Mission Accomplished, Heading Home
After a day and a half in Washington, D.C., I’m on the plane heading home to St. Louis. I managed to complete my testing without too many issues, although I did run into a few.
My original plan had been to use my Surface Pro while I was there, but getting connected to the wireless network at the office proved fruitless. Our host institution will not let us connect any outside devices to their wired network, so wireless is the only option. Unfortunately they’re using WEP with a shared key. That’d be OK (aside from the security issues) except Windows 8 no longer supports those kinds of connections. I checked with the local network contact, and he said they’ll be making some network changes starting in August. In the meantime, I need to make sure any of our Windows 8 users bring a hotspot if they head to that office and want Internet access.
Speaking of hotspots, I always travel with my Sprint hotspot, so I had that with me as a backup. would have been better off with a couple of tin cans and string. We’ve been with Sprint a long time, and the unlimited plans for data are great. If you can’t actually get any consistent data service, however, being unlimited isn’t of much value. Guess it’s time to give Verizon a call.
Our group at that location has a couple laptops that we provided, so I was able to use those (still on Windows 7) to do my testing. That had to wait, however, until I installed the 91 pending Windows Updates. Need to check those software distributions settings I guess.
Once I had systems up-to-date and working wireless connections, I was able to run through all my test scenarios and even made sure the RoundTable camera was working with everything. They had indicated that it hadn’t been working for the last month, but it worked flawlessly for me.
So now I’m finally ready to finish moving our users from OCS to Lync. I’m so psyched to finally be able to get rid of those old servers and get Communicator and Live Meeting off the desktops and replaced with the Lync client. Is that a light at the end of the tunnel I see? Or is it just a different train heading my way? Stay tuned…