Lync Server 2010 Audio Test Service

An exciting new feature in Microsoft Lync Server 2010 is the Audio Test Service.  This built-in tool allows you to place a test call prior to making a real call, to ensure there aren’t any severe network or other issues that might affect the quality of your call.

Easy to Use

There are tools available for OCS 2007 R2, such as the Deployment Validation Tool and the VoIP Test Set, that can also help to monitor and evaluate call quality.  But these tools are unfortunately hard to deploy and manage, and so their usefulness has been diminished.

But now you can place a test call directly from the Phone tab in Lync 2010, simply by clicking on Check…

This places a call into the Audio Test Service in Lync Server 2010…

You are prompted to speak a few words, and then what you said is played back to you as it was heard by the Audio Test Service.

Call with Confidence

Laptop chugging away?  Unclear how good your wireless connection really is at the hotel?  This tool can help you ensure the best possible call quality before you make that all-important customer, or otherwise, call!

Clickable Phone Numbers

Now that we have the ability to click-to-call with Office Communicator, it’s natural that we come to expect to be able to click phone numbers wherever we see them!

Just like web links and email links in the past, what we really need is a ubiquitous way to identify phone numbers and make them clickable…

tel: to the Rescue

In Windows, where http: makes a web link clickable, and mailto: makes an email address clickable, tel: makes a phone number clickable.

So looking at my screenshot below, the first number is just text, the second number has “tel:” in front of it so is now clickable, and the third has the visible text different from the hyperlink value – so the user doesn’t see the “tel”.

The conversation window is what came up when I clicked on the link.  It gives you the second chance to actually dial, because as I’ve shown, the visible text can be different from the actual hyperlink text.  The number could show 905… but really be 900!

Applications can render their phone numbers this way, so that the consuming application, in this case Outlook on Windows, can display the number as clickable.

Restricting called numbers in OCS Enterprise Voice

When configuring a route for Enterprise Voice, you want to match long distance numbers but you do not want to match high-risk numbers, such as 900 and 976.

How do you do that in a regular expression?

It looks like this...

^(\+411)|(\+1(?!(900|976|242|246|264|268|284|340|345|441|473|649|664|758|767|784|809|876|868|869|939))(\d{10}))$

This expression is allowing +411 or +1 XXX YYY ZZZZ, but not any number where XXX is 900, or 976, or 242 ... you get the idea. 

Incidentally, the XXX set above is a comprehensive list you can use in your dial plans as a best practice.

So the basic syntax for "except" is ?!().  Anything in the brackets will be excluded in the match processing.