In my last post, Hosted Voice: Lync Better Than Most, there are three attributes (Proprietary, Integration,Value) of Lync that stand out above competing hosted voice services. The mindset of saving money isn't exactly happening unless customers view only CAPEX and completely ignore OPEX. The basic question customers fail to address is payback. How many months of paying for hosted does it take to buy your own solution? But there's a second question to ponder and that is if you do buy/lease your own solution, then how long will it last? This leads to the third question, what will it cost to maintain the solution to the degree that it makes sense?
Lync thinking is definitely different. Because licensing, acquisition and the TCO for Microsoft Exchange remains costly, SMBs may see an attraction to combine forces using voice and email on a hosted platform. For $25 per user per month, hosted Lync delivers voice and the UC components of Lync, and another $10 per user per month tacks on hosted Exchange mail service that gives you that glowing presence of other Lync users hosted by the same company. There are other options and these prices are from one Lync hosted solution provider.
The hosted Lync provider agreed to let me test their service and since I already have Google, Windows Live Messenger and our internal IP-PBX client Communications Assistant Pro on my virtual desktop, I decided to do a comparative review just to illustrate how the features are placed in each solution.
Here's what I think:
Presence--We in the voice world have done this for years. Only we call it DSS/BLF (Direct Station Selection/Busy Lamp Fields) and these are coded buttons on your physical phone. Presence from Microsoft’s Lync integrates into Microsoft applications, so all my users on hosted Lync with hosted Exchange will see the presence of one another while reading email messages in Outlook or by viewing their status on their desktop. Presence now includes virtually the entire company and you don't needs thousands of DSS/BLF buttons to accomplish this. This is my opportunity once again to state that every IP-PBX should ship UC clients for every phone--then, with this in mind, does everyone really need a multi-line phone? It can be argued a few ways and when it gets down to the customer level either in the SMB or large enterprise space, I think the key concerns are and should remain focused on:
* Are users willing to change or will changes get in the way of users accomplishing their work?
* What is the best method of standardizing for your company?
* If the PC or network fails, can users still perform call handling?
The other thing about presence is it remains un-federated across the many platforms used by consumers and businesses.
Here's what I learned:
Most IT concerns do justice to onboard help. Panasonic and many other manufacturers do not and have not for years. While it may not seem like a big deal to some folks, it is for many others. Online help reduces service calls and lag times to getting users doing whatever it is they want to do. The availability of online help is just as crucial as the material and this is an area where everyone needs improvement. As the software changes and is updated, patched or upgraded, so should online help materials.
Hosted Lync provided me with the answers I needed. But here's what’s cool. When I first established my Microsoft Lync client, a tutorial popped up and led me through some customization and familiarity of Lync. Most telephony systems have a one time tutorial on voice mail when a user first accesses the mailbox. Lync goes beyond voice mail tutorials. Why is this important? This reduces time, speeds up implementation and reduces support calls. I think every IP-PBX manufacturer needs to consider adding a similar tool. IF they would ship UC with the phones then they could easily add the tool to the UC client residing on the customer desktop.
Just in case I'm not being emphatic enough--I am suggesting that one license include phone and UC, period. Within that client software, include onboard help and resources to videos; Microsoft has done well, so follow their lead.
The feature "Report a Call" is for reporting malicious calls. While I don't know how the hosted Lync provider will handle the report, I think this is a key area of concern for users of hosted voice, VoIP and SIP trunks to take note of. For the past couple of weeks we've been getting hang-up calls from 222-555-7777. Then, I answered a call from this number (Spoof) and the faster talker proceeded to tell me about my Microsoft licenses and I should do something on my desktop. I interrupted him and said, "We don’t have computers."
Spoofing isn't going away and I do believe it will get worse. Industry-wide I think a reporting mechanism is something that should become a standard, and again I think Microsoft has shown leadership in improving telephony by providing a useful feature that should be adopted industry wide.
How I tested Lync first was using a Mac Lync client. It ran for three days and ceased to run again. I attempted a reinstall after completely removing all the files and key chains and upgrading to a recent release (10 days old) but was unable to restore Lync on my Mac desktop.
The few calls I made were very good audio quality, 8 on a scale of 10 simply because I believe the person I spoke with was on DSL using his Lync. Next I installed Lync client on my virtual Microsoft XP running on my Mac. The audio was definitely not as good and I made manual audio adjustments. Echo was present until I overrode the settings and turned down the internal microphone.
Here's what I observed:
While running Lync, I opened Windows Task Manager on my desktop. Under the Peformance tab, CPU usage spiked to 79% when initiating calls and then ranged from 25-54% until I put calls on hold (music on hold), then CPU usage immediately spiked to 100% and then dropped to a range of 2-8%. If other apps were running or I started typing this post, the numbers increased substantially.
I did not test any phones with hosted Lync, but let this serve as a gentle reminder to those considering using no phones, that you will want processing power and RAM.
Still, I stand by what I wrote previously: Hosted Lync is better than most hosted voice services. I've interviewed some interesting folks running a hosted voice solution that is tool heavy and they demand performance from their carriers and seemingly get it since they are retaining key accounts.
This is one area of disappointment that I expected something in the way of metrics/monitoring/diagnostics from hosted Lync and the tools just aren't there. Whatever the solution, it will need tools, and the more dependency we place on IP, the better equipped we’d better become, and I just don't see this happening.
