Hi

There is a company located in UK with 2 different locations in France and Italy. There is a site-2-site VPN between UK and the other locations. Active Directory is streched to the three other locations.

They have already Lync Server 2013 installed in UK. No they want to implement Lync at the other locations as well.

Requirements:
- All locations must be able to have their own sip trunk provider to make calls within their country
- Communication with Germany must work through the internal Lync connection
- The Lync configuration must be maintained in UK and then synchronized to the locations
- Every location must be able to maintain their own Hunt/Response groups

What would be the best solution? 
- A Lync infrastructure at the 2 locations
- SBS Server at the 2 Locations?

Regards
Peter

Hi

Germany have a specific law that states only approved contacts can see your presence. Lync calls this Enhanced Presence. This is a global setting to a lync pool. So unless the rest of the company accept this behaviour you will need a separate FE pool for German users.

In my opinion, you are better to deploy an SBA (depending on numbers). This will give you an SBC (local SIP connectivity) and a registrar for users in that office to register to. You would be able to centralize response groups from the UK in theory.

Ultimately, Lync deployment at each location would be the ideal situation for you, but depends on budget.

thanks

Hi Peter,

This is a classic case where you can use a Survival Branch Appliance (SBA).
an SBA is an additional "Branch" registrar that provides survivability and local breakout to small remote sites. You don't need to install any server for this.
This will provide the users in the remote location all the services they need even in the event of a WAN failure (limited functionality, but local breakout) or a local failure (failover to the primary site with limited functionality).

Management and configuration is handled at the global level using Topology Builder or Lync Control Panel.

If you configure the dial plans and voice policies correctly, all internal calls between sites will be treated as Lync to Lync calls.

See here for more information.

Mark said this, but I want to underscore it.

"Every location must be able to maintain their own Hunt/Response groups".  In the SBA/SBS scenario response groups would not be hosted on the SBA, but instead on a full Lync server instance.  Technically, this goal is met as they can maintain their own groups.  HOWEVER, if the connection to the full server in the UK was lost, those response groups would no longer function.  If that response group is tied to a main number for the branch, you'd have to scramble to fix it.  If that's an issue, the extra cost of a full Lync server license is warranted.

Thanks to all for your answers.

As I understand, in case of an outage of the FrontEnd at the branch office, there is no failover to the central Lync environment, like it works with an SBA/SBS, correct? But with SBA/SBS Hount/Response groups will not work if the connection to the central site is down.

The goal should be to have failover and the possibility to maintain own Hunt/Response groups in both cases, outage of the connection to the central site or outage of the branch office FrontEnd. What would be the configuration to provide that?

Regards
Peter

Hi

If you put a Front End at the branch office then you can configure pool pairing between it and another site. Using a Standard Edition users will auto fail over, but there are some admin steps you need to perform to move the full service over. Enterprise Edition (more expensive) but gives you a more automated failover experience

An SBA or SBS does not have Hunt Group / Response Group functionality. This is only available on full fat Front End Pools. So this will make your choice to be either SE or EE Frontend pools.

To migrate RGS you would have to do this manually by exporting the RGS config from one FE Pool and import to the backup pool.

You would need an SBC at each branch for local PSTN break out

thanks

Hi,

If you want have DR function for each branch office, you need to deploy poor pairing, for your case, according for the user number of the branch offices, you may deploy a Lync Server Standard Edition on each branch site, then perform pool pairing between these two Standard Editions.

Best Regards