A typical but potentially major mistake in the design of a Lync solution can be summarized in two words: human factor.
It is typical among technical decision makers, especially those from hi-tech firms, to put excessive bias on technological aspects while overlooking or forgetting the end users. Specifically, we refer to the following points:
- Expectations: The ability for your solution to meet their demands/requirements
- Acceptance: Involving users in the decision-making process, and allowing for their opinions to influence the final solution
- Experience: Envisioning a simple and effective solution that can suit people with diverse skills and culture
- Knowledge: Making people aware of your new UC solution, and training them to maximize their productivity and effective communication
Technology definitely matters, and if your infrastructure fails to deliver a consistently good Quality of Experience, the users will abandon it, which will render your investment void.
The way to meet users' expectations and deliver on requirements starts with awareness. Making users aware of what is coming will somehow make them feel involved in the process and will play a fundamental role in the success of the project.
We can list the challenges you will face in the following two broad categories:
- User readiness: Have you understood and addressed the user requirements in your design? Note that user requirements are not necessarily a synonym of company requirements.
- User adoption: Have you ensured that a consistent part of your project will be devoted to user awareness and training? Lync should not be just another icon on their desktop.
Unified Communications are, in many cases, a significant shift from established communication patterns and habits, which will definitely affect productivity (for better or worse, it is partly up to you). Although instant messaging and other successful technologies have long gained traction and popularity among users, a significant number of companies still rely heavily on traditional forms of communication such as PBX-based telephones and e-mail. The transition from tradition to innovation (or convergence of diverse communication technologies into a more homogeneous ecosystem, which is a UC pillar) is something you will need to encourage and support.
When planning for requirements, treat all business units within the company as different realities, each with their unique view, and do your best to correlate the different requirements into an organic solution. We suggest that you compile a list of requirements for each unit, and encourage your customers' key decision makers to do the same. Their continued involvement in the project is fundamental. You may then correlate the lists in a global repository and start thinking about technical challenges.
A typical example of a biased approach is only listening to IT teams and technically educated users. An amazing number of enterprises do not conduct proper end-user surveys, leaving it to IT teams or key decision makers (which, not surprisingly, often do correspond) to lead the process, sometimes with a disappointing outcome for the real utilizers.
When you conduct interviews with end-user representatives, and as the requirements list starts building up, ensure that you consider and address all of the following aspects:
- Environmental (globally): Think about global companies with worldwide presence and their different culture, technical readiness, habits, and legislation. For example, some places might culturally prefer different forms of communications over others, and you will need to take this into account when estimating the capacity calculations for network bandwidth, server placement, user policies, and so on. We stress on the importance of not forgetting to consider all departments, and ensuring that you get attendance from key stakeholders for each. Not all of them will have the same requirements. For example, some might put greater emphasis on video communication (and perhaps demand advanced devices such as Lync Room systems) and indicate it as a key business requirement. This would result in fundamental information to help shape the network capacity to accommodate such needs.
- Productivity and comfort for users: As we said before, the new communication workloads that are typical of a Lync solution may require some time for proper adoption. Ensure that you address transition properly. Advanced Lync users usually put greater emphasis on software-based endpoints; they will mostly be happy and fully productive with their Lync client and a good (read certified) pair of headsets; this might not initially apply to those who are used to traditional desktop phones. There is a plethora of Lync-compatible devices from several partners that are easy and intuitive to use, yet provide old-school digit-based dialing, along with Lync-native advanced features. Products range from aggressively priced entry-level models to high-end devices. On the telephony note, also remember to address power-users such as receptionists and attendants (a frequently overlooked category), including specific training. Being usually the first and most important ingress point for business calls, it is essential that you meet their habits. Microsoft provides a Lync Attendant Console, which is a good fit for simpler scenarios and call flows. The console dates back to Lync 2010 (but it is compatible with 2013). For more advanced scenarios, there are excellent third-party solutions (which may suggest why Microsoft relied on partners' solutions and never updated its 2010 console).
- Requirements can pose challenges to technical and budget readiness: A typical occurrence is developing specific workloads that depend on high-quality networks in less developed countries (voice and video), or remote sites where degraded network performance to a far central site is a physiologically inevitable occurrence. Make sure you have a very clear understanding of users' breakout, and compile a list of sites, each with the user count, total network bandwidth, available bandwidth for RTC, requirements for Call Admission Control, and Quality of Service (QoS). Such information will be fundamental in determining the network readiness for your deployment (we will cover this aspect in Chapter 11, Controlling Your Network – A Quick Drill into QoS and CAC).
- Legislation will play an important role in some of your design decisions, as you may be required to deploy special compliance features (such as IM and conferencing archiving, which Lync provides out of the box) or possibly a global call record solution (which includes audio and video calls, whether PSTN or Lync-native). Lync 2013 can provide limited call recording capabilities, which were clearly not designed with legal compliance in mind (that is, recording is manually started by a participant in the conference, and this cannot be managed centrally. Furthermore, non-conference PSTN calls cannot be recorded unless through a workaround). A fully manageable call recording for compliance requirements will require third-party solutions. Voice over IP and PSTN regulations are also likely to affect your global design. Some countries may not allow IP-based voice, so your only option here may be deploying one or more PSTN gateways through a local trunk; some others place specific restrictions like only allowing national carriers, or prohibiting Voice over IP (VoIP) outbound traffic to be routed outside the national boundaries unless through a national carrier.
- BYOD (Bring Your Own Device): This is a ramping-up trend, which, in many cases, does not play well with organizations subject to rigid security requirements. Lync 2013 mobility now brings full audio and video capabilities to mobile devices, and this is getting a lot of attention from businesses that see it as an attractive productivity booster or cheap resiliency solution for branch offices without a redundant network link or a local Lync Survivable Branch Appliance. Think about a site with a failed WAN link to the central Lync site. Mobile devices would still be able to connect through a local Wi-Fi gateway (or even through the 3G/4G data network) via the Lync Edge server, and be able to make and receive calls through the corporate phone numbers.
In this recipe, we have provided several, but not all, examples of what type of user-centric challenges you would face in a Lync project. The two key take-away concepts are:
- Allow technological decision to be driven by user expectations and not exclusively the other way round
- Adopt a user-centric approach as a fundamental stepping stone as this is essential for the type of business transformation and project success many companies aim for when it comes to deploying a Unified Communications solution
- For more information about Voice over IP legislation around the world, refer to http://www.absoluteuc.org/can-use-lync-client-ip-telephony-voip-regulations-around-world.
- Use of Lync-certified devices, including headsets, plays an important role in the quality of experience. For a catalog of Lync devices, refer to http://catalog.lync.com/en-us/hardware/index.aspx.