Microsoft Lync with Enterprise Voice provides a full standalone VoIP solution that can replace the traditional PBX or enhance it. However, voice configuration in Lync is neither simple nor exactly intuitive as several elements such as Dial Plans, PSTN usages, Voice Policies, and Routes are involved. The availability of public documentation on the subject is large, however, often resulting in a challenging and confusing experience for the less experienced user.
Specifically to dial plans, routes, and trunk translation rules, you will also need good knowledge of Regular Expressions (RegEx). This is the adopted methodology to match specific strings of characters, with the purpose of performing E.164 phone number normalization/manipulation or determining the call route based on the called number (references to RegEx are provided in the See also section).
E.164 is an international numbering standard for public telephone systems in which each number must contain a country code, a national access code, and a subscriber number, therefore resulting in a unique and unambiguous identification worldwide. You might regard E.164 as the rough equivalent of a fully qualified domain name for DNS. An example of E.164 number is +44201234567 (44 is the country code for United Kingdom, 20 is the area code for London, and 1234567 is the subscriber number).
The
Lync Dialing Rule Optimizer is a web-based tool by Lync MVP, Ken Lasko (@kenlasko
). It is simple and intuitive to use, and is designed to take care of most typical Enterprise Voice setups. Despite the word "optimizer" in the name, the tool is actually capable of creating a fully-functional voice configuration from scratch.
The tool is available at http://www.lyncoptimizer.com/. You will need to sign in through a Microsoft Live account; this will allow you to retrieve your usage history, as shown in the following screenshot:
Let's walk through the main parameters you will need to specify, with a practical example. For this purpose, we will assume you want to configure a direct SIP trunk for an office based in New York City, and you got the following continuous numbering range assigned from your PSTN carrier:
The following are the main parameters we will use:
NewYork
.The following screenshot shows the parameters in the Lync Dialing Rule Optimizer:
The following screenshot allows us to take a closer look at the form shown in the preceding screenshot:
All other parameters should be pretty self-explanatory, so change them as appropriate; now, click on Generate rules. The output will be a PowerShell script that you will need to download and copy on your Lync deployment to import the configuration. In order to run the script, open Lync PowerShell, browse to the folder where the script was saved, and execute it by typing its name.
Once done, you can enable your users for Enterprise Voice and assign the appropriate voice policy that the optimizer just created.
The author of the tool has provided detailed and comprehensive instructions on how to use the tool, with more examples and advanced usage at http://ucken.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/complete-guide-to-lync-optimizer.html.