Last Thursday night we ran our Q2 2013 MUCUGL event at the Polycom EBC in London. We had a great turnout with a full house and some special guests from both Polycom and Microsoft.

Scott Brown, Worldwide Director for Lync Enterprise Voice from Microsoft dropped in to share his thoughts on Lync and Skype and to answer questions from the audience. His enthusiasm for Lync was overtly obvious, and I think it’s great when senior management are up for getting involved in the community like that. Secondly, Vasudevan Krishnamurthy, Polycom’s product manager for Lync voice products joined us during the break via video to answer questions everyone had on the CX and VVX phones. The Lync features that Vasu previewed in the upcoming release of the VVX firmware is really a testament to their investment in the platform.

I presented first up on Lync Mobility Architecture, and you can check our my slides below on Slideshare.

If you didn’t get an opportunity (like me) to attend the inaugural Lync Conference in San Diego in February and thought you missed out, fear not.

You’ll be pleased to hear that PowerPoint presentations and screen capture videos from every session are now available free to download. Now you’ve got no excuse not to learn about all the awesome new HA/DR, conferencing, persistent chat features and more in Lync 2013.

I know I’m a bit late in announcing this here considering it’s just around the corner, but thought I’d let everyone know regardless. We’ve got another MUCUGL event for this quarter, and this time the name of the game is mobility, logging and an update on new Polycom kit. Continue reading →

UC Expo is on again this year on the 5th and 6th of March at Olympia in London. It’s the premier UC event in the UK/EMEA regions for vendors and end-user customers to come together and see the latest developments in the industry along with lots of informative seminars.

I’ve attended the last 3 years (including manning our Modality stand in 2011 and presenting on Lync 2010 mobility last year) and really enjoy meeting new people, catching up with old ones and learning about the new and exciting tech coming out.

This year Tom, Adam and I have again teamed up with UC Expo to present our own little MUCUGL seminar on Lync, except this time we’re excited to talk about the new fully featured Lync 2013 mobility story. We’ll be talking about and demoing the new clients, and will show you the underlying architecture involved and how to deploy it.

When: 6th March, 1:10 PM – 1:40 PM

Where: Flexibility and Mobility Theatre

For more info and to add our seminar to your MYVISIT planner, check out the seminar page on the UC Expo site here.

Look forward to seeing you there!

My presentations on Lync Server 2013 from Nordic Infrastructure Conference 2013 are now available to watch on vimeo. I really enjoyed presenting in Oslo, even though it was -20 degrees celsius!

Designing for High Availability and Disaster Recovery in Lync Server 2013

http://vimeo.com/58110874

Migration and Coexistence Strategies in Lync Server 2013

http://vimeo.com/58165673

You can also view all the other sessions include fellow MVPs Ståle Hansen and Martin Lidholm’s Lync sessions here.

Enjoy!

Coming up in January, fellow MVP and The UC Architects podcast co-host Ståle Hansen and I will be speaking at the Nordic Infrastructure Conference (NIC) in Oslo. Along with Martin Lidholm, we’ll be covering loads of Lync Server 2013 content.

Continue reading →

In this quarter’s event we’ve got an exciting evening of Lync goodness planned at Polycom’s Londom EBC. We’ve struck a good balance of new vendor information, solid Lync technical content and industry news to bring you the latest and greatest since we presented Lync Server 2013 (which was the first event in London to present Lync 2013) back in July. Continue reading →

I know I’m a bit late in reporting on this one, but I was away in Greece for a week on summer vacation/holiday. 🙂

On Thursday 26th we all got together at Microsoft’s London office to celebrate our 1st birthday and talk about the next version of Lync. Microsoft UC Product Manager Steve Tassell started off the night and introduced the exciting stuff coming, followed by Tom telling us about his Top 10 new features.

Adam then went into loads of detail about video conferencing in Lync Server 2013 including how SVC will work and implications to current deployments. Finally, I wrapped things up talking about architecture and high availability in Lync Server 2013 Preview and discussed pool and back end server failover among other things that have changed in the new version. I’ve embedded my slide deck below for those that weren’t able to make it along on the night.

You can check out the other slide decks on SlideShare.

After we wrapped up formalities, a bunch of us headed over to the pub and talked more about how Lync 2013 is going to be the next big thing in UC. 🙂 Many thanks to those that came, see you next time on October 25th!

This is our big one, we’re a year old! I can’t believe it’s already been 12 months since we first decided to get together and put on a user group for UC Pros in London. We’re having a special birthday event at Microsoft’s London office to celebrate and better yet, we’ll be talking about the recently announced next version of Lync. 🙂

First up will be Steve Tassell, Microsoft UC Product Manager to kick off the proceedings and give you an idea of all the exciting new features in Lync 2013. Next will be Tom who will talk about the Top 10 changes in Lync 2013, with Adam following up after the networking break with a deep-dive into video conferencing in Lync Server 2013.

For my session, I’ll be talking about architecture and high availability in Lync Server 2013. There are loads of changes to help you consolidate infrastructure costs, deliver more features to your users and make your environment more resilient. Lync 2013 is definitely a game changer.

Where: Auditorium 1, Microsoft Cardinal Place, 80-100 Victoria Street, SW1E 5JL London
When: 6pm, July 26th 2012

So get yourself down to Microsoft in London this Thursday for a bumper event. Tickets are going fast, so make sure you register here.