Last Thursday night Adam, Tom and I got together once again to put on MUCUGL here in London. This time we teamed up with AcmePacket to stage an event in the intimate Eight Club, deep under the City of London in a cosy basement venue. The treacherous rainy afternoon that would have made Noah nervous stopped no one, and we all settled in for an evening talking about call flows in Lync.

First up, Adam presented a great deck on Fixed-Mobile Convergence (FMC) that featured a real life case study and how it can be the holy grail. Following that, I presented on SIP call flows in Lync and talked about what SIP, SDP, RTP and ICE is along with many other protocols.

You can view my slides below but you won’t see anything on slides 12 through 16 because this is where I jumped over to Snooper to show some SIP messages in each call scenario which I can’t share publicly unfortunately.

After the break, Geraint from AcmePacket talked about their SBC products and Tom finished up the evening talking about the latest developments in the worldwide Lync community. Afterwards over a beer, we all shared some war stories about deployments and recent challenges with Lync. All in all a great event. You can see Adam’s roundup on the event on the MUCUGL blog here.

Our next MUCUGL event is on July 19th, so save the date in your calendars now.

Q2 2012 is almost upon us, so we’re back again with another instalment of London’s only user group for Microsoft Lync Pros. This time it’s all about going deep on session management in Lync. We’ve got a great couple of presentations in store and a stylish venue for this quarter’s event thanks to AcmePacket.

First up is Adam talking about his experiences with Fixed-Mobile Convergence in Microsoft UC followed by me presenting about calls flow in Microsoft Lync. I’ll be explaining everything from how Lync clients talk to each other whether they’re internal, out on the internet coming in through the Edge Server, in conferences or dialling a PSTN number. Prepare to learn lots about SIP, SDP and RTP. 🙂

Following that, AcmePacket’s David Wray will be along to talk about their E-SBC (enterprise session border controller) offering for Microsoft Lync and how they do session management. Finally, Tom will close up the night with news, updates and latest resources relating to Microsoft Lync. AcmePacket are kindly sponsoring this event for us at the swish Eight Club in the city, and here’s where you need to be and when:

Where: Eight Club 1 Change Alley London EC3V 3ND (Map Link)
When: 6pm, April 19th 2012

So make sure you come along to learn more about Lync, share some stories with fellow IT Pros and stick around for a beer afterwards. For more info including the agenda and the registration link, check out the post on the MUCUG London blog here.

Look forward to seeing you there!

UC Expo is on again this year on the 6th and 7th of March at Olympia in London. It’s the premier UC event in the UK/EMEA 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 2 years (including manning our Modality stand last year) and enjoy meeting new people, catching up with old ones and learning about the new and exciting tech coming out.

This year however, Tom, Adam and I have teamed up with UC Expo to present our own little MUCUGL seminar on Lync Mobility. We’ll be talking about the new client and how it can fit in with your existing or new Lync deployment, as well as getting in front of a few new faces and talking about how awesome our user group is. 🙂

When: 6th March, 3:50 PM – 4:20 PM

Where: Mobility Track

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!

Last Thursday night we ran our third Microsoft UC user group meetup in London. This time we headed back to Bow Bells House in the city to talk about the new Mobility functionality in Lync and to have AudioCodes along to talk about their SmartTAP call recording solution.

Just as we were about to kick off at 6pm, a fire alarm went off and we all had to evacuate the building. Some half an hour later we were allowed back upstairs and kicked off proceedings with Adam talking about Lync Mobility Architecture first.

Next up, I presented on Lync Mobility Deployment with Tom including a step by step guide and how the sign-in process works. You can check out our slides below.

The other slides from the night including Adam’s and Steve Hopkins from AudioCodes’ slides are on our SlideShare account and you can check out some photos from the night on the MUCUG London blog post.

When’s our next one?

We’re pleased to announce that our next MUCUG London event will be on April 19th at Eight Club in London so make sure you save the date now.

Many thanks to all that came, we really enjoyed having you along and for a few pints at the pub after. Your feedback was great and always we’ll take it on board to make future events even better.

It’s that time again. Time for another Microsoft UC User Group meeting here in London, this time in January back at our original home of Bow Bells House. This time around, it’s all about mobility baby!

With the Lync Mobility pieces all out in the wild and the Android and Windows Phone clients available, everybody’s talking about the new Lync Mobile client. We’ll be covering the architecture, explaining how it works, how you configure your Lync environment, demoing the clients and much more.
Hopefully the iPhone/iPad app will be in the App Store by then also, so we’ll be able to demo those as well.

We’ve also teamed up with Audiocodes to bring you information about their new mobility and call recording solution and as usual Adam, Tom and I will bring you all the latest Lync Server 2010 news to close up the night.
And it wouldn’t be a user group without a few pints afterwards at the pub next door. 🙂

Where: Bow Bells House, 1 Bread Street EC4M 9BE London (Map Link)
When: 6pm, Jan 19th 2012

For more info including the agenda and the registration link, check out the post on the MUCUG London blog here.

As part of our drive to educate the masses on the brilliance of Microsoft Lync, we’re running a few events in conjunction with Microsoft for both the public and private sectors. The aim of these events is to help organisations better understand the value of Lync, dispel rumours and hearsay.

The first event is for the Public Sector, and will be held at the Millenium Stadium in Cardiff on the 1st of December 2011.
At this event, we’ll be showing you how to leverage the cost saving benefits of Lync and also have customers speaking about their own experiences.

The second event is for the Private Sector, and will be held at the Williams F1 Conference Centre on the 19th January 2012.
This event will focus on how Lync can make your business more competitive in the marketplace, increase productivity and rationalise your infrastructure costs. We’ll also be offering a Proof of Concept Initiative on the day to attendees.
Plus, a go in the F1 simulator. Cool huh?

For more details and registration information, check out the post on the Modality Systems blog.

These events are going to be chock-a-block with great content to get you excited about Lync, and they’re going to be held in some fantastic venues. Places are limited, so get in quick to secure your spot.

Given that the next MUCUG London event isn’t until January, we all decided we couldn’t let Christmas roll past without getting together for a few and talking about the end of the year frenzy/slowdown/other misc goings on.

I haven’t run a #ucomsldn tweetup in a while, so I decided to revive the hashtag and we’ve packaged it up together with MUCUG London to have a good yuletide last hurrah for the year.

So if you’re in London/South East and work in UC (not just Microsoft – we get industry analysts and people from all vendors along), come down to Doggett’s near Blackfriars Bridge on the Southbank on the 8th December from 6:30pm for a few ales.

Event invite and all other important details here – http://twtvite.com/ucomsldnxmas2011

Hope to see you there!

Time for us all to get together again in London for MUCUGL, talk about Lync Server and have a few beers after. Following up from a successful first event, this time we’ve got the Polycom guys onboard to talk video interoperability with Lync.

Taking place on the 20th October at the Polycom EBC and kicking off at 6pm sharp, the night will start off with Polycom Customer Experience Manager Mike Adams showing us a demo of the Lync and Polycom VC integration experience. After a break and some networking, Lync MVPs Jeff Schertz and Mike Stacey will follow up the tech content by talking about audio/video conferencing and Lync integration at a deeper level.

To finish up, Adam, Tom and I will be covering all the latest Lync news and updates to bring you up to speed with what’s happened in the last 3 months. Then, it’ll be time for beer.

Location:

Polycom Executive Briefing Centre
69 Old Broad St
Dashwood House (16th Floor), Broadgate
EC2 London

For more more info and the registration link, jump over to the MUCUGL blog here.

After a few months of preparation, working out what we were going to present, where we were going to have it and when, we pulled it off and ran our first Microsoft UC User Group London event last Thursday!

I’m really happy with the response and feedback we received on the night and I think all the content we presented went down well. It was also great having a chat to people about Microsoft UC after at the pub over a few pints and to share some war stories.

Adam has uploaded all the slidedecks to slideshare for us, here’s my one on Voice Resiliency in Lync Server 2010.

The rest of the presentations are available here. More info including snippets of feedback from attendees is available here on the MUCUG London blog also. Look forward to seeing you at the next one!