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

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Article: Lync Finds Its Groove in 'Universal Communications' Era

Scott Bekker from Redmond Channel Partner has an interesting article about Microsoft Lync Partners and the Keynote from the Lync Conference. The adoption and interest in Lync is growing, and Microsoft has no plans to slow that growth.

You can read the full article here, but here are a couple pieces that I found interesting.

Carol Spowart spent a moment at the recent Microsoft Lync Conference exchanging high fives with a peer on the show floor.
Spowart is the CEO of House of Lync, a Costa Mesa, Calif.-based professional services firm, which, as you might guess from the name, is 100 percent dedicated to Lync deployment projects. "I have a very friendly competitor out of Houston, and the president said, 'It's raining Lync.' I said, 'All you have to do is put out a bucket,'" Spowart recalls.

and later on...

"The era of universal communications is here to stay. That's what the next decade is going to be about. It's going to change your and my life. In fact, 1 billion people in this decade will use Microsoft universal communications," said Pall, who recently returned to Lync from other parts of Microsoft's business.

and still later...

McGillen notes that Microsoft has made installation of Lync so simple that customers often go too far in enabling features without understanding the underlying network requirements for quality of service. "It's a big problem when somebody tries to install Lync on their own," he says. "It's easy enough to click next, next, next and install it, and the [call] button shows up. That's when we get called in a lot. The voice quality is crummy. It was easy to install, but that doesn't mean that everything is magic."

Enjoy!

~ brad

“Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something” ~ Plato

Lync Conference 2014 Wrap Up

The daily summaries didn't happen. In a way that's a good thing, because that means that I was really busy at the conference. I was able to attend a lot of interesting and very informative sessions, catch up with some old friends and coworkers and meet a lot of people, and had a lot of fun along the way.

The conference was attended by 1600 participants (up from 800 last year), offered 170 break sessions, 9 Hands-On labs, Lync Room System labs, and a variety of vendors in the Expo Hall.

Keynote Highlights

The keynote was really good, and had some big announcements, but there weren't any earth-shattering announcements this year. Below are some of the highlights.

• Lync has had 38 quarters of double-digit revenue growth
• 60% of enterprises have deployed it
• 1/3 of all global long distance calls occur on Skype

Up and Coming for Lync & Skype

• Speech recognition to control Lync Mobile
• "Show my meetings"
• "Join my current meeting"
• Mobile App for Android tablets
• Share PowerPoint presentations from tablets like iPad
• Anonymous join to meetings from tablets
• Windows 8.1 Modern App - Answer calls without unlocking the device
• Bing call extensions in browsers - Skype calls paid for by the business
• JavaScript wrapper to embed Skype functionality in websites
• Skype video to Lync within the next few months
• Lync Online will be able to make and receive PSTN calls
• Large-scale meetings (1000-2000 participants) will be brought to Lync Online

Gurdeep Singh Pall returned to the stage to wrap up the keynote. He talked about how the last decade has been the push for Unified Communications and has transformed the way we do a lot of things in our lives and the way we work. He feels we have closed out Unified Communications, and for the next decade we are moving into Universal Communications. This includes ideas like contect and application intelligence, global communications reach through the cloud, and video available everywhere.

A big thanks to Microsoft, the speakers/presenters, vendors and everyone involved who put together such a great event. Looking forward to next year!