Thursday, March 21, 2013

Lync Online and Skype Futures Announced

This is definitely a few days old but wanted to bring people attention to this. There is a planned where Lync and Skype can connect to each other for presence, IM and voice in the summer of 2013. This will be available for Lync Online and Lync on-premise. This is pretty exciting.

This move is somewhat associated to move of Windows Live Messenger to Skype (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/messenger/home). For Lync Online today, Windows Live Messenger can be connected to, so since it is moving over to Skype it is only natural that Lync Online will be able to connect to Skype. Plus with the expansion of voice support is really nice. The reason why I really like this is I have a lot of customers who want to be able to communicate with people outside of their organization. There are subject matter experts, external consultants, professional contacts, etc. that organizations want to have constant communication with. This will allow them to stay in constant communication with each other.

Please do not confuse that with Lync Federation which more of an organization to organization relationship.

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