Staged Deployment of Lync 2010

In some cases you may want to reduce the workload on servers or stage deployment of all the features of Lync until …. (the servers can support the load, the network upgrade is complete, etc). When you did this in OCS 2007 R2 you had to enable GPOs to stage deployment. In Lync most client policies are enabled as in-band from the Lync Control Panel or from Powershell. So what does the experience look like for the user? Do they see that they could do that feature but for some reason the IT team has turned it off? No. They don’t see it.

Looking at a user configuration in the Lync Server 2010 Control Panel I can apply policies to that user. In my case I decided that in telephony audio and video are disabled as shown below.

After I commit this change for the user and log that user out. This is what they see in the UI. The option for calls is grayed out.

If I decided to have a conversation with Holly I can see that Audio calls of any kind have been disabled as well as video calls. In my case I still wanted to enabled conferencing capabilities but this could also be removed to have just IM enabled.

This gives you lots of flexibility in how you deploy. Obviously the greatest value is when all modalities are available but proper planning and deployment are always necessary. Take care.