ DR plans for Tier 1 apps.
Conclusion
With the introduction of paired pools, organizations can now feel good about fully adopting Lync and all its workloads. Voice and conferencing are absolutely Tier 1 applications and the architecture changes in Lync 2013 will meet enterprises’ requirements for Tier 1 Disaster Recovery.
This is really important to understand because it’s different than what other traditional IP-PBX vendors have been offering. Paired pools doesn’t just give you PBX redundancy, which Cisco and Avaya have been doing for years. Lync 2013 actually offers you UC redundancy. Not just voice, but also IM, Presence, Video, Audio Conferencing & Web Conferencing services all replicated with the same mechanism of the Lync Backup Service.
Combining the very best UC user experience with the very best UC redundancy – that should make for a very merry Lync’mas indeed.
 

Overview
I’ll start off by mentioning that I’ve been using the Surface as my only computer now for the last 4 weeks. No laptop, no desktop. It’s my work computer, my home computer, my tablet and of course my mobile computing platform. In fact, I’ve composed most of this blog post with the Surface on a flight to Minneapolis, as a passenger in a rental car, and at my hotel desk. How’s that for device versatility?
While this isn’t meant to be a full-on review of the Surface, it is important to note that I have been happily functioning without my laptop for some time now. The key to all of this happiness: the Lync client. I rely so heavily on Lync to do my job that a tablet without Lync was just not going to fly.
The all-up take for me is that the Surface Lync client is the best mobile Lync client out there – almost on par with the desktop Lync client. It even outshines the desktop Lync client in certain aspects, but leaves room for improvement in other key areas.
My overall rating: On a scale from 1 to 10 the Surface RT’s Lync client gets an 8. I weighted four Lync feature categories according to how important they are to me in my everyday use of Lync:

Below are the detailed reviews of each of my four categories.

IM & Presence – 9 out of 10
IM / Presence work great on Lync. I installed the Lync client from the Windows Store and moments later I was signed in and sending messages. As you would expect, presence information is timely & accurate. The visual interface is probably the biggest change for long-time Lync users: it’s totally adapted for Windows 8 & touch devices. While all my contacts and groups showed up immediately, it took some time getting used to the larger tiles and icons vs. the standard Lync client “buddy list”. As with the conventional Lync desktop client, the “search” function is probably still the best way to find contacts vs. long contact lists.
The major improvement that the Lync client for the Surface has over the traditional Lync client: spellcheck and autocorrect. Having this for IM conversations is a major blessing, given the speed that I rattle off instant messages.
Instant Messaging on the Surface is thousands of times better than it is on traditional mobile devices (phones & iPads). But it faces some of the same challenges as those other mobile devices because the new client runs in full-screen mode. Meaning that if you are accustomed to having dozens of conversations running, each in its own window (like on the Lync desktop client) you are in for an adjustment. All conversations show almost like “tabs” at the top of your screen. This actually works pretty well once you’ve used it for couple days. The one catch is that you’ll need to swipe up or swipe down to see the “tabs”; they are not displayed while you are in another conversation. Being full-screen also means it’s more difficult to “multi-task” (maybe this is a good thing!) because the app takes up so much real estate.
Like all Windows 8 apps, you can dock Lync to the right or left of the screen and work on one other Windows 8 app. I’ve found that connecting to an external monitor really improves this scenario. I can have Lync docked to the right side of my external monitor, leaving the Surface screen itself open to use with other applications.
Especially on a touchscreen device like the Surface, Lync’s IM & Presence are outstanding. Managing multiple conversations is fairly simple but does require some getting used to.
Voice – 9 out of 10
The best part about Lync voice on the Surface: it works. Calling a contact is as simple as clicking on the “call” icon.  The dial pad works well for calling standard (dare I say “old-fashioned”) PSTN numbers.
The surface will use your built-in mic and speakers; this functions remarkably well but in noisy areas you’re going to want a headset or handset. Surprisingly, every headset or handset I connected to the surface via USB worked immediately, with no fuss. I’ve tried the following devices

• Polycom CX100
• Polycom CX600
• Polycom CX3000 (conference phone)
• The Roundtable (yes, it’s that old – prior to Polycom’s acquisition and rebranding)
• Jabra 520 speakerphone
• Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset (with and without USB dongle)

Plug and play worked in each case; there was absolutely no silliness with drivers or devices not being recognized. I did notice that you can’t use the “in-line” functions of the headsets, like mute, hangup, etc; I had to use the Lync client itself to mute & hang up. But this wasn’t a huge deal. Also of note: I even tried using my Bluetooth headset by just pairing it to the Surface without the USB dongle. Voice quality wasn’t as good as it is with USB, but I think it would do in a pinch.
Speaking of voice quality – nobody ever once has suspected me of calling them via a wireless tablet. The quality is identical to calling from any Lync Phone or other Lync client. There has been no latency, jitter or static issues. Don’t forget, however, that the Surface is wireless only. As goes your WiFi connection, so goes your Lync voice on the Surface. There is no option to plug in with an Ethernet cable because the Surface doesn’t have an Ethernet port. (Unless you buy a USB Ethernet adapter… which I’ve tried and it does work, but leaves you no USB port for a headset or handset).
I’ve probably logged close 100 hours of call time via Lync + Surface and I’ve been extremely happy with the results.
For me, the biggest drawback for voice is that you can’t cut & paste numbers into the dial pad nor click on numbers in a webpage. Clicking on numbers in a browser just launches Skype for me. (Foreshadowing…? Maybe??). Other than that voice on the Surface is a winner.
Video – 7 out of 10
My team has grown increasingly reliant on video so it was important for me to be able to use the Surface for that purpose. The Surface makes Peer-to-peer and video conferencing simple to use: clicking the video icon initiates a video call.
The Surface’s built-in cameras, both front & back, can both be used for Lync video. You have the option to toggle the view from the front-facing to the rear-facing camera and this is nice for an-adhoc video conference where you have a few people in same room with you. I’ve read a lot of reviews that complain about the quality of the Surface’s cameras, but my experience with the video camera has been excellent. I believe the complaints stem from the quality of the “still shots” taken by the cameras. I can confirm that the Surface will not be replacing your fancy Nikon SLR anytime soon (and frankly, nor should it). You will, however, find that it makes for an outstanding video camera. It sends a crisp 720p HD video stream. Every person on the receiving end of my video stream has commented on the great clarity. In several cases, people were baffled when I told them I was using the built-in camera on my tablet. It’s that good.
Receiving video, on the other hand, has been slightly less amazing. The Surface can occasionally struggle to deliver smooth HD video. I’ve found that regular “VGA” quality video is always displayed extremely well. Very few hitches crop up during video conferences or peer-to-peer in non-HD scenarios. However, when you use the Lync “full screen” mode to display HD video it’s not as good as it is on a desktop. Don’t get me wrong: it’s good. But it falls short of the desktop experience. My gut feeling here is that this is due to processing power. I pulled up task manager while in a full-screen video call (I connected an external monitor to display task manager while the Surface itself was full-screen video). The processor was REALLY pegged: consistently around 80% and Lync was the program using most of it. Killing full-screen HD video saw the processor % drop quite a bit.
All in, the video experience is good; I’m very happy with quality, occasional HD hiccups notwithstanding. I continue to use video for just as many of my calls as I did with my laptop and for me that says it all.
Conferencing – 5 out of 10
This is where the Lync client struggles to meet my needs. It works, to be sure, but the experience needs some updating by Microsoft.
Joining scheduled meetings is a bit tricky: you can’t click on Lync invites in your calendar or OWA. If you try, it brings up the Lync Conference Website & prompts me to either install Silverlight or to install the Lync Attendee client. The problem is that not only are neither supported by Surface RT, clicking the “Join” link should launch my Lync Surface client. (Note: this may just be a problem joining conferences scheduled on Lync 2010. I’ve actually had some success joining Lync 2013 conferences via the “Join” links – but that has been inconsistent as well)
So instead of clicking on the link – how do you join conferences? Well, you need to go into your Lync client and find the little box that pulls your calendar info from Exchange. If it’s working properly it will display your next Lync Web Conference & you can click on it to join.
I’ve had problems doing this. Conferences scheduled by federated partners don’t always show up. Conferences that someone scheduled by cutting and pasting Lync info into a regular Outlook calendar meeting (as opposed to using the Outlook plugin to create the meeting) don’t show up. If for some reason your Lync client can’t connect to Exchange Web Services, nothing shows up. If you are late joining a meeting, you may not see the meeting in progress, but rather your next meeting.
Once you are in the meeting you can see the list of participants, use audio, video and see what people are sharing on their desktops. That’s the good news: the basic functionality works as a participant.
But you can’t:

• “Manage” the meeting: admit, remove, promote attendees through the Lync UI
• View or use the whiteboard / polling functions
• Share your desktop
• Schedule a Lync Meeting (no Outlook client on the Surface, hence no Lync calendar plugin to schedule meetings. Ugh!)

The last two in particular are what hurt the most. Because you can’t present anything at all, the Surface relegates you to pretty much just being a participant in all meetings. And because you can’t schedule new Lync meetings yourself, you are relegated to joining other’s meetings. Yes, you could cut-and-paste your conference info into a regular calendar appointment but, as described above, you won’t be able to join your own meeting if you do that. I also know that you can schedule new Lync meetings via the Web Scheduler (and with Exchange 2013 + Lync 2013 you’ll be able to through OWA). But really this isn’t good enough for me.
Short story on Lync meetings with the Surface is that it’s an OK experience as a participant and a bad experience as a presenter.
Conclusion
I realize that I’m a pretty demanding Lync user. It’s the application I use most each day and rely heavily on Lync performing well. For someone like me the Lync client gets a score of  8 / 10. The most important pieces of Lync are IM/Presence and Voice; the Surface client nails these two. And video is good. Conferencing is where most of my negatives come. The conferencing experience is adequate, but just not good enough yet for a hard-core Lync user like me. A more casual user  –  and some would claim the Surface RT is geared more towards casual users –  probably wouldn’t even ding the conference experience.
Overall, Lync on the Surface is by far and away the best mobile Lync client out there. Even given the areas where it needs to improve, Lync for Surface probably should be considered among the best mobile (I’m considering only tablets and phones here) UC client of any vendor’s solutions. I’m very pleased with this first version of Lync on Surface RT & I’m looking forward to some updates to the conferencing experience to make it even better.