Chapter 14. Administration of Microsoft Lync Server 2013

Administration of Lync Server 2013 is a welcome relief for those who ever spent time managing a Live Communications Server or Office Communications Server deployment. The older products were based on a Microsoft Management Console snap-in that was not intuitive and often required many clicks to perform simple tasks. This chapter covers some of the improvements found in Lync Server 2013, such as the Lync Server Control Panel and the Lync Server Management Shell.

The addition of the Lync Server Management Shell follows the precedent set by the Microsoft Exchange Server team, and the Lync team has taken another cue by including role-based access control (RBAC) in this release. The Lync RBAC differs slightly from Exchange RBAC and is compared in this chapter.

Also discussed is the new topology model in which all server planning and configuration are performed centrally. Building a topology using the Topology Builder and storing the configuration in the new Central Management Store (CMS) are explained in this chapter. The new scope-based policies are covered as well.

Common management tasks, such as draining servers or configuring Quality of Service settings, are detailed in this chapter. Finally, common troubleshooting steps are described with examples, and how to use the new Centralized Logging Service (CLS) is covered.