Hot off the heels of TechEd Europe, I’m thrilled to announce that I’ve been awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) again for Lync in 2013!

To give you a bit of information about what the MVP Award is, here is Microsoft’s description:

The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award is our way of saying thank you to exceptional, independent community leaders who share their passion, technical expertise, and real-world knowledge of Microsoft products with others.

I’m massively honoured to be recognised for my community contributions over the last year and I thank you for reading my blog and sending in your questions/comments. I’m excited to continue to write and speak more about Lync and help more and more IT Pros learn about the product. You can check out my MVP Profile here.

Yesterday afternoon I received an email informing me that I’ve been awarded Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) for Lync in 2012!

To give you a bit of information about what the MVP Award is, here is Microsoft’s description:

The Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award is our way of saying thank you to exceptional, independent community leaders who share their passion, technical expertise, and real-world knowledge of Microsoft products with others.

I’m massively honoured to be recognised for my community contributions over the last year and I thank you for reading my blog and sending in your questions/comments. I’m excited to continue to write and speak more about Lync and help more and more IT Pros learn about the product.

I’m also looking forward to collaborating more with the almost 50 other Lync MVPs worldwide both online and at MVP Summit in February next year. You can check out my MVP Profile here.

Just a quick one to let you know that I had a post published on Microsoft’s TechNet NextHop blog today about UC deployment success criteria. You can check it out here.

It covers a lot of areas that are important to ensure your deployment goes well including securing business buy-in, managing the voice experience (device selection) and ensuring training and adoption materials are delivered.

I hope this allows you to understand a lot of the business challenges involved with deploying UC and helps your deployment to become a success.

– Justin

Since kicking things off on this blog in April I’ve written a fair bit about Lync Server 2010 and have really enjoyed sharing the issues and resolutions I’ve encountered along the way as well as announcing our UC User Group events.
2011 has been a really successful year for us at Modality and me personally, with loads of great diverse projects across England. As it’s that time of year, I thought I’d take a moment to reflect on what I’ve written about during the year and share the highlights:

Mac Musings

As a Mac user, there was a heavy focus on the Communicator/Lync experience on OS X in a lot of my posts. One of my first posts was comparing Communicator for Mac 2011 to Lync 2010 on the PC.
When Lync for Mac 2011 came out in September, I was one of the first blogs to publish a review of the new client.

Miscellaneous Thoughts

There’s sometimes I sit and think “it would be worthwhile if someone just created a really clear document around how this works” when I’m looking at a particular component of Lync for a customer for based on a question someone has asked on the TechNet forums. As a result, I wrote some stuff about Demystifying Photos in Lync, how Lync uses Exchange Calendar information and How to exclude local intranet URLs when setting up URL filtering.

I also pushed the boundaries a bit in October by looking at CUCI-Lync and why you should think twice.

Interview with a UC Pro

The Interview with a UC Pro series has gone from strength to strength, and over the course of the year I interviewed folks from around the world that lead the way in the community. In 2011, I interviewed these guys:
Alex Lewis, Tom Pacyk, Chris Norman, Adam Jacobs, Jeff Schertz and Tom Laciano.

Exciting news about this concept coming up in 2012, stay tuned for an announcement.

Lync and SQL Mirroring

A started a series dedicated to finding out if SQL Mirroring works with Lync Server 2010, since the only official statement was that it was “not supported”. I set out to determine why this was the case and what happens when you deploy your databases onto a pair of SQL mirror nodes. Check out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. I still haven’t written the part about Group Chat yet, so stay tuned for that in 2012.

Everyone goes nuts over mobile clients

When the new mobile clients became available last week, every man and his dog started doing backflips over getting it up and running. Much discussion occurred on twitter about when the clients became available in the App Store/Marketplaces and then loads of people complained about the lack of features.

To throw my hat in the ring, I got my hands on the iPhone client and published one of the first looks at the client for iPhone.

Bring on 2012

Thanks for subscribing to my blog, I hope I’ve been able to bring you valuable content on Lync Server 2010 this year. I recently received my 3 year UK work permit, so I’m looking forward to another productive year in London and can’t wait to bring you even more Lync related content in 2012.