Says Gurdeep Singh Pall, Microsoft Lync & Speech Group corporate vice president. This week, Microsoft Lync, formerly Microsoft Office Communications Server, becomes available for purchase. First Kinect, and now Lync. Are we seeing the beginnings of a recurring pattern here? I can't wait for Microsoft Unyte and Microsoft Joyn.
To end users, Lync will be an application that combines video, IM, presence, conferences, and whiteboard sessions. To Microsoft, Lync is a project more than 5 years in the making. I sat through the company's lengthy keynote presentation, and thought you might be interested in hearing a little (or a lot) about this new unified communications solution. I'll start off by saying that you've probably seen a lot of what Microsoft presented somewhere else already.
That's not to say that Lync isn't innovative; but, to hear Bill Gates himself talk about how Lync finally makes it possible to have a desktop without a desk phone was a bit silly. Counterpath has been making this possible for years now. There also appeared to be some confusion about the pricing of current video conferencing solutions. At one point, Gurdeep Singh Pall remarked that with Lync compatible HD cameras, "You no longer have to pay $300,000 dollars for HD, I know that's what you've been paying." I don't know if he was kidding or if he just pulled that number out of the air. The audience erupted into laughter, as they should have.
So what's in this thing, anyway?
Despite these few moments that made me scratch my head, and a few technical hiccups (at one point when they were demonstrating inviting someone to a video conference and white-boarding session, it didn't work), I'm actually very impressed with the Lync application. Keep in mind that Lync will probably be immensely more useful to you if you're already using Microsoft business apps like Outlook, Exchange, and Sharepoint. If you're a Google Apps and Basecamp user, then you'll probably be less excited. Here are a couple of my highlights. Lync includes a soft phone / video phone. It is based on SIP, XMPP, and voiceXML.
“We built Lync from day one using SIP as the basis,” Pall said, “Right at the core we started building on SIP. We’re not talking about SIP as a cool new feature that we sort of put as a checkbox on the machine.”
Right on.
Some of the features include the following:
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Contacts lists with pictures automatically imported from Sharepoint. Each contact also has a ‘call card’ when you scroll over it, which allows you to easily send them an email (via Outlook), start a call or video call.
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Presence gets automatically updated depending on what you have scheduled in your calendar. Also included is location based presence updates that can be manually or automatically updated.
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Activity feed that is a simplified version of Facebook’s newsfeed.
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Visual voicemail- users can listen to voicemail straight from the Lync application. Voicemails can be stored in exchange and transcripts can be read in Outlook.
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The coolest thing about the Lync application is the built in meeting functionality. This encompasses videoconferencing, drag and drop inviting, and collaborative white board sessions. These meeting sessions can also be recorded. The Microsoft demo included the use of the Polycom CX 5000, a video conference phone with a 360 degree panoramic camera, and several large touch screen monitors so that it’s no surprise that it was the highlight of the entire keynote presentation.
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For household and consumer interaction, Lync comes interoperable with windows live messenger and a little something that is currently being worked on called Video Kinect. Yes, you will soon be able to turn your Xbox and TV into a video phone with Lync.
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An API for developers to create custom experiences.
Lync Partners
Microsoft isn’t going this alone. During the presentation, they revealed that they’ve been in cahoots with plenty of other companies preparing for this launch for 2 years. Partner devices are ‘certified’ meaning that they are optimized for Lync performance. Some big brands you may have heard of are HP, Lenovo, Dell, Logitech, Jabra. Aastra, and Polycom. Polycom is one of Microsoft’s main partners (Polycom CEO Andy Miller even made a cameo appearance during the keynote) and have released an entire line of Polycom phones specifically built for Lync. These include the Polycom CX 600, CX 3000, HDX 4000, and more. Clearly a lot of these companies think Lync is a big deal. Gurdeep Singh Pall remarked that these vendors will be “innovating to compete for your dollars”.
“You know, the PBX world has been living in the IBM mainframe economics era where once you buy the mainframe you will pay through your nose to buy endpoints which work against that mainframe. And that’s why today companies who are in the PBX space – and I don’t care if they call it PBX or CallManager, they’re PBXes—they will sell you very, very expensive (end devices). It’s like a shell game; they move the money around, you know you bought the pbx. It looked kind of cheap when you compared it to Lync, but guess what? They move the money around to the end devices."
While this is sometimes true (it's pretty clear that Pall was making a jab at Cisco here), let’s not completely overlook open hosted PBX solutions like um…OnSIP. I'm willing to bet that we have less hardware and software limitations than Lync. Overall, I was pretty happy with the keynote presentation. Microsoft championed open standards and interoperability with existing communications solutions, which is certainly there to an extent. It will be interesting to see how the enterprise UC market reacts.