VCS and Office 365 Lync integration?

[christhibault]

We recently moved to Office 365 and that include Lync capabilities for desk to desk video calling (as well as IM) but we don't have an on-premise Lync server to do any configurations required. Does anyone out there have any experience with integrating these two products?

My assumption is that this is still sort of possible, but we won't be able to configure any VCS endpoint to Lync user calling. Is it possible to still have Lync users to call an VCS endpoint (which is what I really want to do anyhow)?

My initial tests have come up negative doing the best I can with the deployment guide, but I'm also thinking that I might need to change my domain for my VCS endpoints to a subdomain (like @vcs.mydomain.com), as right now they are both using the same top level domain name and I'm afraid that the two systems aren't "finding" each other because their searches are limited to their respective systems.

Any thoughts or assistance is greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Chris

[awinter2]

Hi Chris,

I'm assuming you don't have any control whatsoever over the server side of your Office 365 Lync environment?

In that case, I can't see how this will integrate with the VCS, since with a standard VCS <> Lync integration, you need to configure your Directors/FEPs to trust the VCS (and optionally create static routes from OCS/Lync towards VCS), so that the VCS B2BUA can register FindMe accounts into the Lync environment.

- Andreas

[christhibault]

Andreas,

Thanks for the response. I do agree with you partially. I can somewhat setup trusts with external domains for Lync to Lync federation, but it's not quite the same... definitely can't run Powershell scripts against it.

I generally agree that I don't think that VCS will be able to call Lync because I can't configure Lync to trust VCS. Any presence or other feature sets gained by full integration will not be there. I can accept that.

But I should be able to configure VCS to accept Lync users so that I should be able to call my C40 codec (or any of my other codecs or MCU Bridge) via SIP from my desktop Lync client (similar to Movi, just using Lync as the client). I just think the fact that my VCS is running SIP on "mydomain.com" and Lync is also running SIP on "mydomain.com" is preventing the two apps from talking to each other...

So, a call from my Lync client looks at Office 365 for it's list of valid SIP addresses within "mydomain.com" and says, "I don't see that address in my list" and fails to connect. And vice versa too. While I have put the neighbor zones in the VCS config and configured an appropriate dial plan, the system never really gets that far because when it looks at an address like "LyncUser@mydomain.com" the Dial Plan says, "Oh, you must be a Tandberg Endpoint, but I don't see you in my list" and drops the call... at least that's what I'm seeing in the test searches for an alias and generally in the logs too.

I think if I change one, likely the VCS at this point, to leverage a subdomain like "vcs.mydomain.com" for all of it's registrations, I should be able to tell Lync that if it is attempting to reach a "vcs.mydomain.com" URI to look at VCS instead of trying to look at its internal database of users... at least that's my theory.

Just before I go revamping my entire video conferencing infrastructure to change suffix, including Movi users, I'd like someone to say, "Yeah, I've done that with my Lync/VCS integration and you're plan makes sense."

Thanks,

Chris

[Alok Jaiswal]

Hi Chris,

In some scenario's customer do use different domains for Lync and VCS video domain.

In that you need to setup SIP static routes on Lync side and say that when the search is coming go to this VCS. But i am still not sure how the trust would work in your scenario.

Please also keep the note of port numbers when you setup the static route.

Thanks

Alok

[awinter2 · Accepted solution]

Chris,

you cannot configure Lync to federate towards a VCS environment in the same way you can federate towards other domains running Lync, this is not how the integration works.

The role of the VCS in an integration with OCS/Lync is to translate between Microsoft SIP and standards-based SIP, which is the reason why one or more VCS Control devices need to communicate directly with a Director or Front End Processor. You can't communicate directly with a VCS trough an OCS/Lync Edge server.

I'm not familiar with Office 365 and what control this service gives you over your server infrastructure (if any), but if you take a look at the OCS/Lync deployment guide and the configuration steps you need to make on the OCS/Lync servers in order for them to trust the VCS and optionally to set up static routes, I don't believe that you will be able to perform these steps using Office 365 (Please correct me if I'm wrong).

- Andreas

[christhibault]

Thanks Alok and Andreas,

You're correct that I cannot setup static routes on my Office 365 environment for Lync to point at VCS. Well, I had to ask...

Thanks,

Chris