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Lync Online Administration and Management
Topic Last Modified: 2013-03-29
This section describes the administration controls and support to customize Lync Online settings and keep an organization’s Lync Online environment up, running, and current. It includes information about self-service administration tools; Microsoft administration responsibilities and performance commitments; and service and product upgrades.
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Although Microsoft directly controls all Lync Online data centers and is responsible for overall system performance, it can control only a portion of the elements that combine to provide the total experience for Office 365 users. Organizations themselves are responsible for the network connections to the data centers, the customer’s wide area network (WAN), and the customer's local area networks (LANs). Additionally, they are in charge of user devices and their configuration.
Lync Online therefore provides customer administrators with the following tools, described below, to manage several messaging-related tasks:
The Microsoft Office 365 portal is the website through which administrators and partners purchase and manage Office 365 services, and where users access and use Office 365 collaborative tools.
The Microsoft Office 365 admin center is the web portal from which each company’s service administrator can manage user accounts and settings for each of the Office 365 services to which they subscribe. From within the Office 365 admin center, administrators can follow links to the Lync admin center, where they can manage settings specific to Lync Online. For more information about getting up and running using the Office 365 admin center, see the following video: Introducing Office 365 Enterprise.
Lync Online provides a single unified management console that is optimized for management of on-premises, online, or hybrid deployments. The Lync admin center (LAC) is where administrators manage Lync-specific settings.
For more information about how to use the LAC to manage Lync Online, see Lync Online settings summary.
Lync Online customers benefit from periodic upgrades to the latest Lync technology, including new releases of Lync Server. These upgrades are made available at no additional charge, and help ensure that customers are using the latest Lync software.
After a major version of Lync is released by Microsoft, customers have up to 12 months to upgrade their service to the new release.
| Feature | Lync 2013 with Lync Server 2013 | Office 365 Small Business | Office 365 Small Business Premium | Office 365 Midsize Business | Office 365 Enterprise E1 Office 365 Education A2 Office 365 Government G1 | Office 365 Enterprise E3 Office 365 Education A3 Office 365 Government G3 | Office 365 Enterprise E4 Office 365 Education A4 Office 365 Government G4 | Office 365 Enterprise K1 Office 365 Government K1 | Lync Online Standalone Plan 1 | Lync Online Standalone Plan 2 | Lync Online Standalone Plan 3 |
| Microsoft Office 365 portal | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Microsoft Office 365 admin center | No | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Lync admin center | Yes | No | No | Yes1 | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
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| 1 Only available through the Lync admin center (LAC) management interface. |
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