Lync Implementation Update – 12/10/13

Overview

The purpose of this document is to provide an update of the Lync project.     Sponsors, Project Leads, User Group members and related parties will receive a copy.     We appreciate all the hard work and cooperation of everyone who has come into contact with Lync.

College Lync Conversion Time Lines

Significant progress has been made on the Lync project.   As we have been successful in making our way through the initial phases of the project deployment, college teams have hit their stride.   DO and college teams have projected Lync project end dates.  Each college is using a slightly different methodology; however, each methodology is working well for their college.

College College Team Timeline
ARC Linda Jurgens

Jeff Bucher

Several groups a month through September 2014
FLC Colleen Johnson

Jeff Lewis

Several groups a month through May 2014
SCC Karen Chewning

Andy Divanyan

Phases in February, July and October 2014
CRC Jon Cornelison Planning discussions to begin in Spring 2014

 

All Locations Have Lync Infrastructure Deployed (except one)

All centers, colleges and site locations throughout Los Rios have Lync deployed except for FM.    Every location except for a main college campus has all users converted to Lync.

The infrastructure deployed was a significant technical challenge addressed by Mark Williams and Vitaliy Taryanik over the last 6 months.    Lync has been configured successfully with inbound and outbound traffic, failover to alternate locations and call routing.   This allows the remainder of the project to concentrate solely on user migration.

Status of User Migration

18 months ago we migrated all users to Unified Messaging.   That migration established we had 2,145 college users of voice services.   As we continue to migrate individuals through Lync, we have the ‘IM’ or Instant Messaging Service and the Lync Voice Service.    We are gauging success of the Lync User Migration as a percentage of the UM user base.

At present 39% of all users are now running IM and 25% are running Voice Services.   Congrats to all involved!

 

UM

IM

% IM Lync % Lync
ARC 864 324 37% 212 24%
CRC 361 62 17% 58 16%
FLC 263 256 97% 83 32%
SCC 657 199 30% 183 28%
Total 2145 841 39% 536 25%

Code Blue and Alarm Lync Migration

We had originally targeted the end of December to complete the Code Blue and Alarm migration out of the PBX.  However, Joe Kramer, Kathie McCreery and a contractor Mike Hopper have been working at each location to find, locate and document unused analog lines (called measured business lines or mb’s).    The survey work has identified significant project and college savings through the repurpose of unused lines.   As well, we are improving our documentation considerably in the process.

Each site location and college campus has a location in their mdf that terminates all AT&T or Frontier phone lines.   As we complete the survey for each location we are placing documentation within the mdf that can be used by college IT staff, DO Technical Services staff and FM staff to understand all lines, their use and how they connect to the site infrastructure.    And additionally, this information will be used to reconcile to the phone bill.

Lync User Group

In November we held an initial Lync User group meeting.  It was well attended with good feedback provided to the Lync team.  We will meet again in February to discuss online conferencing sessions and faxing.  Both options are enhancements the Lync team would like to understand and provide for the continued use of these features in the Lync system.

Firewall Implementation

Mike Muzinich has completed the firewall deployment to each site location throughout Los Rios.   Firewalls will provide considerable stability and security to all network activity in and out of a location.

Switch Replacement

Tim Smith has worked with ARC, FLC and SCC to determine all switch needs for the Lync project.   In the first four months of 2014 collectively all three colleges will be deploying 61 telecommunication closets with new switch equipment to support Lync.   All three colleges used this opportunity to review their current infrastructure and will be purchasing additional switch capacity.

The new Lync required switches have in some cases replaced existing switches that are being moved to new locations across campus to improve the age and stability of the network.

UPS Replacement

As part of the Lync project, as we evaluate new switch needs we are also evaluating new UPS needs.   We have found a few times over the last few months that location outages were mitigated by UPS’s that were able to keep equipment running during the outage.   In the past, with our older UPS’s we were not able to do so.   The Lync project has provided equipment that has supported considerable, improved outage uptime.