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Service level agreements in Lync Server 2013

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Topic Last Modified: 2014-08-18

The SLA is a document that defines the services that your customer expects from you. The complexity and content of this document depends largely on whether customers are internal (within your environment) or external.

External Customers

If your customer is external, the SLA may be part of a legal contract with financial incentives and penalties for performance that falls inside or outside defined levels of service. Defining these levels of service should be part of the overall contract negotiation.

As with all contracts, it’s important that both parties understand expectations. The SLA defines these expectations. The contents of the document should change infrequently and only because of negotiations with the customer.

Internal Customers

If your customer is internal, you may still want to define the services that are expected of operations teams and of IT systems. The SLA may be created by the operations staff and intended as a set of goals for the availability of IT services within your organization. Or, performance levels may be set by management and used as benchmarks when assessing staff performance.

Typical Criteria

SLAs include sections that define criteria of minimum levels of availability, support, and capacity.

  • Availability   Define the hours and the operating systems on which sites and other Lync services will be available. Any routine maintenance that affects service availability should be defined. Define external factors that affect service, for example, the loss of Internet connectivity.

  • Support   Define the hours when support for a system will be available. Specify methods for customers to contact support staff, how incidents are grouped, and target time to respond and to resolve the incident. Define frequency and content of feedback to the customer.

  • Capacity   Define the maximum enabled size of Lync sites and the steps to take if the limit is exceeded. Define the maximum enabled time to do standard tasks, such as the time to retrieve a document from a document library. Define the maximum number of users per Lync pool and agree to a process to increase capacity if more users are added.