Skype for Business Announced

We finally know what the next iteration of Lync will be. Today Microsoft announced Skype for Business. A decade ago Skype brought down the barriers by making it easy to talk to someone anywhere in the world. A few years later, Microsoft bought Skype and introduced a lot of speculation about what that would mean.

Microsoft has now fully merged Lync and Skype, enabling what should be near seamless communication between the two. Skype for Business will be launched the first half of 2015. Existing Lync on-prem customers will be able to upgrade to the new Skype for Business server, and Office 365 customers will be automatically updated.

For more information, click here for the blog or here for the YouTube promo.

~ brad

"While only one day of the year is dedicated solely to honoring our veterans, Americans must never forget the sacrifices that many of our fellow countrymen have made to defend our country and protect our freedoms." ~Randy Neugebauer

Article: Microsoft emulates Star Trek, turns Skype into a Universal Translator

Microsoft is once again taking the world by storm. At the recent Code Conference in California they announced the newest service offered through Skype, Skype Translator. The service provides real-time translation of the spoken word.

From the article:

Yesterday at the Code Conference in California, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Skype corporate vice president Gurdeep Pall, introduced Skype Translator. It’s the first time that this new feature has been demonstrated publicly, and involved a Skype conversation between Pall speaking English in California and Diana Heinrichs speaking German in London.

More info is also available from the Microsoft blog. This will be available as a Windows 8 beta app by the end of 2014.

~ brad

"If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world."  ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein