“There won’t be any significant changes or updates from Lync 2010 to Office 365,” says Oscar Trimboli, director of information worker business, Microsoft Australia. The upgrade from Office Communications Server was “a bit more than a name change”, Trimboli says. Lync added deeper integration of voice, video and web conferencing. One new feature is Skill Search – instead of searching by name, users can type in finance director or programmer and set up a call.
Other changes include the inclusion of high-definition video and more extensible APIs that can connect to line-of-business applications such as finance and CRM. “Instead of people having to go to a different system to make a call they can click a button in the application. The APIs allow them to do that,” Trimboli says.
Brian Walshe, general manager, Microsoft Solutions at Dimension Data, says there is one major change in which the online version of Lync catches up with the more heavily featured on-premise application. “Lync on-premise and Lync Online become much closer in what they can do,” Walshe says.
“Particularly in that they can support federation.”
Federation is a critical development; it allows users to contact people by instant messaging outside the corporate network.
BPOS, the vendor’s current cloud service to be superseded by Microsoft Office 365, does not support federation with Office Communications Online. This means that BPOS users can only see presence and instant message other colleagues, which is a huge limitation of the technology’s potential.
“If you were happy with instant messaging presence in your organisation then that was fine,” Walshe says.
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