Using Lync in Office365 - Install issues

As part of Office365 Lync is a great communication tool for your business, we have set this up internally and I will share some of the issues that we experenced. On the whole it is a great product and I think it will help communication internally and reduce the time it takes to get things done, but the install did cause us some issues. The issues are:-

  1. The users used the instructions after they logged in to install Lync – don't do this, give them a link to the Lync install on a network share. The install would just not download for the users, it got corrupted, not sure if this was our proxy or something at Microsoft's end.
  2. Also give them the Office sign in assistant install on a network share – it annoys users that they seem to have finished the install and then they have to install something else – again this failed quite a few times for users. Link here to both installs -http://g.microsoftonline.com/0BL10EN/195
  3. When you add users they don't immediately appear in the list of contacts when searching for users. It seemed to take up to 12 hours for the contacts to appear. You can add the user using their full email address, but if like us you haven't used your own domain this is a bit tedious.
  4. If  you don't specify an exchange account for each of the users they don't get any conversation history.

 

Lets see how it goes, hopefully it will prove very worthwhile.