What's New in Microsoft Lync Server 2013 : Client Features - Tabbed Conversations, OneNote

Figure 1. Tabbed conversation window.

Presenting

A new presence status has been introduced to indicate when a user is currently presenting content during an Online Meeting. When Lync detects that a user is giving a presentation, it automatically changes the user’s presence to “Presenting.” Users have always had the ability to manually set presence to Do Not Disturb when they were giving a presentation, but the key difference is that this presence status is now set automatically. This helps prevent instant messages or calls from potentially interrupting a presentation, which is always embarrassing during a conference.

OneNote

Integration between conversations and Microsoft Office OneNote has existed since Office Communicator 2007 R2, but it was really a buried feature, accessible only via a submenu that most users were unaware even existed. Microsoft has made some great strides with the integration included with Lync 2013, and made the collaboration points much more obvious. While in a Lync Server 2013 conference, users can opt to start taking private notes about the meeting, at which point the meeting subject, date, and participant list are automatically populated within the new note.

The previously discussed feature is on par with the preceding version’s features, although it is definitely more obviously accessible in Lync 2013. The new addition to OneNote integration is the concept of shared notes in a Lync conference. When a presenter uses shared notes from a notebook stored on SkyDrive or SharePoint, all participants can see and edit the OneNote note in real time during the conference. This eliminates the need for a single person to try to capture all the meeting notes, in which case some key pieces of information can be missed. Instead, each participant can contribute to the notebook simultaneously, ensuring that all relevant information has been recorded. A really nice touch here is that notes are displayed via OneNote Web App through the Office Web Apps Server if a user doesn’t have the OneNote application installed. The OneNote integration during conferencing is shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. OneNote shared notes integration.

The current disadvantage to this feature is that permissions to the shared notebook must be configured in advance and managed outside of Lync. Sharing the notebook within Lync does nothing to provision access to the notebook for each participant. Additionally, when a OneNote shared notebook is added to a meeting, all participants receive the sharing notification, but only those with access to the shared notebook can actually view and edit the notes. Users without access to the notebook will receive an error indicating that they do not have the appropriate permissions.

Audio Dial-Out

One of the key strategies in Lync voice implementations is the notion that organizations don’t need to replace all the existing PBX phones and can instead leverage the Lync dial-in conferencing features with the old phones during a lengthy migration. This worked just fine for users who dialed in to the conferencing service, but there were some serious caveats with the capability to support dial-out from the conferencing service to the PBX phones. Although it was possible, there was no control over what numbers could be dialed within Lync, so businesses had to turn to gateways or the old PBX to provide class of restrictions or number manipulations. The last pain point was the fact that only a single gateway would be targeted in this dial-out scenario, similar to the old 1:1 Mediation Server to media gateway ratio in Office Communications Server 2007 R2.

Lync Server 2013 has added a feature to the conferencing policies to support audio dial-out for non-Enterprise voice users. The end result is that users who are not enabled for Enterprise Voice yet but have a Lync 2013 client can join a conference and have the conferencing service call their desk phone. The user only needs to answer the call to be placed in the conference. The primary advantage in Lync 2013 is that the dial out numbers can now be controlled on a per-user basis with voice policies.

VDI

Lync Server 2010 supported a very limited number of workloads through a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) client and specifically excluded any kind of media sharing. The only way to support audio for the VDI user was through USB redirection pairing of a Lync Phone Edition client, so users had no ability to use headset or speakerphone audio devices. There was also no capability to share video with a thin client user.

Lync 2013 has introduced a VDI plugin that is installed on the thin client and pairs with the actual Lync 2013 application running on the remote desktop. The plugin allows the end user to leverage devices local to the thin client for both audio and video so the media stream continues to be peer-to-peer between clients and not run through the virtualized remote desktop. The end result is that the thin clients can now be attached to local or built-in devices for audio and video.