Hello everyone, time for another post. A post that won’t be showing you how to do something technical but hopefully something that, if nothing else, can start a discussion. Don’t worry, more technical posts will follow.

I have started getting quite some questions about Lync mobility, both in my daily work and through other means such as this blog. There seem to be a lot of Lync deployments that haven’t deployed mobility. It seems that security departments are reluctant to allow it.

If you are or have been in this situation you probably recognize one or more of these arguments:
– We can’t allow storing of domain passwords on mobile devices.
– Our policy requires the use of two-factor authentication for external access.
– We don’t want to expose infrastructure if we can’t limit it to certain clients.

Those are the most common I come across and they are all valid points. Those are the arguments I would use myself. In fact, they are excellent arguments and should be asked by any security department. The thing is that you can fulfill all these requirements for Lync.

You can use an application specific password or you can use 2-factor authentication and you can limit the clients accessing Lync from the outside.

What I’m getting at here is that Lync is truly a great application (but you already knew that) and while mobility might just be a small part, it is an awesome part. Don’t cripple your Lyncers, empower them!

Have a good weekend!