By now you’re familiar with the many resources available in the Lync Adoption and Training Kit and have had a chance to try out some. Now you’re ready to put the knowledge you gained in the planning and pilot phases into action in the first stage of your organization-wide rollout.

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Getting Started
Best Practices
Microsoft Case Study

This phase of the project combines the actual rollout with a carefully focused program of user education and training. For details, see the Rollout and Training tab of the Rollout and Adoption Workbook.

Before the Rollout
Two months before the scheduled rollout, meet with your training and help desk representatives to review the planning checklists, decide what resources need to be customized or created, and finalize staffing plans. In particular, verify that your Lync intranet site and training resources are on schedule for completion.

Three weeks prior to the launch date, begin training your support team, including Lync champions, and publish the online end user training. Finally, with one week to go, send email to users notifying them of the planned rollout date, highlighting your intranet site and other end-user resources, and announcing the time and date of your launch event.

Launch Event and Rollout Day
One day prior to the rollout, host a launch event for everyone in the rollout group. The launch event provides an overview of the core scenarios and benefits, describes the changes that users can expect, and explains ways users can get more information or support. For details, see the customizable Launch Presentation: Introducing Lync 2010.  On the day of the rollout, send a welcome email highlighting the available training and support resources, and then roll out Lync to your users.

After the Rollout
After the rollout, conduct instructor-led training sessions for users, collect usage and adoption data, gather feedback, and modify checklists and resources as required. Then you'll be ready to start a much more well-informed and robust version of the same process all over again.

A carefully planned training and support program is one of the eight most effective best practices for a successful Lync rollout. For details, see Top Eight Best Practices.

Others have found the following related best practices useful during the rollout and training phase:

• Set up a small mobile training and support team. The Microsoft IT department recognized that some users—particularly executives, Lync 2010 Attendant users, and anyone using the Lync manager and delegate scenario—would require extra help during the rollout. Microsoft IT successfully met this challenge by establishing the Street Team, a mobile training and troubleshooting group that focused on specific individuals and small groups.
• Plan for behavior change. Helping users map their current behavior to the required new behavior is an important part of your training program. For a resource that deals specifically with this issue, see Finding Familiar Features in Lync 2010.
• Customize training to match the Lync Server workloads you have deployed. With this version of the Lync Adoption and Training Kit, almost every resource can be customized. The kit includes the HTML source for all the Help and how-to topics and a way to redirect the Lync F1 key to your own internal version of Lync Help. Now you can train your users on exactly what they need to know and eliminate confusion and help desk calls about unsupported features. For details about customizing your training, see Training.
• Keep training focused on tasks and scenarios, not on features. If you talk to most new users, they ask "How do I do this?" rather than "What does this do?" For a task-based approach to training, group the provided Help and training resources in a way that makes the most sense for your organization's workflow. If you can customize the training based on user profiles it is even more effective.
• Use Monitoring Server reports to validate training. Microsoft IT found that correlating user training activity with Monitoring Server usage reports was a good way to verify training effectiveness. In one case, Microsoft IT tracked users who completed a self-paced module about Lync conferencing and found a dramatic increase in online meeting usage following the training. For details about using Monitoring Server reports, see Monitoring Server Reports.

During each phase of the Lync rollout, Microsoft IT used the metrics and feedback mechanisms that they had developed to adjust the pace of the rollout as appropriate. For example, if user satisfaction or usage statistics for a given workload were significantly below projections, Microsoft IT looked for a root cause, such as networking or device issues, and then slowed or paused the addition of new users until the issue could be addressed.

Microsoft IT decided to roll out all the Lync Server workloads at once, but they used a very targeted approach to training. The training team emphasized complex scenarios, such as conferencing and voice, and adjusted the type of training (self-paced, instructor-led, small group, or one-on-one) based on user needs.

When the Microsoft IT trainers gained experience, they began to take on additional responsibilities, providing technical advice and advanced feature testing to IT managers at branch sites, especially those involved in rolling out Lync 2010 Attendant.

With the growing number of Lync users at each successive rollout, Microsoft IT saw an increase in the number of questions about Lync interoperability with earlier client versions during migration. As a result, the team began placing more of an emphasis on interoperability and developed training focused on this topic. For details, see Joining a Meeting When Lync 2010 is Not Available.