Good news for users of location information in Lync 2010

Yesterday we released Cumulative Update 1 (CU1)  for Lync 2010 and it includes very good news for users of location information in Lync 2010, especially for deployments outside of the United States.

Prior to CU1 location information loaded into the Location Information Service (LIS) in Lync Server 2010 had to be validated against the Master Street Address Guide (MSAG) in the US before the location information was automatically shown in Lync. The reason for this requirement is the relationship with the support for E-9-1-1 in the US, where the address information needs to very specific and validated before it can be used. The MSAG only contains addresses in the US and as such it was not possible to validate addresses outside of the US.

With CU1 Lync will automatically show non validated location information, if there is only one location returned from LIS based on the request the Lync client sent to LIS. This means that it now makes sense to load information for locations outside of the United States into LIS for automatic display in Lync 2010.