Posts Tagged ‘unified communications’

For many of us Outlook is always running. If used to its full potential Outlook will work for you and make a busy day more manageable. Many fail to utilize the many features Outlook has to assist you with hundreds of incoming emails and/or a full calendar. I am sharing a few tips that will […]

Companies now have several options when it comes to Microsoft’s enterprise-ready unified communications platform, Lync – from Lync on-premises, hosted Lync, to Lync Online with Office 365, or even Lync in a hybrid environment. I’ve been using Lync for over three years, and can attest to its ability to provide a more connected experience, enabling […]

Didn’t you always wonder which plan to pick in the O365 family? So many different SKU’s providing distinct features, storage capabilities, tools, etc. I know while talking to customers one of the initial and biggest question has been around which plan is perfect for them and can they downgrade or upgrade from there. Looks like Microsoft […]

Everyone has an opinion on “Cloud’ and its effect on the business, for some it’s scary in terms of data security and for some it’s revenue generation and cost savings. There are a number of reasons why cloud computing is so widely used among businesses today. Some of them include Reduction of costs – lower […]

Yesterday, over at Redmond Channel Partner, Scott Bekker wrote about the recent upswing in business around Microsoft Lync. You can read the full article here. Bekker talks about the recent Lync Conference, and a major takeaway being that Lync is really taking off as customers move past the initial voice pilots to full implementations, where […]

It’s no secret Microsoft is doing the same to XP as the bad boy trio from Office Space did to that poor Printer. The deprecation of XP will have an impact on organizations for various reasons, some of which I’m not qualified to speak in depth about, but a key topics on the wire as […]

When you install Lync 2013 and configure the back end for mirroring, a lot of things happen “under the hood” to configure the mirror (and witness, if applicable). Microsoft really has done a fantastic job of hiding the overall complexity of SQL mirroring through Lync topology builder, but suffice it so say, there are many […]

This is going to be a hard hitting session with lots of stats and lots of new features delivered rapid fire.  Hence my heavy use of bullets. 30% of all IT spending will be in the cloud by 2020.  It’s IT as a service.  Keep in mind, SharePoint is one product but there are many […]

For those that have deployed Lync 2013 alongside Office Web Apps 2013, we’ve all seen this seemingly innocuous check box: Office Web Apps Server is deployed in an external network (that is, perimeter/Internet) Over the past year I’ve never yet had a reason to check that box and honestly didn’t have a very good idea […]

In further anticipation of SharePoint Conference 2014, today Microsoft announced the release of Service Pack 1 for all Office products, including SharePoint 2013. This has been a long time coming. Most of us in the industry were expecting SP1 to arrive sometime last fall, right around the 1 year mark of the product release. There […]

A recent Office Blog highlights new resources for Managing Office 365 with Windows Powershell.  Powershell is an incredibly robust tool for managing your SharePoint, Lync, and Exchange environments. It was released around the 2010 product lines and most of us in the industry remember its predecessor, STSADM, for managing SharePoint 2007.  If you are new to Powershell, you’ll find the […]

Starting this upcoming Monday, February 17, Lync Conference 2014 goes into full swing through the 20th.  Experts from all over the world will be presenting, demoing, answering questions and having a good time representing the world of Lync.  The Lync community as a whole are just a bunch of geeks who love what they do […]