Take 2: Is Your WLAN Ready for Unified Communications and Collaboration?

In the previous blog, we covered details about Cisco AVC enhancements with AireOS 7.6 that allow you to classify various collaboration applications such as Cisco Jabber , Cisco WebEx®, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Lync, and Microsoft Skype. Many customers have deployed voice-over-WLAN in mission-critical environments. The goal in this blog is to walk you through the collaboration specific enhancements implemented since then, that enable customers to get a great experience when supporting Microsoft Lync over Cisco WLAN.

The above picture shows the timeline for various AVC, policy and Lync enhancements. The crucial updates since AireOS 7.6 are:

Nov 2013: Cisco WLAN achieves Microsoft Lync Certification for 802.11n and white paper with best practices with Cisco WLAN and Microsoft Lync.

Aug 2014: With AireOS 8.0, Cisco WLC allows you to configure per user-group, per device-model policies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKBrWYx4IMM

In Progress: 802.11ac certification for AireOS & IOS

H1 CY15: Cisco to introduce Microsoft Lync SDN interoperability with the upcoming AireOS release. This software update on the Wireless LAN Controller will allow you to view statistics about Lync call quality adjacent to relevant WLAN Statistics.

This capability allows you to troubleshoot Lync issues on the Wireless LAN Controller to identify if poor MOS scores are due to one of these issues:

Wireless coverage holes

Non-Wi-Fi interference

Over-loaded Wi-Fi channel or over-loaded Access Point

Client-side issues

If you have a Cisco Prime Infrastructure in your network, you can use the robust capabilities of this network management tool to understand network topology and isolate if the issues are over the WAN, LAN or WLAN.

I am sold. Can I get a beta code for the same?

Within the next few weeks, you can get access to the beta code to trial this functionality. Please reach out to your Cisco account team or partners and add your name to the interest list.

Details:

The best practices to enable optimal collaboration experience can be found at the following locations:

High density deployment as well as the number of SSIDs.

High Availability best practices

Lync Best Practices from Microsoft