Bill Gates oils up Microsoft's Lync product Microsoft released its rejigged office communications server yesterday, which was anointed by none other than William Henry "Bill" Gates III. It has been renamed Lync and according to the company blurb, the software brings together instant messaging, presence, audio, video, web conferencing and voice under one roof. …
...but they're also moving into new territory with it in terms of trying to compete with or replace the old, reliable PBXs. In fact, the only voice area they're not trying to move into (yet at least) is enterprise call centers. Typical of Microsoft marketing prowess, they will be getting more than a few punters to bite. My friend at another IT outsourcer told me he had 3 clients ask him this week about installing Lync.
Then core product improvements with presence, IM, conferncing, etc (i.e. everything but voice) are great... but I for one am a little worried about replacing the good old, rock solid and reliable traditional phone systems with Windows. I've been around long enough to know that out of our population of managed environments, we'll see at least one major cock-up and people will go absolutely bat-shit crazy on us for it. If you think it's bad when mail goes down, that is absolutely nothing in comparison to the phones dying.
Its not to bad to be honest but its really just a rebrabded version of office communicator with some enhanced voip and virtual meeting stuff.
PLays quite nicely with sharepoint 2010, tried using it with onenote 2010 as a virtual interactive whiteboard with moderate sucess
but yeah basically msn messenger from 2 years ago slotted into office with a voip stack
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