Lync Migrations Depend On Infrastructure

This week, as I walked the halls of the Enterprise Connect conference in Orlando, Fla., I heard executive after executive talk about migration. The genesis of their discussions was the idea of migrating from PSTN (the Public Switched Telephone Network) to VoIP, or from VoIP to UC (Unified Communications). In addition, everyone (and I'm not really exaggerating, here) was talking about the migration from desktop units to mobile devices. The challenge wasn't finding someone who was helping their organization migrate -- it was finding someone who was standing still.

Just to make things a little more interesting, two Microsoft products were at the center of many discussions -- and many questions about just how to migrate both software and infrastructure to take best advantage of their capabilities. The first of these products is Microsoft Lync, the UC product that brings all sorts of communication, including audio, video, text messaging and desktop sharing, together in one rather complex package. Perhaps because it integrates so well with Windows Server and the rest of the Microsoft back-end suite, Lync has rapidly become the default UC package for many companies looking to make the leap in that direction.

The first thing to consider is the degree of role-based permission fine-tuning that arrives as part of Windows Server 2012's AD implementation -- and the ease with which those permissions can be managed through WMC (Windows Management Console). The goal of a single enterprise identity, federated across all the major communications mediums at use in the modern enterprise, is largely realized in the Lync/Windows Server 2012 pairing. It's in the infrastructure, though, that things get truly exciting.

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