Configuring Location Information in Lync Without E911

One of the most underutilized features in Lync is the Location Information Server (LIS) database.  This is due usually to the following:

• LIS is marketed in the same discussion as E911, which only North America (really US and Canada) can use
• The configuration is completely performed in powershell

The LIS can also be very helpful for an organization (no matter what country you are in) for publishing…well, location information.  If a company is very spread-out, either regionally with many campuses or globally with many offices, wouldn’t it be great to auto-populate a user’s location information based on where they are actually sitting that day?  I mean Lync unleashes us from our cubicle and now it is hard to know if someone is actually in the office or working from another company location.

LIS can be configured to do just that, publish location information for your users based on where their Lync client is connecting from.  This post will step you through the minimum requirements to make that happen.

Location information is based off of network components, such as subnets, switches, etc.  When looking at Lync configuration options for network components, it might be a little confusing.  Lync will use network information (subnets) for four different uses and understanding what the authoritative source is crucial.

Lync Functionality	Subnet Definition Location
Determining Location	LIS Subnets (powershell)
Determining Location Policy (used in E911 config)	Lync Subnets defined in Lync Control Panel
Call Admissions Control (CAC)	Lync Subnets defined in Lync Control Panel
Media Bypass	Lync Subnets defined in Lync Control Panel

If we are just interested in determining our location and publishing the information, only the LIS subnets need to be defined.  Subnets (including location information) will be configured using the Set-CsLisSubnet cmdlet.

In our example, we will be creating two different locations.  If you are only interested in publishing location information into the Lync client and do not care about E911 configuration, only the “Location” and “City” field are used to populate the client.  You can use both or either for your configuration.  The following commands are used in my environment:

Set-CsLisSubnet –Subnet 192.168.1.0 –Location “Building 40” –City “Redmond”

Set-CsLisSubnet –Subnet 10.0.2.0 –Location “Home Office” –City “Texas”

Once we have our subnets defined, we need to publish the information to the LIS database.  The can be achieved by running: Publish-CsLisConfiguration cmdlet:

Once everything has been replicated, we can log-off of our client and back in.  The location information is now published into the client depending on what subnet the user sign’s in from.

You will also notice that others users will see this information about other user’s presence within their client:

Note that we did not have to configure anything in the Lync Control Panel for Network Sites and Subnets:

This post showed how to configure location information and publish that information in the Lync client.