CU 2 Update

This morning CU2 for Lync 2013 (or “Lync 2013 July 2013 Update” is probably the official title) was released. There is no official word of any major new features beyond the usual “stability fixes”. You can see the full KB article here, the interesting sub notes are:

  • Core Components
    • 2846479 User in a DG cannot join a chat room in a Lync Server 2013 environment
    • 2846484 An unhanded exception occurs on a Lync Server 2013 Persistent Chat SDK-based application
    • 2846485 Long delay when you create many conferences at the same time in a Lync Server 2013 environment
  • Conferencing Server
    • reliability fixes
  • Web components
    • 2846478 Display names of federated contacts do not appear in a Lync Server 2013 environment
    • 2846479 User in a DG cannot join a chat room in a Lync Server 2013 environment
    • 2853996 Internet Explorer users cannot join a Lync Server 2013 meeting
    • 2854647 You cannot sign in to a dial-in conferencing webpage in Google Chrome browser by using IWA in Lync Server 2013
  • Front End
    • reliability fixes
  • Web Conf
    • reliability fixes
  • Mediation
    • reliability fixes
  • UCMAPI
    • reliability fixes
  • Call Parking
    • reliability fixes
  • Persistent Chat
    • 2846479 User in a DG cannot join a chat room in a Lync Server 2013 environment
    • 2848328 Persistent Chat or Persistent Chat Compliance services fail to start and log EVENT 53505 if you uninstall the Lync Server 2013 (July 2013) Cumulative Updates
  •  UCMAPI Workflow
    • 2846489 Lync Server 2013 RGS incorrectly redirects a call to the queue overflow call action
  • Admin Tools
    • reliability fixes

For details about how to install make sure you read the KB article & remember to update your databases too!

Web client Q&A

As you can see from that list there aren’t references to any new features or functionality, however after installing the updates and joining via a web client I noticed a new button had appeared in the “Present” window for “Q&A” sessions. This is interesting as back at the Lync conference this year MS had mentioned that they were looking to introduce more structured meeting features into Lync to bring back some of thea features that used to make LiveMeeting great for holding very large meetings.

1

If you click on the button you get a notification that IM has been disabled for the meeting & a new content pane is added in the “stage” area that has a box for typing your questions into

2

After you have typed your question it will move up to the main part of the window where you can see two “sections” to filter questions to just find “unanswered” or “all”. If a question hasn’t had an answer supplied there is a blue link that lets you type a reply

3

When you are done with the Q&A you can close it and the client will display an information message at the bottom

4

  Before closing the Q&A session there is a button that lets you save the content out if you wanted. This pops up a window with a trascript of the text for you to copy/paste somewhere else to save it.

5

Current client

The downside is that the current Lync client can’t display any of the Q&A functionality so from the users perspective they don’t know that anything is happening in the meeting. I assume this is a temporary thing and that when the correspondiong client update is released it will contain the functionality to enable Q&A. The full client also gets not notification that IM has been disabled so they can merrily type messages into the meeting that the web client will ignore and not display

6

Summary

It’s good to see MS pushing more features into CUs and not just sticking with bug fixes, I guess when the matching client CU is released we might get some more information or details about how this works & if there are any acompanying policies or proceedures to control it’s use in a deployment.