Location Information Service (LIS) Lync 2010/ 2013

Lync 2010 with CU1 introduced the LIS for identifying the Users Location for E-9-1-1 call and internal information too. The E-9-1-1 Service must be supported by a) SIP Trunk Provider or/and b) Law. What does Law mean?  Simply explained, if you are for example in Germany, so need to ensure you can make Emergency Calls also during Power Interruption. This cannot be done with Computer based Systems. A PABX is different, there are service ensuring the phones availability.

So let look into LIS itself:

The information will be stored in the LIS Database for Lync, which is the same for Lync 2010 and 2013.

Lync identifies 4 different Location Types:

1.     Switch Ports

2.     Switches

3.     IP Subnets

4.     Wireless Access Points

All associated commands here are:

• Get-CsLisSubnet
• Set-CsLisSubnet
• Remove-CsLisSubnet
• Get-CsLisWirelessAccessPoint
• Set-CsLisWirelessAccessPoint
• Remove-CsLisWirelessAccessPoint
• Get-CsLisSwitch
• Set-CsLisSwitch
• Remove-CsLisSwitch
• Get-CsLisPort
• Set-CsLisPort
• Remove-CsLisPort

It is important to remember that LIS Networks have nothing in common with the Lync Networks, which you mainly use for Region and Site consolidation.

Wireless, Switches and Port will be identified with their ChassisID, which is equivalent to the MAC address (Layer-2 Switch), managed Ethernet switches that support Link Layer Discovery Protocol-Media Endpoint Discover (LLDP-MED)

Just not enough here, that’s when I talked about the Service Provider, here are several things you need to check and configure:

Before publishing the location database, you must validate new locations against the Master Street Address Guide (MSAG) maintained by your SIP trunk or public switched telephone network (PSTN) E9-1-1 service provider.

Remember for Planning (MSFT):

hen you use ELIN gateways, you populate the Location Information service database with the civic address and at least one ELIN for each Emergency Response Location (ERL). During the planning phase, it is a good idea to decide how you want to name the locations and how you want to assign ELINs.

Planning Location Names

The Location Information service Location field has a maximum length of 20 characters (including spaces). Within that limited length, try to include the following:

• An easy-to-understand name that identifies the location of the 911 caller to help ensure that emergency responders find the specific location promptly when they arrive at the civic address. This location name may include a building number, floor number, wing designator, room number, and so on. Avoid nicknames known only to employees, which might cause emergency responders to go to the wrong location.
• A location identifier that helps users to easily see that their Lync client picked up the correct location. The Lync 2010 client automatically concatenates and displays the discovered Location and City fields in its header, while the Lync 2013 client ONLY displays the discovered Location information. A good practice is to add the street address of the building to each location identifier (for example, "1st Floor <street number>"). Without the street address, a generic location identifier such as "1st Floor" could apply to any building in the city.
• If the location is approximate because it’s determined by a wireless access point, you may want to add the word Near (for example, "Near 1st Floor 1234").

Planning ELINs

ERLs define specific locations at a street address. You need to decide how you want to divide your building space into ERLs and how many ELINs to assign to each ERL. For example, in a multifloor or multitenant building, different areas in the building can be assigned different ERL zones. Typically, each floor in a building is designated as an ERL. Each ERL is then assigned one or more ELINs, which are used as the calling number(s) during an emergency call. Contact your PSTN carrier for phone numbers that you can use for ELINs. The following table provides an example of ERLs for a specific street address.

After we have designed the LIS, it’s part for the Service Provider to be integrated as well.

There are two steps necessary:

1.     Setup the Service Provider

2.     Validate the Addresses in your LIS DB against the Master Street Address Guide (MSAG)

3.     Publish the Location DB

Set-CsLisServiceProvider -ServiceProviderName Provider1 -ValidationServiceUrl <URL provided by provider> -CertFileName <location of certificate provided by provider> -Password $pwd

Get-CsLisCivicAddress | Test-CsLisCivicAddress -UpdateValidationStatus

Publish-csLisConfiguration

Note:

CsLisCivicAddress is only for receiving and testing the Civic Addresses against the Master Street Address Guid. The configuration is still part of CsLisLocation, where you create, modify or read the Location Configuration Database entries.

If you have remote user, you still need to configure a Client Policy, which makes it recommended for user entering a Location.

There are a lot more blog’s where you can see how you configure the above commands, so I’m not repeating this here, but its more how the service work and necessary to know about LIS.

Author: Thomas Pött Managing Consultant Microsoft UC