Microsoft Launches Lync: "PBX Era is Over"

By Eric Krapf, Editor | Nov 17, 2010 | http://www.nojitter.com

After all the names--"Wave 14", "Communications Server 14," "Office Communications Server," what is Microsoft Lync, the company's third-generation UC platform--and what does it do?

The short answer, from corporate VP and UC leader Gurdeep Singh Pall: "One thing Lync does is, it replaces your PBX," Gurdeep told the audience at the Lync launch in New York today.

"The era of the PBX is over," he added.

To drive home the point, Microsoft brought in Bill Gates, who appeared on a video link from Seattle to declare Unified Communications "Probably the most important thing to happen to the office worker since the PC came along." Gates predicted that in the future, "When you see someone's desk in a movie, and you see that separate phone, you'll say, 'Wow, that's before this [UC] happened.'"

The centerpiece of the announcement show was a demo of the new Lync client, which adds icons for easier navigation and pictures of your contacts that can be pulled from the SharePoint database or from any other social network store.

Microsoft officials hammered at the theme of "social" using this as a kind of mantra repeated often throughout the demo. The other overarching theme was integration with all the other Microsoft products--Office, Exchange and SharePoint, with which Gurdeep said that Lync "fits like a glove."

The client itself features buttons at the top with icons for "People," "Activity," "Redial" (a loose rendering; I'll explain below); and the Softphone. Click on the People button and you get a fairly traditional buddy list, with the photos and the colored presence indicator--formerly the round "jellybean"--now rendered as a bar next to the photo.

Pressing the Activity button takes you to a view of your contacts according to their most recent status updates in SharePoint--this was another point at which the "social" theme was hammered home.

Redial is, in Gurdeep's words, "The Mother of All Redials," by which he meant that it's really a listing of each contact that, when a person is clicked on, opens up your recent history of all contacts with that person, in all media; Gurdeep's eloquent way of explaining it is that, "With one click I can re-hydrate that session" that might have been started and stopped at some time in the past.

Finally, when it comes to the softphone, what's new is what's old: A layout that mimics a touch-tone pad. "In the past, we shied away from a three-by-four dialpad; we thought it was a throwback," Gurdeep said. Customers, however, said they wanted it.

Beyond the basic client, Microsoft also demonstrated a conference session featuring video and whiteboarding. In a demo with Chris Capossela, senior VP in charge of Microsoft's Office division, Gurdeep showed a Lync meeting experience using the Polycom CX5000 360-degree video input device that started its life as the Microsoft Roundtable. The system displayed the active speaker in the main frame, although the relative sizes of the video and whiteboard frames could be dynamically adjusted, as could the contact list.

Video was probably the one weak spot of this launch program. In the opening conversation between Capossela and Gates, Gates's end of the video featured jumpy video and out-of-sync video and audio. For this kind of high-definition video over the open Internet, that's not unheard-of or a fatal flaw, but it does show that the state of the art is still not what it should be.

One final demo featured Capossela in a living room setting, showing that Lync can integrate with Microsoft Kinect, to, as Capossela put it, "integrate the family room with the board room," to allow for home working in different formats.

Chris Capossela closed by noting that Lync works today on PCs, Macs, browsers, and of course desk phones; and he said Microsoft is committed to releasing Lync on the iPhone and Windows mobile phone in 2011. Additionally, in a move that may be very significant, Lync online will be available in the suite of applications that Microsoft makes available when its cloud-based Office 365 service debuts next year.

Much of today's announcement consisted of features and messages that Microsoft has been telegraphing for close to a year. Seeing it live, and hearing customers like Marquette University describe implementations where they actually are replacing PBXs with Lync, makes Gurdeep Singh Pall's declaration of the death of the PBX seem like a statement of the inevitable, albeit not the near-term reality.

And as far as the Lync client is concerned, my own personal impression from the demos was that it's not as elegant or slick as the Avaya Flare Experience, but it seems just as functional and usable; the buttons letting you take a different cut on your contacts, whether by name or communications history, or current activity, seems like a logical way to make these colleagues accessible to the user.