This post describes the new blog, and how you can use filters to see posts only for the products you are interested in: Welcome to the New Office Blogs.
 
-The Lync Team

Add this new rule to your firewall or proxy server to avoid Lync sign-in issues and ensure a secure connection to Office 365.  

IMPORTANT: You must add this allowed CRL endpoint to any device that is filtering web traffic: firewalls, load balancers, proxy servers, web security software/appliances, and so on.

 
See also Lync Online URLs and IP Address Ranges Set up your network for Lync Online

Lync Meeting presenters: this Lync update is for you!  The most common feature request from our users is that they want the modern app to have more of the features available in the desktop app.  We continue to listen to feedback and starting today, you can now manage your meeting participants from the modern Lync app. 

In addition to new features, we also continue to improve the ease of use for Lync.  We think you’ll like what we’ve done in this update.  Here’s an overview of what’s new:

Manage meeting participants individually or as a group. You can mute a participant, send a private IM, view their contact card, promote to presenter or demote to an attendee. You can also invite more participants, mute all audience, and admit people to the meeting who are waiting in the lobby.  

Manage meeting participants

Easily access conversation controls when you are in a call or meeting. All the controls are right at the bottom of the screen, which you can use to quickly mute/unmute your audio, view the participants, start or stop your video, or leave the conversation.

Easily access conversation controls

Use the new Meet Now feature to quickly start an impromptu meeting and collaborate on a subject that requires immediate attention- without having to schedule a meeting in advance.

Meet Now to start a new meeting

Pin your meetings list as a tile to your Start screen to easily see your meeting schedule. The tile lists up to three meetings on your calendar in the next twelve hours.

Pin the Join/Meet Now tile to your Start screen to easily and quickly join scheduled meetings or start a new Lync Meeting.  If you have a Lync Meeting now or starting soon, tapping the tile opens Lync and joins the meeting. At other times, tapping the tile lets you start a new, ad-hoc meeting.

Meetings list and Join/Meet Now tiles on Windows Start screen

Enjoy improved functionality of screen readers voicing fly-out menus.

This update also has fixes for some problems that prevented a small number of users from signing in to Lync. If you’ve had sign-in problems, click Delete my sign-in info on the sign-in page after installing the update and try signing in again.  If you continue to have problems, please contact your technical support team.

Click here for more information about this update.  To see some of the other things we’re working on, check out the demonstration from the Lync Conference 2014 keynote.  The video is here, and the demo starts around 17:30.

For most users of Windows 8.1, Lync will upgrade automatically within 24 hours. To get the update sooner, search for Lync and click Install.  You can tell when you have the update because you’ll see a message box saying “We’ve updated Lync!” the next time you go to the app.

We are proud to bring you this new version of Lync and are excited to continue adding features, improve performance and make the app even better. Please send us feedback and give us a new or updated rating in the Windows Store, or provide comments to this blog post so that we know what you would like to see in future updates. Then keep an eye out for future updates; more features are coming!

Have fun using Lync!

Introduction

I started in the computer industry on a helpdesk team managing projects. My first “fly solo” project was evaluating the roll-out of ISDN video conferencing between 3 sites in San Francisco, Chicago, and London. When I went in front of my CEO to justify the expense of the project – he politely swept away all of my “supporting documentation”. Instead, he asked me 3 simple questions: Costs? Benefits? What is the business value?

It was a painful but great learning exercise in how to justify projects – one that sticks with me to this day. So when we assembled a v-team for Lync 2013 business value evidence, my hand shot up. The team approached the work from multiple directions: We commissioned a Forrester Consulting Lync 2013 Total Economic Impact (TEI) study, started building TCO comparisons between Lync and the competition, and gave Lync customers a platform to share their experiences through written case studies and in-person customer sessions. All of this work landed at our 2nd annual Lync Conference in Las Vegas in February.

But First – Understanding How a TEI Works

A Forrester Consulting TEI study looks at the benefits versus the costs to determine overall business value. For a typical TEI study, the work starts with actual customer interviews. Next, Forrester develops a composite company based upon those interviews. The costs and benefits come from those same customers along with Forrester industry data. Finally, the financial results are produced from the data.

Besides producing the study, there were compelling stories that came from this work that we wanted to share. The goal is to help you start the journey toward understanding Lync business value in your organization. Let us know if this helps.

Understanding the Benefits of implementing Lync 2013

Hopefully by now you have downloaded the TEI study – let’s walk through some of the key benefits and understand how real-world customer case studies reflect these savings.

Saved $1.3 Million in PBX and Web Conferencing

Legacy PBX solutions are generally expensive to maintain and as your business grows, acquisition costs for new PBX systems also soar. For our study, the composite company chose to remove its PBX infrastructure entirely. Lync gives you the option to completely eliminate separate PBX infrastructure for better cost savings.

Another area that prospective Lync customers often want is to reduce their dependence is on “pay as you go” web conferencing solutions. Lync provides conferencing as part of Lync – no per minute charges, no sudden true-up in years 2 and 3 for existing users. Our composite company for the study chose to completely eliminate other web conferencing solutions.

Our customers experienced even greater savings then reflected in the study. In their recent case study, UCB, a global biopharmaceutical company, states that they have reduced web-conferencing costs by more than US $1.4 million a year since replacing its legacy conferencing services with Lync 2013, Lync Server 2013, and Lync Mobile.

Telephony costs reduced by $1.7 million

When your organization is spread around the world as our composite company is, international call cost begins to add up. Conference call usage and international roaming charges are also significant costs. After discussions with our pool of customers, the study modeled telephony savings of $1.7 million for our composite company. But it's about more than reducing traditional phone calls. Lync naturally adds new modes of collaboration. Many phone calls are easily replaced with Lync’s instant messaging. Presence can insure better opportunities to get the right person at the right moment – and that improves efficiency. Conferencing pulls the team together at the right time eliminating the usual back and forth.

Customers like Mitul Shah, Head ─ IT, of Blue Star Infotech Ltd saw reduced telephony costs as well. Shah explains, “The introduction of Lync has reduced telephone calls across various locations, as the employees can chat (text/audio/video) on the move.” And, “With one-one, one-two, or one-three audio conferencing using Lync, we are saving costs on telephone lines by 5─10 percent…”

Staffing Optimization Saved $3.9 Million Dollars

One interesting outcome of the TEI study was understanding how staffing changed and was optimized by the introduction of Lync. Our customers report that there is a fair amount of contractors and maintenance contracts in different countries to manage their legacy PBX infrastructure. Other customers reported not having a homogeneous infrastructure which introduced additional costs. By standardizing on Lync, they saw several benefits. We modeled this with our composite company to calculate these savings.

Chris Maxey, Systems IT Analyst at Tampa General Hospital, shares that "When our nursing and business staff can communicate more efficiently, we can get answers, test results, and other information to patients faster…”.

Do not forget the basics…

One interesting choice made by Forrester for this TEI study was to avoid the old tried and true “travel avoidance savings” that so many vendors claim. But in the real world, Lync customers continue reporting these savings.  Adventist Health System has saved millions of dollars in travel costs by using video conferencing to supplement in-person meetings. The company has reduced management and maintenance work as well.

The Key Takeaways

All of these details really help paint a picture of real world results for our customers. Let’s take a look at the key takeaways from the Lync 2013 TEI study to understand the financial results.

Payback Period of 14 Months

Payback period is really the “break even” point for your project. After crunching the data, the TEI study showed a payback period of 14 months. Customers report even faster results. Steve Hanson, Global IT Manager, Cargill, notes “We’re on track to achieve ROI in less than 12 months.” EPAM Systems has also seen savings. “And with Lync, we’re seeing fewer service requests, reduced maintenance costs, and lower TCO.” - Siarhei Harbukou Project Manager.

NPV of $2.46 million dollars over 3 years

NPV, or Net Present Value, helps you to understand the future benefits in today’s dollars. Our composite company experienced an NPV of $2.46 million over the 3 years. Real world customers report compelling numbers as well.  Steve Hanson from Cargill states: “…we expect to return a net value of $1 million annually to Cargill business units through this cost offset.” And when you translate to a “per user” basis, the composite company of 5000 employees experienced a positive benefit of $493 dollars per user over the 3 years.

Where to go next

I am excited by these findings and the success of our customers – it demonstrates something we have known intuitively here at Microsoft.  Lync delivers solid value for many organizations. And we understand that “your mileage may vary”. We encourage you to begin thinking about benefits and costs for your company.

One great way is to apply our framework to your situation. I would suggest reaching out to your local Microsoft account team or partner to meet with you. They can conduct a personalized assessment so you can decide for yourself the business value of Lync for your organization.

It has been a year since Lync 2013 was released for general availability and the Lync team is truly thrilled at the progress of the product and all the enhancements we have brought to market. In the past year, we’ve delivered four major updates to the Lync desktop client, bringing you new features such as Q&A manager, embedded IM images, Lync Meeting recording options, and spellcheck. Of course, we are not stopping there. For the February Update for Lync 2013 Desktop Client, the Lync team is excited to introduce three more new features.

Features included in the February Update:

• Toggle pictures of sender/receiver

• Support of high-resolution monitors (200% scaling mode)

• Transfer files and pictures in a Persistent Chat room

Toggle pictures of sender/receiver

In the last Lync client update, we released a feature that displayed the picture of the sender/receiver in an IM conversation or group conversation. This made it easy to visually identify who had just sent an IM, especially in the context of a group conversation. However, we received a lot of feedback through the blog and other listening channels that users wanted an option to turn this off. So in the February update, we added in the functionality to choose whether or not pictures of sender/receiver would appear in IM conversations.

Releasing this feature is an example of how we take feedback seriously so please, keep the feedback coming by letting us know on this blog, through Microsoft field personnel, and the Technology Adoption Programs (TAP). We want to make sure Lync is the best product it can be.

Support of high-resolution monitors (200% scaling mode)

New 4K Ultra HD monitors and notebooks offer an incredible display for work or entertainment. New hardware like Toshiba Kira Notebooks, Sharp 4K Ultra HD monitors or the just announced Lenovo ThinkVision Pro offer screen resolutions of 2560 x 1440 and even 3840 x 2160.

While pictures on these displays are amazing, they also present some visual challenges. When users increase resolution, it inherently decreases the size of each pixel (assuming same display size). By decreasing the size of each pixel, the content shown on the display appears smaller. Ultimately, when display Dots-Per-Inch (DPI) gets sufficiently dense, this “shrinking effect” can make content hard to see and UI targets difficult to click/tap.

To learn more, please see Windows 8.1 scaling DPI enhancements

In order to address these scale/DPI issues, in Window 8.1 the maximum DPI scaling value was increased from 150% to 200%. This additional scaling capability provides two distinct advantages for high-DPI displays on Windows 8.1:

1. UI can scale larger which makes readability better and touch/mouse interactions easier.
2. 200% scaling enables pixel-doubling for up-scaling which provides a clear and crisp appearance for images, graphics, and text.

For comparison, here’s what you would see in Windows 8 in the Display control panel under Appearance and Personalization:

In Windows 8.1 you can see here that DPI scaling goes up to 200%:

Previously, icons in Lync could have looked fuzzy and pixelated in these high resolutions, but with the February update, the team has addressed this issue with support for 200% DPI scaling.

Transfer files and pictures in a Persistent Chat room

In the November update to the Lync client, we added the ability to escalate a persistent chat room to a Lync Meeting. This month, we continue to add functionality to persistent chat rooms by enabling file and picture transfers. Users simply drag and drop files/pictures into the persistent chat room and it is transferred to other members of the room.

The feature is supported for Lync Server deployments only as persistent chat is not available for Lync Online deployments. Also, the feature works only for users connected inside of a company’s network.

For admins:

All the features in the February update for the Lync client are client side only. Therefore, no changes are necessary from the server side to enable your users to access these new features.

To our amazing logistics teams, you were the engine of the show. We sold out expo – again,  spilled out of our hotel – again, tripled our speakers, doubled onsite bodies, and kept the local authorities satisfied. You are amazing and roll with everything. Thank you.

To our technical teams – we doubled our bandwidth and capacity and tripled our breakout rooms. Whether in keynote or the expo hall, everyone worked their butts off. And everything worked. Thanks so much for the over-engineering.

To our speakers, engineers, proctors, assistants, and booth staff – you are the reason everyone here took a week away from their lives to talk Lync in the desert. Thank you for the phenomenal presentations, labs, white board sessions, and conversations.

To our MVPs – what can we say? Your work for Lync is constant and tireless, virtually and physically. We are so thankful for your efforts spreading the business benefits and technical internals of Lync over the years and consistently holding us accountable. 

To our sponsors – your consistent refrain of "more passes" and early announcements was a welcome early sign of great things to come. It completely outmatched our wildest expectations when we walked into the Lync Conference expo hall, stretching far into the distance, filled with the universe that is Lync. It's humbling. Thank you for helping our customers on this journey with us. 

And to the customers and users of Lync – we do it all for you. Thanks for learning with us, sharing your stories and growing as a community. You're the best. Tell us how we can do it again, but better – please submit your evals. 

Lastly, to all of you and everyone else in the Lync and Skype communities – we appreciate your passion, hard work, and time to help make this conference the best it could be. We look forward to seeing each and every one one of you next year.

Sami Abou Saab - Partner

Jacky Magee - Social

Jennifer Yust - Customers

Tim Woo - Keynote

Jamie Stark - Content

Lauren Husum - Lead

Lync Conference 2014 Team

Skype / Lync Enterprise Product Marketing

Microsoft Corporation

Day One of Lync Conference 2014 is over and it has been exciting to see the enthusiasm around Lync from our customers and partners. For me, as the Lync Demo Lead, the end of day one also means I can relax a bit knowing the keynote demo went off without a hitch. If you are in Vegas with me or watched the keynote webcast live, I hope you enjoyed the show and the new product announcements we made.

Since most people have never had to put on a big stage demo like this, you may be wondering what goes on behind the scenes. So I thought it would be interesting to share with our blog readers a peak into what it takes to make the magic happen.

A lot of moving parts go into a keynote demo and it’s always amazing to watch all the pieces come together on show day. In general, the recipe for success is:

• A captivating speaker – I was lucky to have Derek Burney, Corporate VP, return to do the demo this year. His flair and humor are always a hit with any audience.

• Awesome technology – We don’t do fake demos (everything on stage was live code) so it’s great knowing I have a team of the best engineers behind me.

• “Talent” – Luckily I can always pull photogenic people from Lync marketing and force them to be demo buddies.

• A fantastic producer and production crew.

• And of course, planning, planning, and more planning.

Saturday/Sunday:

When I arrived on site at the Aria Conference Center, this is what was waiting for me in an empty ballroom. Our demo equipment had left Redmond by truck two weeks prior and thankfully arrived at the Aria in one piece. Over the next two days, the production crew built out the stage, control room, and sets in the green room.

Monday:

The day before the keynote, we held rehearsals where Gurdeep Singh Pall and Derek Burney ran through their respective keynote sections. Here are Derek and Loy adjusting the KISS dolls to ensure they would be at the perfect height for the cameras from a variety of devices.

Tuesday, Day of keynote:

Here I am one minute before the start of the keynote demo preparing to be on the other end of the mobile phone meeting with Derek.

Our 70’s themed video teleconferencing set where Jacky, Jole, and Daniel sat with a Tandberg VTC waiting to be invited into an existing Lync meeting with me and Derek. It was a humorous way to show off the native Tandberg interoperability story of Lync even if none of them knew how to use an abacus.

Of course, our wrist/hand expert, doctor Sami, in his medical set which we used to demo the ability to embed rich communications into an existing webpage using Lync/Skype API technology.

Our “pawn store owner” Carl and Gleb getting the Skype client ready and thinking through just how much they’d pay Derek for a used Tandberg. With Lync/Skype video connectivity coming by June, the communication possibilities are endless when you have video access to hundreds of millions of Skype users worldwide right from a Lync client.

And as I mentioned earlier, a great production crew is key to a great show. Here is a shot of the control room and @nomorephones himself, Jamie Stark.

Derek and me right after another successful demo!

I hope you enjoyed a peak into what it looked like backstage at this year’s Lync Conference keynote demo and a big thank you to everyone who helped make it such a success. I look forward to seeing you all again next year!

In the legal industry—as with just about any professional services realm—the client comes first. Clients expect ready access and responsiveness. And we want them to be able to quickly find us any and every time so that they’ll continue to reach out to Holland & Knight attorneys as their trusted advisors. At the same time, it’s critical to support our employees in their aim to achieve some degree of work-life balance. We want our people to be able to work when, where, and how they want.

At Holland & Knight, those two factors lie at the heart of our adoption of unified communications technology. Previously, we had a range of communications options in place, but all our separate systems produced a far-from-seamless experience. Attorneys didn’t make full use of the capabilities because they had to jump between tools to make them work. Nothing was integrated.

Worldwide Adoption of Microsoft Lync

In the past few months, we’ve completed our deployment of Microsoft Lync Server 2013, and soon Lync will be available to all 2,000 Holland & Knight attorneys and staff. We’re not only pushing Lync to desktops, we’ll make its full mobility and video capabilities accessible from our employees’ choice of approved devices. Ours is not a one-size-fits-all-users kind of environment, nor do we want it to be. Our objective is to support employees’ preferences and provide them the flexibility to adopt the tools and technologies that best fit their personal workflows.

Moving to Lync is something of a cultural shift for us, but one that employees can embrace at their discretion. Holland & Knight employees have been using our existing Avaya phone system for 10 years, and we have no intention of moving them into a strict softphone-only environment and away from their phones. Lync has standard-based interoperability for flexible deployment options, so our goal is to give employees the freedom to communicate through whatever methods suit them best—voice, video, instant messaging, and screen sharing—from any supported device. The firm will derive the greatest value if we offer the benefits of unified communications without forcing attorneys and staff to use any one aspect.

Choosing the Most Flexible Fit

We did our due diligence and concluded that Lync would give us a cost-effective, integrated toolset with options available to complement each person’s natural work patterns. We’re conducting an internal marketing campaign to address everyone’s needs—from employees who just want a dial tone on a traditional phone all the way up to those who have desktops, notebooks, Surface tablets, and smartphones, and want communications options for all of their devices.

At the upcoming Lync conference, I’ll go into more depth about our business case for selecting Lync over Cisco, discussing the importance of its integration with Microsoft Office, the advantages of its end-user experience, the security enhancements that its traditional counterparts lack, and its compelling five-year ROI and licensing model. I’ll also address how using Lync will help us sharpen our law practice while simultaneously making life a little better for employees. For example, our attorneys and staff are particularly excited about Microsoft Lync Mobile, an app that will release them from the limitations of their office phones and desktops. They’ll be able to get away and enjoy their kids’ weekend hockey game, for example, knowing that they can immediately be reached and respond to clients and colleagues through any number of methods—whatever’s most effective.

Easier Collaboration among Colleagues

For improving responsiveness, the five-digit internal dialing and voice over IP (VoIP) calling alone make the change worthwhile. VoIP enhances accessibility as it uses our office-wide WiFi coverage to augment areas where traditional cellular coverage is weak or nonexistent. We’re also enabling colleagues to reach each other more quickly through Lync features such as presence and instant messaging. In addition to the speed of collaboration, we’re boosting the ease with which attorneys and staff around the world can work together to resolve client issues. For instance, they’ll be able to escalate a voice call to include video and screen sharing for ad hoc, peer-to-peer collaboration in one step, without having to find an empty videoconference room and deal with Cisco telepresence and other separate components.

Connecting with Clients through Skype

The functionality we gain from our Lync adoption will be used not just internally for collaboration among colleagues but externally with the firm’s clients as well. That’s part of the reason we’re looking forward to using Lync Federation with Skype, so that we can securely communicate with people outside our environment. This will be especially welcomed by our Latin American and Middle Eastern offices, which have been pushing to use Skype because it is a regular part of the way clients expect and want to communicate in those regions.

We feel as though there are limitless ways that we can use Lync to our advantage—and to the advantage of our clients. I look forward to sharing more about how Holland & Knight is streamlining collaboration, enhancing communication, and giving our attorneys and staff flexibility that they’ve never had before.

With 140,000 employees who speak six languages and work from 26 countries, communication is critical, especially in the fast-moving and highly competitive telecommunications market. At Telefónica, we have been on a journey to implement a unified communications (UC) vision in which employees can collaborate anytime, anywhere, from any device.

Two years ago, Telefónica was using many different versions of Microsoft collaboration technologies—Office Live Communications Server, Office Communications Server, and Lync Server—for instant messaging and internal conferencing, and a mix of third-party tools for audio conferencing and external conferences. We had islands of great technology, but none of it was connected. You could only talk to someone who was using the same technology, which was a problem for an organization with employees and partners in 40 countries. We knew that we had to solve the problem from the employee perspective; we could not force tools on our staff. We started with what employees already had, used, and knew, which was Microsoft Office. Lync options are right there in the Office applications, so we decided to standardize on the latest release of Lync as the center of our UC vision. Our value proposition for Lync is in how many things that it does and does well. No single product out there meets every single need of every organization, but Lync is a great product that meets the majority of our business needs and is incredibly multifaceted in terms of what it can do. We are using Lync to remove technology islands and give our people more freedom and choice, which lets them more easily blend their personal lives and work. They can connect where, how, and as they like—at a concert on their mobile, at home on a tablet, or in the office on a desktop. You may start a Lync Meeting in the office on your desktop computer. If you have to leave work to pick up your child, you can join the meeting using Lync Mobile—with a single touch. The ability to move between devices is huge and is really important to people; it leads to happier, more productive employees and makes Telefónica a more attractive place to work. Are there productivity savings here? Absolutely. Here is just one example from a multinational team in Telefónica. When their weekly meetings started, everyone dialed into a managed conference service that costs about a euro a minute for each participant. Before long, these meetings began stretching to two hours because of the time it took to email documents around and the distractions that are inherent with audio calls.
We moved these meetings to Lync Meeting—which includes audio, video, and content sharing—and almost overnight the calls dropped back to one hour. People could view and share presentations in real time and see one another. You could see other team members and whether they were engaged. The whole experience was more collaborative and made people more accountable. It’s hard to put an exact amount on how much we saved by doing this, but it was a significant amount, and we’re just one of 300 to 400 global teams that meet on a daily or weekly basis. While we see the opportunity for additional savings by removing extraneous technology such as dedicated room conferencing systems, audio conferencing products, and the associated support and IT management, we remain focused on the benefits to employees, who love the flexibility that Lync provides. We’ve deployed Lync 2013 to 30,000 employees in Europe and Latin America and have plans to continue our deployment of either Lync 2013 or Microsoft Lync Online to the remainder of our 140,000 employees in 2014. People lose interest very quickly if you put a flawed tool in front of them, so we take pains to get new technologies right the first time. Lync meets the fundamental needs of our employees by allowing them to communicate and collaborate globally.