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Managing Lync Users
Now that we have already covered the basics about Lync Server Control Panel, let’s click the Users item on the left side to load the main page for managing Lync users (Figure 01). The administrator can hit Find without any additional information to list all Lync Users or a name can be typed in, and then click the Find button to search for the desired user.
Figure 01
The Lync User creation is pretty straight forward, basically we need to configure four key items (figure 02) which are:
- Define a Lync Pool: Here, we need to assign a server where the Lync user will be hosted.
- Define a SIP URI: This is the user login when trying to access Lync. The default option which is Use user’s e-mail address will work just fine if you have created the user already in Exchange or at least the E-mail attribute field in the Active Directory Users and Computer was set with the same SMTP address of the SIP domain being used by Lync. We can always define it manually by selecting the other options to create the SIP URI.
- Define Telephony Options: By default it is PC-to-PC-only however, we have an option to disable audio/video for the user; enterprise Voice and also RCC (Remote Call Control) in two flavours: where both options allow the Lync to control a PBX desktop phone, however the RCC only option does not allow audio/video calls from Lync client.
- Policies: There are several policies which can be applied at several levels but the ones applied at the user level are more restrictive than the others.
Now that we have an idea what we are expecting, let’s create our first user in Lync, and to do that click Enable users. On the new page we can add as many users as we want using the Add.. button and all users listed will be created in this first run. In the field Assign users to a pool, let’s select our only Lync Server that we have just installed, and in Generate user’s SIP URI let’s leave default settings (in this case we know that the user has a mailbox already configured).
Figure 02
The remaining options are related to Telephony which for now we can use the default settings, and after that we have several policies that allow the administrator to control Lync user behaviour and standard settings from a central location (Figure 03). If it is a new implementation you won’t see much, just Automatic for all of them, however, in the next section we are going cover the policies and demonstrate how we can create additional policies.
Figure 03
Another option is to enable the Lync User using Lync Server Management Shell and it can be done easily using the following syntax:
Enable-CsUser <Username> -RegistrarPool <Lync-Standard-FQDN> -SIPAddressType EmailAddress –SIPDomain <SIP-domain>
Helping end-users to adopt Lync…
It doesn’t matter if the Unified Communications administrator has spent several days planning if at the end of the day the end-users don’t know how to use it. Even worse is if the service desk is not ready to support those end-users.
Training is a must before going live, however, we can help end-users with some of the most common questions that they may have through a Lync Custom Training provided by Microsoft which is a simple portal with several videos and step-by-step demonstration of simple tasks of using Lync from the end-user perspective. The first step is to download the latest version of the documentation and in order to do that search for Microsoft Lync 2010 Adoption and Training kit: Lync Custom Intranet Site on the Microsoft Download center here.
We don’t need a server just for that as we can use any server that has Web Server role installed. On that server let’s create a folder below C:\Inetpub and name it LyncHelp. Copy the zip file that we have downloaded from Microsoft to the same server. The file is probably named Lync_Custom_Intranet_Site_Download_Package.zip. Open the zip file and extract all files and folders below Lync_Custom_Intranet_Site (Figure 04) to our new folder C:\InetPub\LyncHelp
Figure 04
Our second step is to configure IIS to support the Lync web page. Open Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager, then expand <Server-Name>, and then right-click Sites followed by Add Web Site…
On the new Add Web Site window, let’s name the Site Name as LyncHelp and specify the Physical Path as c:\Inetpub\LyncHelp. Finally define LyncHelp as hostname and click OK (Figure 05). In this article we are going to use LyncHelp as the name for the website and the same name will be used for everything else, such as folder name, site name and host name.
Figure 05
The Lync Training has a Default.html page in the main folder and by default IIS does not have such file as a default document. Let’s expand our brand new site and double click the Default Document icon. Then right click on the right-side, select Add… and type in Default.html. Make sure that it is the first entry of the list, as shown in Figure 06.
Figure 06
The final step is to create an entry in DNS for the site that we have just created (Figure 07).
Figure 07
After that the end-users can go to their Internet Explorer and type-in http://LyncHelp and the initial page will be displayed (Figure 08). The new site should include several videos, step-by-step tutorials available to all end-users.
Figure 08
Conclusion
In this article we went through the Lync Control Panel which is the main tool to manage Lync users in your organization. We also saw how to create a web portal to help end-users understanding better Lync features.
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