Microsoft 70-336: MCSE Core Solutions Lync Server

When a company needs voice, video, chat, conferencing, and remote access to behave like one system instead of five disconnected tools, that is where lync 2013 training earns its keep. This Microsoft® 70-336 course is built for the person who has to make real design decisions: which topology fits the business, how to support branch offices, how to protect communications, how to keep users online during a failure, and how to migrate without breaking everything people rely on every day.

I built this course for consultants and administrators who already understand that unified communications is not just “install the software and hope for the best.” Lync Server planning lives or dies on architecture choices. If you choose the wrong edition, ignore edge access, underestimate conferencing demand, or treat voice as an afterthought, you create problems that show up later as outages, poor call quality, and unhappy executives. This course focuses on the decisions that matter before implementation starts and the operational details that matter after users are live.

What this Lync 2013 Training Course Actually Teaches

This course goes straight at the core of Microsoft Lync Server design and implementation. You are not just learning where buttons are. You are learning how to translate business requirements into a unified communications design that actually works under pressure. That means understanding how Lync Server supports enterprise voice, audio/video and web conferencing, persistent chat, mobile and remote access, data compliance, and high availability. It also means knowing where Microsoft’s own tools fit for monitoring and troubleshooting, because in the field, “I think it should work” is not a strategy.

The content reflects the kind of thinking expected from someone supporting a real UC environment. You will look at central and branch office scenarios, standard versus enterprise edition deployments, disaster recovery planning, and the relationship between client endpoints and the services they depend on. You will also spend time on migration from previous versions of Lync, which is exactly the kind of work that separates a technician from a consultant. Anyone can stand up a lab. The useful professional is the one who can preserve service while moving users, policies, voice plans, and conferencing features without causing avoidable downtime.

• Designing Lync Server topologies around business and technical requirements
• Planning for high availability and disaster recovery from the start
• Supporting remote access, external access, and branch office scenarios
• Implementing enterprise voice, conferencing, and Unified Messaging integration
• Handling compliance, persistent chat, and endpoint considerations
• Using Microsoft tools to monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot the environment

Why Lync 2013 Training Still Matters

Yes, the associated exam is retired. No, that does not make the material irrelevant. In fact, retired infrastructure exams often become even more useful as learning resources because they capture a mature product line at the point where Microsoft had already ironed out many of the early design lessons. Lync 2013 remains a strong study vehicle for unified communications architecture because it forces you to think in systems: identity, certificates, front-end pools, mediation, gateways, conferencing, clients, and external access all have to cooperate.

This matters if you work in environments where legacy voice and collaboration platforms are still present, or where you need to understand the logic behind later Microsoft collaboration designs. Employers still value people who can map a requirement like “support executive meetings from home and keep voice quality consistent” into a concrete architecture. That is not entry-level work. It requires judgment. This course is aimed at building exactly that judgment.

The strongest Lync professionals are not the ones who memorize features. They are the ones who understand dependencies well enough to predict failure before the first user call opens.

That is why this course is still worth taking. It teaches the logic of enterprise communications design, not just product trivia.

Who Should Take This Course

This training is best suited to IT consultants, telecommunications consulting professionals, unified communications engineers, messaging specialists, and infrastructure administrators who already have some exposure to Microsoft Lync technologies. The official candidate profile assumes at least two years of experience, and I agree with that expectation. If you already know your way around server roles, network concepts, certificates, and user-facing communication services, you will get much more out of the material.

It is also a good fit if your job puts you in the awkward but important middle ground between business leadership and technical teams. That is where UC projects often fail: leadership asks for better mobility, cleaner conferencing, and lower support costs; technical teams focus on the server list; and nobody owns the design end to end. This course helps you bridge that gap. You learn how to explain the technical consequences of business choices and how to defend a design when someone wants to cut corners.

• UC and collaboration consultants
• Messaging and voice engineers
• Systems administrators supporting Microsoft Lync environments
• Telecommunications professionals moving into IP-based collaboration
• Infrastructure architects who need unified communications knowledge

Key Skills You Build in Microsoft 70-336

The value of this course is in the skills it sharpens. You will learn how to design a Lync Server environment with the discipline of someone who has to live with the result. That includes capacity planning, topology decisions, client access considerations, and voice integration. It also includes security and resiliency planning, which are the areas that get neglected right up until the first outage, then suddenly become everyone’s priority.

From a practical standpoint, you should expect to strengthen your ability to evaluate requirements like these: how many users are on one site, what features external users need, whether you can support conferencing traffic over a WAN link, what happens if a front-end pool fails, and how voice traffic should be routed between branches and the PSTN. These are not abstract questions. They are the daily work of a UC designer.

1. Translate business needs into a UC architecture
2. Choose between standard and enterprise edition deployment models
3. Design for high availability and disaster recovery
4. Plan external, remote, and branch office access
5. Support enterprise voice and conferencing requirements
6. Understand client, endpoint, and compliance implications
7. Monitor performance and troubleshoot with Microsoft tools

Course Topics You Need to Know Cold

I don’t teach this subject as a list of isolated features. Lync Server has too many moving parts for that approach to be useful. Instead, the course connects the important technical decisions so you can see how one choice affects another. For example, the way you design for branch offices can change your voice routing strategy. Your high availability approach influences how you size pools and handle failover. Your external access design affects certificate planning, security boundaries, and client behavior.

Major topic areas include central and branch office site planning, standard and enterprise edition deployment, high availability and disaster recovery, remote and external access, enterprise voice, Unified Messaging, conferencing, persistent chat, data compliance, client endpoints, and migration from earlier versions of Lync. Those topics are not random. They mirror the realities of a production collaboration environment where multiple services must stay in sync.

• Central and branch office planning
• Standard edition versus enterprise edition design choices
• High availability and disaster recovery concepts
• Remote access and external user scenarios
• Enterprise voice architecture and dialing considerations
• Unified Messaging and conferencing integrations
• Persistent Chat and compliance requirements
• Client endpoint and device planning
• Migration from previous Lync versions

Lync 2013 Training for Voice, Conferencing, and Collaboration Design

Voice and conferencing are where a lot of people discover whether they really understand unified communications. Email systems can be sluggish and still function. Real-time voice and video do not forgive sloppy design. If packet flow is wrong, if bandwidth is undersized, if policies are inconsistent, or if routing is incomplete, users notice immediately. That is why this part of the course gets serious attention.

You will work through the thinking behind enterprise voice, including how endpoints connect, how calls are routed, and how telephony services fit into the broader UC design. Conferencing receives equal treatment, because meetings drive adoption. If users cannot join reliably from the office, from home, or from outside the network, they will abandon the platform or start using shadow IT. That is not a technical problem alone. It is a business problem that starts with design.

Unified Messaging and persistent chat add another layer of organizational value. They are not nice-to-have features when an enterprise needs controlled collaboration, retention, or team-based communication. They have to be planned, secured, and supported like any other service that may be subject to audit, legal review, or operational dependence.

Security, High Availability, and Disaster Recovery

If you remember only one thing from this course, remember this: UC design is not complete until you can explain what happens when something fails. That includes server loss, site loss, WAN degradation, certificate issues, client access problems, and user access from outside the firewall. A polished demo does not matter if the platform collapses when a pool fails or a branch office link drops.

This course emphasizes high availability and disaster recovery because they are fundamental to an enterprise deployment. You need to understand where redundancy belongs, how failover is handled, how to think about geographic separation, and which services are truly critical. Security is just as important. Remote and external access introduce exposure points, and a Lync environment is only as trustworthy as the weakest part of its identity, certificate, and access design.

When you finish this section of the course, you should be able to look at a deployment and ask the right questions:

• What service remains available if a pool node fails?
• How do external users authenticate and connect safely?
• What happens to conferencing and voice if one site is lost?
• Which components are monitored continuously, and which failures go unnoticed until users complain?

Migration and Troubleshooting in the Real World

Migration is where theory meets politics. Existing systems have users, policies, phone numbers, meetings, and habits. Moving them incorrectly can break trust in the entire communications platform. This course treats migration from previous versions of Lync as a planning discipline, not a side note. You need to understand supported migration scenarios, sequencing, coexistence considerations, and the operational risks involved in moving people and services across versions.

Troubleshooting is equally important because no production UC system ever runs without questions. Users report one-way audio, delayed presence updates, failed conference joins, device issues, or client sign-in trouble. The professionals who stand out know how to use Microsoft tools to isolate the problem instead of guessing. That means looking at the right logs, checking the right services, and separating network issues from configuration mistakes and endpoint problems.

If you work in support or engineering, this portion of the course is especially valuable because it teaches a method. Method is what saves time under pressure. It also makes you more credible in front of stakeholders who do not care which service failed; they only care that meetings and calls are working again.

Career Impact and Why Employers Value This Knowledge

People who can design and maintain unified communications platforms tend to land in high-responsibility roles because the business impact is immediate. When voice or conferencing fails, employees lose time, customers lose confidence, and management starts asking hard questions. That is why Lync and UC skills often show up in job descriptions for collaboration engineer, voice engineer, UC consultant, systems engineer, and infrastructure architect.

Salary varies by region and experience, but roles that combine Lync/UC design with voice, messaging, and infrastructure knowledge often sit in a competitive range. In the United States, experienced professionals in these areas commonly see compensation somewhere in the low six figures, and more when the role includes architecture, migration leadership, or enterprise voice responsibility. The real career advantage, though, is not just pay. It is leverage. You become the person who can make complicated communication systems understandable and reliable.

This course is especially useful if you want to:

• move from administration into design and architecture
• strengthen your consulting credibility
• work on migration or modernization projects
• support enterprise voice and collaboration platforms
• prepare for Microsoft MCSE-oriented study paths

Prerequisites and How to Get the Most from the Course

You will get the best results from this training if you already understand basic server administration, networking, identity concepts, and Microsoft collaboration terminology. The course assumes familiarity with Microsoft Lync technologies and with migration scenarios. That is not gatekeeping; it is realistic. This material is most useful when you can connect the lesson to infrastructure you have already touched or supported.

If you are newer to the subject, do not treat that as a reason to skip it. Treat it as a reason to study carefully and take notes on the relationships between components. Focus on why a design choice exists, not just what the design choice is. For example, ask why a deployment needs specific redundancy, why branch offices are treated differently, or why external access requires such careful certificate and firewall planning. Those questions will make the course stick.

Before you begin, I recommend that you be comfortable with:

• Windows Server administration concepts
• basic networking and DNS behavior
• security and certificate fundamentals
• user authentication and directory services concepts
• general voice or collaboration terminology

Why This Course Belongs in Your Training Plan

This is not a lightweight overview course. It is a serious study resource for people who need to understand Microsoft Lync Server at the level of design, deployment, and operations. If your work involves unified communications, this knowledge is practical. If your work involves consulting, it is essential. If your goal is certification study, it gives you the architectural foundation you need to think like the exam expected you to think: not as a button-clicker, but as the person responsible for making the whole solution fit together.

I like courses like this because they reward careful thinking. They force you to consider availability, security, user experience, and business continuity in the same design conversation. That is the real job. Tools change. Product names change. The discipline behind UC design stays valuable.

If you want to understand how Microsoft Lync Server solutions are planned, built, supported, and migrated in the real world, this course gives you the framework to do it with confidence.

Microsoft® and MCSE are trademarks of Microsoft®. This content is for educational purposes.