Lync Adoption and Training Kit

This is a cool set of resources to help roll out Lync in your enterprise.These resources, consist of guidance, examples, templates, and user education and training resources, and are designed to help organizations successfully roll out Lync. They are also very useful as a reference after you have started or completed your rollout. Inevitably you will want to make changes and where better to get some help..

You can see them here at http://lync.microsoft.com/Adoption-and-Training-Kit/rollout-and-adoption/Pages/Resources/Intro-to-Resources.aspx

Lync On Premise vs. Lync Online

I get asked fairly often about the differences between the on premise version of Lync and the Lync online offering. I also get asked whether its worth using the online version of Lync.  Having been on the beta for a while i would recommend Office 365 as its really useful to be able to get to email, SharePoint and Lync. The whole experience does rely on your link to the internet though but by and large I could not fault the service.

I hadn't got around as yet to doing a comparative analysis of the differences, just as well as I found a really good one here. There is a really neat table that summarizes the differences well, making the answer to  Which offering should I use based on features” a really easy answer.

Lync 2010 Using UCMA in a Preconfigured Lab

I was looking for something else but found this environment. The MSDN guys have made some online labs available so that you can do some programming experimentation using the UCMA.

Very Cool!! I ran and I mean ran through one of the labs and one it very good but you will need to have a look yourself and make your own minds up!

You can find it here:  http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/gg288977

UC in a Box

This is something I first heard about a couple of years ago but had forgotten about it. What it is is the Unified Communications Experience “in a box”, provided by BoxedUC. Essentially a rack mount solution that contains everything you need to run a Lync deployment, but it gets better than that… You can add Exchange 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 and have the whole gambit at your finger tips.

In their words

boxedUc is an "Appliance as a Service" which virtualizes in a single server the whole Unified Communication suite of Microsoft.

Have a look here or the full url is http://www.boxeduc.com/

System Centre 2012 Deep Dive

I was sent this website via the monthly TechNet Flash news letter. its worth checking out if you are interested in System Centre. You can find it http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/hh286395