Lync 2010 released but who’s really using it?

Last week we released the new Lync Server 2010 and Lync 2010 client, the replacement products for Office Communications Server and the OCS client.  I’ve been using Lync for about the past 4 months internally and it does some amazing things for communication in your company.  Having just joined Microsoft from the outside world I can say that some of what you get is revolutionary:  Integrated presence across email, IM, voice, document sharing and with APIs extensibility of that to your own applications; the fact that you never need to remember an extension number, you just call a person; voice over IP that doesn’t splat a large graphical approximation of a phone handset on your screen obscuring what you're actually doing.  Those are just a few things Lync 2010 does, and that’s not without getting into the sizable cost reductions…

You won’t want to take my word for it though so I introduce you to Vicente Fraser from The London School of Business and Finance.  Vicente has already deployed Lync because he felt that his business (which is 400 employees strong across 4 continents) would see immediate benefits, and it has.  I sat down with Vicente last week and had a chat with him about it.  We also talked about implementation, user training, administration and call routing.  Once you’ve seen this you might want to grab the Lync 2010 180 day trail download or if you don’t have some tin, try the hosted trial.

Lync 2010

They’ve made initial savings of £20,000 and the rollout costs have already paid for themselves…in fact the amazing thing about this is a that the Financial Controller, Michael, doesn’t even think that the ROI they’ve seen is all encompassing enough.  Because Lync touches him personally he can see beyond ROI and sees how Lync’s powering Flexibility and Expansion.

Lync 2010