Planning for Dial-in Audio Conferencing

Lync Online Plans 2 and 3 natively support online conferences that can be initiated and attended by any user with one of the Lync conferencing clients (including the full Lync Client and Lync Web App). However, dial-in conferencing, which enables attendees to dial into the audio portion of a Lync meeting, requires purchase of a dial-in audio conferencing service from an approved Microsoft partner. This service therefore requires some planning before it can be made available to Lync Online users.

Microsoft maintains a list of partners that are approved for providing dial-in audio conferencing, in the Lync section of the Office 365 Marketplace site, as shown in Figure 28.2. The first step in the planning process is therefore to visit the site, gather information on the available conferencing providers, and use it to evaluate and determine which service will best meet the conferencing needs of the organization.

Figure 28.2. Approved Lync Online conferencing providers.

After a dial-in conferencing provider has been selected and the service has been purchased, the organization is assigned a block of toll-free numbers and passcodes for use with the service. These toll-free numbers and passcodes need to then be assigned to the Lync Online users to enable this feature. If there are many users to be enabled for dial-in conferencing, it can be a significant administrative burden to manually configure these values for all of these users. Thankfully, Microsoft provides import/export functions into the Office 365 portal, and these can be used to quickly assign the dial-in conferencing values for the user accounts by direct editing of an XML file.

After the dial-in conferencing values have been configured for a Lync Online user, the phone numbers for dial-in along with passcodes automatically appear on new meeting invites, in much the same fashion as with dial-in conferencing configured for an on-premise Lync deployment.