Skype for Business Meeting room devices are gaining popularity in recent months as companies seek to extend the UC capabilities from the PC desktop to meeting spaces such as huddle rooms, small and medium sized meeting rooms and even large conference rooms. Polycom has been providing native Skype for Business meeting room solutions for many years now, such as the popular Polycom Group Series family of video collaboration endpoints, and more recently the Polycom Trio8800 SmartHub which is the successor to the widely used starfish conference phones but with additional video and content sharing capabilities. In addition, Microsoft's partners are soon to launch the Skype Room Systems V2 solution which adds yet another meeting room device that customers can choose from.

This blog post serves as a guide on how to provision these devices in an Office365 Hybrid environment where an on-premise AD is synced with Azure AD along with ADFS deployed, Exchange is purely online and Skype for Business configured with hybrid setup with some users homed on-premise and some online.

This is the continuation of the post Deploying Polycom phones for Cloud PBX with on-premise PSTN Connectivity. Here we are ready to move on-premise Skype for Business Enterprise Voice enabled accounts to Office365 E5 Cloud PBX. As shown in the previous post, we have already used two on-premise Enterprise Voice accounts to sign in on two different Polycom devices: a VVX600 and a Trio8800. Below is the status of these two devices as seen on from the web admin Lync Status page:

Last week at Enterprise Connect 2016, Polycom and Microsoft made joint announcements which has had profound impact across the entire UC industry. Never before has 2 companies partnered together so closely to bring about a whole new level of innovation and technology for meeting room spaces and collaboration focused built purposefully for the cloud. While there are already several great blog posts on the announcements such as the one from Network World by Zeus Kerravala, this blog posts focuses on what those announcements really mean for customers in practical terms.

Ensuring Pool Quorum and Routing Group Quorum
HA in the Skype4B Front-End pool is the ability of the server pool to continue servicing users in the event of a failure of 1 or more servers within the pool. Front-End pool HA is based on clustering via HLB and DNS load balancing built into the servers to automatically distribute groups of users across the various front end servers in a pool. During startup, 85% of all servers in the pool must be started in order for the entire pool to be functional. This is known as achieving Routing Group level Quorum. After the pool is operational, then only 50% of the servers in the pool must be running in order for the pool to remain functional. This is called achieving Pool Level Quorum and is not to be confused with Routing Group Level Quorum. The table below shows the numbers for these two quorum types: