So over the past year I have gotten all sorts of random requests to review books, blog posts and all sorts of random content.  Typically I just ignore the requests and move on with my day but a couple weeks ago I said yes to reviewing “Getting Started with Microsoft Lync Server 2013” by Fabrizio Volpe.  The print or eBook can be found here.

First off, lets explain what this book isn’t.  If you are looking for a book to help you troubleshoot your edge deployment, design your 50+ server worldwide Lync Server deployment or understand the details of how ICE/STUN/TURN works than you should go ahead and skip this book.  This is not to say this is a bad book but rather a book designed for those who are new to Lync Server 2010 or Lync Server 2013.  If you have never deployed Lync before and you need to deploy a lab or a small deployment of Lync, the tutorials in this book will help you get from a base OS to a server running Lync Server 2013.  If you are an experienced Lync 2010 administrator this book has some interesting nuggets (small section on Enterprise Voice, a little bit about VDI, Persistent Chat) that you might find helpful but you will need to decide if that information is worth the money vs doing a Bing search to find much of the same information.

There are a few things in particular that I like about this book.  First, the book isn’t written as a “formal book” but rather it reads like a really long blog post – or a series of blog posts.  I like that writing style as typically it is easier to read and relate to the author.  Second, this book does a better job than TechNet does on the actual install process.  Although TechNet has gotten better over the past few years I feel like they 1) fail to include screenshots when they should 2) assume you are creating a 12 server enterprise pool all the time.  Lastly, this book does a nice job of including the correct references to TechNet and other MVP blog posts where necessary.

So in conclusion, if you are new to Lync and need a book to help walk you through a lab deployment or understand the basics of the product, this book will certainly help you with that.

NOTE: I wasn’t paid or compensated for this review other than a copy of the eBook to review.