Tag Archives: Microsoft Lync
The Great Presence Challenge
We’ve all done this. You are sitting in front of your PC working on a project and realize that you need some important information from a coworker. Let’s call that coworker Deborah Olson. You click over to Microsoft Lync, find Deborah in your contacts list, and see that her presence jellybean shows her to be […]
Unified Communications and Me
Life comes with a few simple rules: Be kind to others. Live purposefully. Learn from your mistakes. Don’t buy a unified communications solution from a company that doesn’t deliver unified communications to its own employees. In my latest article for No Jitter, I explore how my company, Arrow Systems Integration, implements unified communications. I tried […]
Point. Click. Communicate. The Webification of Communications
My second article for No Jitter explores the evolution of the PBX from “refrigerator cabinets” filled with proprietary gateways, call processors, applications, and line cards to the modern day web server. I look at each functional component to help explain where we were and why we moved on. As always, I welcome your thoughts and […]
The Dark Side of Always On
My job keeps me on the road more than I care to admit. I don’t want to spoil my day by looking, but I believe that I have banked well over 250,000 frequent flier miles. Yes, some of those miles were earned outside of actual air travel, but even if I lop 75,000 miles off […]
New and Worth Noticing
The business of communications involves a lot of leap-frogging. A company comes up with something really clever and for a short while they hold bragging rights over their competitor’s products. I say “short while” because it never seems to take very long before those competitors have the same thing as well as something of their […]
Microsoft Lync and Session Border Controllers
As with every other SIP solution for voice communications, there is a place for session border controllers (SBC) in a Microsoft Lync configuration. However, leave it to Microsoft to make their solution different enough that it warrants some discussion. SIP Trunks Let’s start with SIP trunks. As you probably already know, an SBC will sit […]
The Microsoft Lync Survivable Branch Office
Back in the dark ages of telephony (before the year 2000) it could be said that if you had a building you had a PBX. It didn’t matter if that other building was across the street or across the country. The wiring of an older PBX had distance limitations and although there were some tricks […]
A Quick Introduction to Microsoft Lync
My history with Microsoft telephony goes back to the early 1990’s when Microsoft and Intel jointly created and released the Telephony Services Applications Programming Interface or TAPI. TAPI allowed Windows programs to write applications that could directly control a telephone. A TAPI application could instruct a telephone to do anything that a user of that […]
Tao, Zen, and Tomorrow 