The Lync:Mac client enables users to
communicate with each other through both audio and video. As such, it’s
a good idea to tune the audio and video subsystems of the Macintosh
that is running the client in order to optimize the experience for the
user.
For those who might not be familiar
with the Macintosh operating system, items such as audio and video are
managed through System Preferences. This can be accessed either through
the Dock (the icons displayed on the bottom of the screen) or by
clicking the Apple logo at the upper-left corner of the screen and
choosing System Preferences. When looking for System Preferences in the
Dock, look for a grey square with a large gear and two smaller gears.
Tuning the Display
The System Preferences interface is broken up
into five rows, including Personal, Hardware, Internet & Wireless,
System, and Other. Clicking the Displays icon, located in the Hardware
row, opens a new menu. From this menu, you can select screen
resolutions. In general, for the best visual results, pick the native
resolution of the screen. This is especially important when using an
LCD, or liquid-crystal display. Although displays can generally run in
multiple resolutions, they are optimized for one particular resolution.
As Wikipedia describes it, “While CRT monitors can usually display
images at various resolutions, an LCD monitor has to rely on
interpolation (scaling of the image), which causes a loss of image
quality. An LCD has to scale up a smaller image to fit into the area of
the native resolution. This is the same principle as taking a smaller
image in an image editing program and enlarging it; the smaller image
loses its sharpness when it is expanded.” Thus, you are when using an
external LCD or the built-in LCD display on a Macintosh laptop, it is
important to ensure that it’s running at its native resolution.
Typically, a monitor can inform a computer of its native resolution
through extended display identification data (EDID). If a monitor
doesn’t support this standard, search online for the native resolution.
If it can’t be found, experiment with various resolutions. Generally,
it is obvious when you select the native resolution because the text
will look significantly crisper.
Another feature that is available on the
Macintosh laptops is support for automatically adjusting brightness as
ambient light changes. This enables the laptop screen to adjust to the
conditions of the room and is helpful when users move their laptop back
and forth between well-lit and poorly lit locations.
Clicking the Color button offers
additional options for managing the display profiles. Picking a profile
that matches the output monitor can result in a more accurate
representation of colors, which means people will look more natural
when in a video call.
Tuning the Audio
In the Hardware row of the System Preferences
page is an icon for sound. Clicking this icon opens a screen with three
tabs, which include Sound Effects, Output, and Input. Sound effects are
used by various notifications within the Communicator client and their
relative volume can be managed here.
Clicking the Output tab enables you to
control overall volume of the output and gives you control over basic
audio features such as left/right balance.
Clicking Input enables you to modify
the sensitivity of the microphone. This is probably the most critical
step in optimizing the experience in audio calls. If the microphone is
too sensitive, it can clip or send a distorted signal. If sensitivity
is too low, other users will have a difficult time hearing the person
speaking into the microphone. One excellent feature offered on the
Macintosh is native noise reduction. If the box labeled Use Ambient
Noise Reduction is used, less distracting background noise will be sent
over the microphone and this will benefit anyone in the audio
conference.
Troubleshooting
The Lync:Mac client is a huge upgrade and
generally easy to use, but there are a few things that might go wrong
in a large deployment:
• If the client doesn’t connect, try
setting the client to a manual configuration and list the pool name. If
this results in the client connecting, your service records in DNS are
not configured properly.
• If a manual connection still doesn’t
work, try pinging the pool name. If it fails to resolve, there might be
an issue with DNS. Try pinging the DNS server as well; it’s possible
you’re having other network issues.
• If you’re getting audio feedback when
conferencing, your sound card might not support noise cancelation.
Having a good sound card results in a better overall experience.
Another possible fix is to run the configuration utilities for your
sound card. This enables you to correctly set levels for the speakers
and the microphone. This can prevent clipping of the signal that can
result in a distorted voice.
• If you aren’t getting presence
information or if the client complains about Outlook integration, it’s
possible that you activated an account for Lync Server 2010 and created
a SIP name for the user that doesn’t match the email address. These
need to match for everything to work perfectly.
• If you are using certificates from
your own CA and external users are having issues connecting, they might
not trust your root CA. The public certificate from the Root CA needs
to be imported into the Trusted Root store in Keychain. If external
systems trust the Root CA but aren’t able to reach the Certificate
Revocation List for the CA, they will fail to connect.
• An excellent way to check on network connection to Lync Server 2010 is the netstat command. If a connection on TCP 5061 is in a Syn_sent state, it means the Lync Server is unavailable. If the connection is sitting at Time_Wait,
odds are that the application is having issues. It means that the
connection was acknowledged, but the application isn’t sending data.
