Legacy Phone Presence and Click-to-Call

A more limited set of features can be deployed to users that gives the “click-to-call,” or Remote Call Control functionality. This allows the end users to click a user within their Lync contact list and have that user’s number dialed from their legacy PBX phone. Additionally, presence messages are integrated so that when a user places a call from the legacy phone, the user’s presence in Lync automatically updates to “In a Call.”

This is one of the most basic integration options; it really does not provide a significant amount of flexibility or features to the end user. In this state call forwarding settings, delegation of calls, and advanced call control features are not available. The click-to-call features also don’t work well for remote users because even if they try to initiate a call, it would be placed from a desk phone inside the office, attached to the local PBX.

This is really a legacy feature set that has limped along with minimal updates and attention from Microsoft since the days of Live Communications Server 2005. The inclusion of the feature again is geared toward supporting existing customers that heavily invested in this approach earlier and have not completed a migration to Enterprise Voice yet. New deployments should not consider this approach.