On the whole, Lync is a great collaboration tool that is even better with Enterprise Voice, when it’s also serving as your PBX. That’s what we have at CGNET. But isn’t it funny how one little feature that doesn’t work as expected can drive you nuts? The one that was bothering us was adding somebody to a Lync meeting in progress when the person wasn’t a Lync user. We’d dial their number to add them in, and we’d get an error message. We found that we could add one Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN, i.e. non-Lync) user if we connected with them first, then added in the Lync users. But we could only do one, and only in that order.

We haven’t figured out exactly why this is happening yet, but we do have a workaround, which we found here. Basically, one person in the meeting has to start a separate call to the PSTN number, then merge the call with the meeting by clicking on the people icon in the new call, the three dots inside that window, and then the drop-down to merge.

The moral of this story? It’s still I.T., folks, there’s lots of great new functionality, but there’s still a lot to learn.