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.
Center Migration Status
Most of the centers have been migrated successfully to Lync. This summer we migrated Davis, West Sacramento, El Dorado and Ethan Way. We successfully opened the Elk Grove Center with Lync. We will migrate Natomas on October 30th and Public Safety Center on November 7th. Once Facilities migrates to Lync, all Los Rios locations will be running Lync.
October Lync Voice Migration
We currently expect to convert roughly 2,800 users to Lync over the life of the project. To date we project we have migrated 650 or 23% of the Los Rios population. By the first of the year we project we will have 30% converted to Lync. We have made significant progress with the much appreciated help of our college IT and operations staff.
ARC: Converted 75 users including the bookstore, the Presidents Office. ARC expects to continue rolling 10-15 users every other day. ARC is projecting they will have roughly 200 users converted in academic areas by December including Counseling, Enrollment Services, McClellan and Natomas.
CRC: Converted roughly 50 users at Winn Center and Elk Grove. CRC will begin the project in late spring 2014
FLC: Has converted EDC and the IT staff. We are looking to convert a mixture of 85 academic and administrative staff and the bookstore by January.
SCC: Converted 175 users in October to Lync in various academic departments and the bookstore. SCC expects to begin a new wave of users in February and then again in summer 2014.
College Training Staff
With the significant momentum at ARC and SCC towards their Lync implementation, college staffs have been handling the Lync training to much success. We applaud all the materials produced in collaboration with the DO to meet their specific campus needs, as well as the investment the colleges have made to help their college Lync implementation be such a success.
Lync Instant Messaging (IM) Status
Lync IM continues to be a very successful communication tool in many areas. If you are in the Lync client and type an individual’s name and can locate them, they are Lync enabled. We suggest you reach out to one new contact a day via IM!
Police: All police locations are Lync enabled and can be contacted via IM
Bookstore: All locations except CRC are Lync enabled and can be contacted via IM
ARC: All Lync voice enabled users can be contacted via IM
CRC: All Lync voice enabled users can be contacted via IM
DO: All users are Lync enabled and can be contacted via IM
FLC: All users are Lync enabled and can be contacted via IM
SCC: All Lync voice enabled users can be contacted via IM
Lync User Group
In order to ensure the Lync Unified Messaging (voice mail), Instant Messaging (IM) and Voice services and the upcoming video conferencing and fax services meet and exceed our users expectations we have formed a Lync User Group. The Lync User group is comprised of end users who can best inform how the Lync system can meet their needs. There is no minimum or maximum a college can send. Each member is responsible for representing their area.
Firewall Implementation
Each year DO-IT purchases new servers for use in the VMWare environment. This year, the servers refreshed in the VMWare environment will be deployed to center sites as primary firewalls and to some colleges as secondary firewalls. By January, each Los Rios location will have a fully functioning firewall that will enhance the reliability and support of local services in the event there is an internet (fiber) disruption of service. Natomas, Public Safety and Facilities Management will be receiving new firewalls by the first of the year.
Outside the ability to support reliability of local services such as access to file shares, printing and Lync phone survivability, these new firewalls will provide the infrastructure to support the PCI network for credit processing, Facilities Control network management and public wireless. The introduction of the firewalls is a significant improvement in overall services and reliability offered by DO-IT and a direct result of the Lync project.
Switch Replacement
For the deployment of Lync, we have purchased close to 25 switches for all campus locations where we could not leverage existing switches. In addition to considerable benefit to the Lync project to have PoE switches, each college is able to repurpose some current switches to locations with aged, out of support switches. This will lead to considerable improvement in stability of the network as well as a good foundation for the wireless network as well.
UPS Replacement
We have been replacing aged, 11 year old UPS’s or providing new UPS’s in many locations. Primarily we have deployed new UPS’s to the core infrastructure at CRC, EDC and SCC where the campus will now have at least an hour of uptime as opposed to 15 minutes prior to the Lync project. We experienced outages this summer at each location that had these UPS’s been deployed, uptime would have been much improved. The UPS replacement as part of the Lync project is providing significant improvement to the overall reliability of our infrastructure.
Code Blue and Alarm Lync Migration
As part of the migration from the NEC PBX system, and to support significant improvement to the overall reliability of the infrastructure, we will be moving the code blue and alarm lines to AT&T or Frontier. By having these key security lines individually supported by direct phone lines called 1mb or measured business lines similar to a phone line to your house, these key systems will operate independent of any Los Rios infrastructure issues. The analog lines will be deployed through the coming months with the migration anticipated by the end of December.
T1 Reclamation / SIP Trunking
As a reminder, we are moving through a process to reclaim T1 lines that should have been removed with the migration of campus services to fiber. Once we complete this project, we will begin to move to SIP trunking lines for the redundancy of the voice network. T1’s are a very costly and older technology to SIP trunking. SIP trunking will allow us to leverage our fiber network investment as well.