Whilst it’s great to see Lync now supports E911, it’s not actually relevant to us here in Australia. There is no current requirement for such a means to report your physical location to the emergency operator, although ACMA is aware of and currently seeking comment on this and other related issues.

Australia’s current system relies on you being able to tell the emergency operator your address, or the hope that you’re calling from the address of the service as registered in the Integrated Public Number Database (IPND) database.

But I digress.

The “great” bit about Lync’s implementation of E911 is that the user’s location information (based upon their Subnet, WiFi AP, or switch port) is also now potentially visible to every other user in the Enterprise. (It’s *NOT* visible to Federated contacts).

I say potentially because you can tighten Lync’s privacy settings to prevent this if you don’t want it with Set-CsPrivacyConfiguration.

Out of the box this was a little broken – RTM Lync didn’t automatically display your location if you were on the corporate network. This was fixed with the Client update to 4.0.7577.108 released Jan 21st, 2011.

It’s easy to build a “wiremap” of your subnets using the set-csLisSubnet command, but what about your WiFi network?

The quick and easy way to find the BSSID of a small (tiny?) deployment is to just open a CMD window on your Windows 7 laptop/netbook and issue the command:

netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid > c:\Wifi-list.txt

This will report all of the wireless networks in range, and the BSSIDs of each.

You can then simply paste the elusive BSSID into Set-csLisWirelessAccessPoint and Bob’s your uncle.

– G.