Best Practices

By following a few best practices, you can optimize the Microsoft Communicator experience for your users. Little tricks to ensure that things work the first time and configure automatically simplifies the deployment of the Microsoft Communicator client.

• Whenever possible, use a certificate from a public CA to ensure that clients will automatically trust the CA and that the CRL will be readily available.

• If you plan to do video conferencing, spend a couple of bucks and get a nice webcam. Pan and tilt support is a great feature for keeping people well centered in the view.

• When doing large conferences with video presentation or application sharing, consider setting up the conference to use a PSTN dial-in for audio to conserve bandwidth for video.

• Always properly calibrate cameras and microphones to give users the best possible experience with the Microsoft Communicator client.

• Always be sure to configure the Lync client to use the microphone you want. It’s common for webcams to have a built-in microphone and Lync might default to this, even though the user is playing sound through the headset. This typically manifests itself in the person’s voice being faint. Or, in some cases, distorted because the user might have turned up the sensitivity all the way thinking the problem was with the headset microphone.

• Be sure to end your meetings when they are over. Otherwise, you needlessly tie up resources on the back-end servers.

• Although this is a good idea for any type of meeting, avoid having side conversations during a conference. Not only does it cause background noise that can distract others, you potentially take focus from the presenter if it is a video conference.

• Make sure you don’t have anything non-business-related on your screen if you are doing a full desktop share. The potential here for embarrassment is noticeable.

• If you are inviting meeting attendees from outside your company, set the meeting options to first place these guests into the waiting room so that you can verify their identity before allowing them into the meeting.

• Finish your meetings with the Remove everyone and end the meeting function from the People menu.

• Configure Microsoft Communicator to use Transport Layer Security (TLS). This provides encrypted communications from the client to the server. This prevents possible interception of communications by an attacker who can read an unencrypted transmission.

• Always scan files received in Communicator with an anti-virus program before opening them.

• Consider using Managed Preferences to block specific features or functions of the Communicator client.