Cisco VCS Microsoft Office 365 interop

[mark.evans]

As I understand this in order to connect Cisco Telepresence endpoints to the MS Lync client a VCS gateway is required.

This is supported for the on premises version of MS Lync. However I cannot find anything that details support or a road map

of the support of MS Lync within MS Office 365.

Does anyone have a road map or information on when support for Lync MS Office 365 may be forthcoming?

Thanks

Mark

[Chris Swinney]

IMHO, this is at best an overpriced and broken solution in any case. Licensing is ridiculous and does not provide for full Lync interoperability. There are better solutions out there at this point in time, such as PEXIP and Acano.

Cheers

Chris

[Wayne DeNardi]

Or replace Lync with Cisco Jabber ;)

Wayne
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[Chris Swinney]

Yes, true, Jabber is nice (at least Jabber Video for Telepresence , I have little experience of Jabber for CUCM, and Jabber free is a bit hit and miss - which reminds me, note to Cisco, re-think product naming, but I digress.....).

Problem is, every man and his dog either now has Lync, or is implementing Lync, or is thinking about implementing Lync. It the interoperability between Lync and a Cisco environment where everything falls down.

[Wayne DeNardi]

And that's what happens with large companies (Microsoft) decide not to use the same standards as everyone else in their products (Lync, Skype) or bastardise the signalling so it's no longer standards compliant.  Hence the need for all of these other, and often expensive, components to link it all together.  Fingers crossed, one day they'll change things to use the more open standards that all vendors can all communicate with.

Wayne
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[Chris Swinney]

Ah, but is SIP a "standard"? There are multiple RFCs outlining the protocol, but it isn't a standard per se, not in the way that H.323 is a "standard".

Yes, I'm splitting hairs, however, I agree with you and when companies bastardise SIP for their own nefarious purposes, they should at the very minimum provide an open interoperable gateway so that they can communicate will "normal" SIP based product that do comply to the RFCs. An example of a way that it could be done is through the StarLeaf (ex Codian) products. They use their own propitiatory SIP stack, yet their backend allows for full interoperability with H.323 , 'normal' SIP, and Lync - I must admit that I do like what they offer. The only ironic thing is that they don't negotiate AAC audio when hooked up to the Codian MCUs due to there product not being "white-listed"!. As Cisco now own Codian, we did forward a request to Cisco to add the StartLeaf product to the whitelist for these MCUs - we will have to see what happens....

Nevertheless, the last I read about this was that MS were looking to bring such a development to Lync, probably in 2015. I can't remember where I read it, but I think it may have come out of the last Lync Conference. My guess is that it will be rolled into a part of the next evolution of the product such as Lync 2015/16?

[Wayne DeNardi]

I agree with all the above... and also rumoured is a merging or compatibility between Microsoft Lync and Skype.

That'll make a lot of people here happy when they can make a call to an external party who is using Skype - that's probably the number 1 requested feature in the organisations I support.

Then, fingers crossed, all these companies and software products will all talk nicely with SIP endpoints, without all the additonal propietry signallying or magic conversion boxes, and we'll be able to use our proper VC kit to call to any of these external systems - one step closer to making video a replacement for voice communication.

But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it to happen.

[Jens Didriksen]

This Wainehouse presentation might be of interest:

Microsoft vs Cisco Unified Communications

/jens

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[Wayne DeNardi]

Thanks Jens,

That was an interesting watch.

In a nutshell - they (Microsoft and Cisco) both do different things well, but can't do everything properly, but they're all working towards making their stuff interoperable with each others and we'll just have to wait and see what they come up with in the future.

Wayne
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[outlooker]

The best way to connect SIP/H.323 to Lync is through Radvision scopia UCGW.

[mark.evans]

Hi All,

thanks for your contributions thus far I am aware of the limitations and alternative solutions.

The original question still remains outstanding:

Does anyone have a road map or information on when support for Lync MS Office 365 may be forthcoming?

thanks

Mark

[Jens Didriksen]

You'll be much better off asking your Cisco rep for a NDA presentation as nobody from Cisco will comment on anything relating to roadmaps etc in a public forum.

/jens

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