We are four people from Microsoft that work on Lync & Unified Communications - ask us anything!

Hi guys, thanks a lot for this AMA! I have a question from a user standpoint:

Are you deliberately trying to piss me off with Lync's incomprehensible and not intuitive interface?

Absolutely not. Although we were thinking of you throughout the development of every feature (not /u/loranda specifically but the users in general), we want to provide you with the most intuitive experience possible. One that is optimized for touch and multiple form factors, but also excels in a traditional scenario.

What pisses you off and how can we make it better? - Taimoor

I'll jump in: Having to hover to find anything. Bug riddled patches (The September one already has 2 identified). The Lync client randomly freezing and being non-responsive. Backtracking on changes to the notification area icon. Is it supposed to be more finger friendly? Because it is only barely better than the 2010 client on a Surface. Tracing files buried 242 directories deep which is tedious to talk end users through for log collection.

When joining a meeting with a presentation (PPT, Desktop share) it always defaults to Presenter view. This view is pointless and the first thing I do every time is switch to Content view. (Problem with presenter view: Static, low-res picture blocks part of the shared screen. I don't need to see their face. I know who is presenting). An option to set default sharing view would be really swell.

Those are the ones off the top of my head. I blame the Office team for most of this, not the Lync team. The 2010 client was solid and reliable. Once the Office group got their paws on it, it's been a mess.

Jamie here. Thanks for the feedback.

Hovering: I'm not a UX designer, but here's what I remember about the redesign process - as more and more capability gets put into Lync, we take a bunch of time to understand what users (as in actual customers, not "users" as in MSFT blue-badges) are doing with Lync and how to best get out of their way. Fundamentally, you're looking for the set of tradeoffs that optimizes the best for the most people - I know on the voice front, people are put off that transferring a call is buried in the voice menu....and they happen to be the folks that transfer a bunch of calls throughout the day. If we optimized for those users, everyone else would be put off that these voice functions they never used were front and center.

Bugs - yeah, they happen. We try to be as up front as possible about them, triage and fix.

Notification - bunch of customer feedback on this point so it got done. Same with spell check. Of anything, our team spends a ton of time collecting feedback from a bunch of different sources and getting it worked into our backlog. It helps that we're shipping more often so we can be more nimble here.

Surface - have you tried the Lync App?

I have Lync installed at my work. They say use it only for work purposes. I do not. Thanks for the IM client!

You're welcome! Be aware though that everything you type on Lync can be archived and searched by the admins. By default. Easily.

If they put in some third party gear they can also record all the media.

Jamie

Is this functionality also present in the O365 version of Lync?

Absolutely - here's a reference: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/lync-online-security-and-archiving.aspx

Jamie

Maybe I'm a big dumb and haven't had enough time with Lync yet, but is there any way to have multiple conversations with the same person logged chronologically? Whenever I look back through my messages, it has multiple "John Doe" conversations saved, but I think it would be better to just have one log with each user, possibly separated by "sessions."

This is good feedback. It does behave the way you mentioned today. - Taimoor

Why doesnt lync have spell check? Seriously EVERY other IM client in the world has it.

Do you have the latest updates installed. This made it in! - Taimoor

Thanks JusMorris :)

StimpyHD - here's the link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2825630

UGH. Edit - Jamie

I find general copy/paste/font formatting in Lync to be tiresome and not on par with a standard Windows application experience. is there any likelihood of improving these basic functions?

I would also like to know an answer to this. I hate that when I copy and paste code from VS 2012 with the dark theme it pastes it in the light colored fonts into the window so I have to manually select everything and change the color to something else and then back to black to get it into a readable state, since Lync has a white background. At least other office software allows you to select if you want to keep formatting or just the content.

Great point. By way of background, in other office apps when you paste you can choose to copy formatting, merge formatting, paste as text, etc. I'll check to see if this is on our backlog.

Jamie

The latest versions of Lync 2013 brings ability to paste pictures and paste without formatting. What is still missing in your opinion?

Which version are you on that allows you to paste pictures?

Lync 2013, latest (September) update. Download here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2825630

Jamie

does lync come with NSA mandatory rootkit to steal company data and penetrate networks?

I don't think so. I certainly haven't been involved in any spec reviews for rooting Lync. But of course, if I was and I told you so I would go to jail, right? Ugh. Our head lawyer wants to change this: http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2013/08/30/standing-together-for-greater-transparency.aspx

Here's another way to look at it - 90 of the Fortune 100 use Lync (http://lyncdup.com/2013/04/microsoft-q3-2013-lync-revenue-grew-over-30-again-90-of-the-fortune-100-use-lync/) Generally, this crowd is pretty paranoid about security.

Jamie

Why can't I close Lync by clicking the "close window" button? This is wildly infuriating.

Why do you want to close Lync?

So Lync is based on two fundamental services - identity and presence. If you close the application, it can't represent your presence and you just show as offline. If you need to get work done, go into "Do Not Disturb". We found that for the majority of users, if we made the default behavior of clicking the "X" in the application "shut down" users would forget and leave it off.

Jamie

Why do you want to close <insert product name here>?

One of the things I never want to hear from a developer.

By all means put in a confirmation but whether it's Lync, Spotify or anyone else, a user should be able to freely and simply close a non-vital application.

To disregard such a fundamental function shows a sad disregard for your users imho.

<sigh> As a Spotify user, this does irritate me. The only thing I can hold on to for explaining is that Spotify's goal in life is to serve me ads for male skin care products. Lync represents my presence to the world. Now I would likely notice that Lync isn't running - my Outlook would appear really boring and static - but the feedback we've gotten has been the opposite.

I'll take this back though....Thanks for the feedback. Jamie

What is the biggest hardware hurdle in the way of giving people a really connected experience? What hardware do you wish was prevalent, but isn't?

That's a great question. I wouldn't say there is a hurdle as such. I wish HD cameras were more prevalent.

I personally wish I had a logo on my shirt that I could touch and call on Jamie whenever I wanted. I like to pretend I'm captain Kirk sometimes. - Taimoor

Except Kirk never had a com badge. That was Picard.

Fair point. Im sure Kirk would have wanted one though. - Taimoor

This is Jamie. Agreed with Taimoor on the camera thing - you know when we first started out with Communicator doing VoIP hardware manufacturers were doing terrible things with their microphones - putting them right over the hard drive so you would hear the stepping motor during your call, crap like that.

Our program for qualifying devices (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/lync/gg278164) has helped tremendously here, both for raw audio quality and ensuring companies have lots of choice for great headsets / handsets / cameras.

got a few questions-

If I sign up for lync to skype connection now can I still get pic connectivity, specifically aim?

Why are you stopping support for aim and yahoo with so many people still using it? I understand you bought skype but I could sell a lot more lync packages if I could promise aim connectivity

When I asked an MS reseller about lync with enterprise voice I was told I needed standard, enterprise and plus lync cals. That was expected, the reseller then told me that I needed windows server and sql cals? Is that true if I just used an existing sql instance? or could I just buy sql licenses.

For the edge server in lync 2013 if I do not put my external IPs directly on the internet without a NAT - I then need 2 subnets in my perimeter network? Seems like a lot of extra work.

There are a few reasons why aim and yahoo are being discontinued. The most important one however was the fact that in a federation such as that, it is important for connectivity to have an SLA. Something people could rely on. Unfortunately we were not able to get those SLA's from those federation partners and therefore couldn't risk jeopardizing the experience.

You can indeed use an existing SQL instance, though we recommend a dedicated instance for management, troubleshooting and scalability. If you have a smaller deployment, you could also use a standard edition deployment.

I'm not sure I fully understand your edge question.

• Taimoor

Can you talk about the future of Lync and Skype? Are the two products going to merge one day or always remain lync = business, skype = consumer?

Jamie here.

So we don't have anything to announce here on this AMA, but will give you my take. You're absolutely right on how we look at the world today - Lync for businesses, Skype for consumers. Happy to go into that in more depth if anyone is interested.

When Microsoft bought Skype, the first thing we did was align the engineering organizations. It didn't make sense for us to have two groups of folks thinking about codecs for example - let's have one group think about codecs, about signaling stacks, etc.

We've done the same thing on the Marketing side. The group I work for all think about Lync, but report up through the same marketing organization as Skype (not Office....)

The majority of the work today is on advancing the connections between the products. We have Skype to Lync connectivity now for contact list, presence, IM & voice but clearly that's not enough - we need to do video next and then a bunch of other scenarios as well. That's going to keep us busy for quite a long time....

</marketing>

Can you make it so i can use animated Gif's as my avatar, would be a hoot in my office.

And being able to add custom emoticons. Seeing a beer icon is fine. Seeing an animated smiley drinking a beer? Full of win.

Great stuff. I'm sending a screen capture of this to the guy who would be responsible for this :) - Taimoor

We all probably know the answer, but I'll ask anyway :-P

Lync (and Outlook++) clients for Linux, Mac, BSD etc?

Edit: Kudos on creating something that I at least have seen a good alternative to (the whole integrated experience with email, chat and probably a lot more I never need for my work experience) :-)

We have Lync clients for Mac OS. Our partners have innovated and created some clients for Linux (Ubuntu) as well. Check out xavy clients from Damaka. - Taimoor

I sell commercial headsets from Jabra, Plantronics, Sennheiser, you know... all the standards.

Not one person has ever been able to explain to me the advantage of a Microsoft Lync optimized model, and as a result I've never sold one.

What exactly makes a headset Lync optimized, as opposed to a standard UC certification?

The spec is actually pretty involved. As sleyland says below a bunch of it is around USB HID (Human Interface Device) specifications around the controls on the device. We want to ensure when you plug in the device Lync recognizes it, renders it in the client correctly and provides the right set of functions. There are also audio requirements - we ensure that the speaker and microphone render and consume full bandwidth audio for example (instead of just having the electronics do 16Khz audio but the speaker or mic not being able to reproduce it).

Jamie

Hi guy's, thanks for the AMA.

My question is regarding screen sharing in Lync.

Currently if any kind of admin password is required it puases screen sharing, you have said on the forums that this is on purpose.

Surely you can see how, from an administrator perspective, this is completely useless. We currently have to use a different screen sharing application whenever we want to change anything and its quite frankly ridiculous.

Thanks, Will

Thanks for coming out!

So totally see where you're coming from. As I'm sure you can see where another administrator would want to ensure that Lync screen sharing doesn't present any security back-doors into their network.

Would a switch on the policy side help? I don't know off the top of my head about scoping (forest, pool, group, user) but I wonder if we can't offer an option here - essentially that a particular user in a screen share (or a given session?) can get at the admin prompts for troubleshooting. I don't know if it goes against the SDL principles (http://www.microsoft.com/security/sdl/default.aspx) but it's worth considering. Would that work?

Jamie

any improvements to multi party HD vid conferencing? the 5 head limit, etc.

We provide 5 video streams in the gallery. Honestly, we feel, any more than 5 streams would become very distracting. We do switch out the active speaker and have pretty cool algorithms in figuring out who should be in the active video row. What do you think we should do? - Taimoor

I prefer Cisco's telepresence method of switching who's displayed by who's been most active on the call, but lets be honest here, what we really want is to do is create a Brady Bunch style screen. So I would say 9 is the number to shoot for! What do you think /u/LyncTeam ?

Jamie here.

We looked at a bunch of different designs here. One thing that brady-bunch (NxN as opposed to Nx1) does is suck up real-estate for collaboration (PowerPoint presenting, Screen sharing, etc.) We try to balance that in the most optimal way possible with the current design with the 'standing row' of active video and 'sitting row' of pictures.

Can you run Lync over a satellite circuit? We have offices in some really remote places and the only way we can get network in there is over VSAT. My biggest concern is latency - anywhere from 550-900ms.

This is Jamie. totally agree with everything Taimoor just said. One thing you can try is fire up a WAN simulator between two endpoints. I did this at Miercom to try and break the healing characteristics of the media stack by doing terrible things - 20% packet loss, 2000ms delay, jitter, etc. Not only was it pretty fun but you can exercise the stack and get an idea of where things go from "great" to "passable" to "let's just use IM"

Why is it that when I send a hyperlink to a coworker in a Lync chat it works just fine but if I send one to several coworkers at once in a group chat all they see is a blank message?

I just tested this with our internal IM chat we have to coordinate the AMA, logging into Lync Web App using FFX. It worked. Here's a screenshot that took way too long to take: http://i.imgur.com/mpqG6Xa.png

So maybe there's a conference policy preventing URLs?

As an IT admin, I ask that you please fix it so that when UAC prompts come up during a screen share, that I can enter in the creds and continue.

This was answered above by Jamie. - Taimoor

What's the difference between Lync and Skype and Outlook Instant Messaging?

Lync integrates with your Active Directory, Exchange and Office Applications. It provides instant messaging, peer to peer voice and video, desktop and application sharing, multi-party conferencing and can replace your PBX. Everything can be controlled and managed by policy.

Jamie

Callcenter Engineer here and I have a crapton of questions. I'll try to limit them. 1. Are there any plans to simplify federation? As a provider of professional services for large companies, I find it very difficult to convince them to enable it even though it would vastly improve communications. 2. SIP Integration for Office365 - I'm just a guy and don't have a Lync server in my home, are there plans to point it to a sip trunk or as a SIP phone to an existing PBX 3. Please say you are diligently working on the Skype federation debacle that it is currently. 4. I was an Aspect guy before now that their product is horrible I'm a Cisco UCCE guy. I see Taimoor has a bit of experience there, are there plans to integrate easily with UCCE as a 5million times better version of CAD? 5. I want to get into Lync Server's IVR functionality (formerly TellMe right?) What are my options for getting hands on with it if my company and my customers don't use it? Is there a lab install guide to put it all in a VM, give it some SIP trunks and make test calls? 6. Where can I find some decent documentation for getting started using it as an IVR? Everything I see says go take a course, I see the value in it but at the same time I don't have the means to actually make that happen without much better justification that would come with a bit of "real world"ish hands on. (Yes I'm a Technet Subscriber so I can download the full server but the resource requirements are a bit much for a home lab) Finally, can you please reverse Microsoft's decision on closing Technet

This is Jamie. I'll take a shot here...

1.) What's the blocker to federation? Is it security, complexity, understanding the value? There are TONS of companies federating using Lync - for new customers who come into the Executive Briefing Center, I joke at the very least it's an awesome way to get your Microsoft Account managers / Sales people anytime, anywhere when something goes sideways. Customers have an "ah ha!" moment. Sales people look worried. Transparency is good.

2.) Nothing to announce on the SIP trunking side - it's not a simple problem. But you can hook up a Lync Phone Edition endpoint to Lync Online - we supported that with the latest release.

3.) We're always working to make this better and triage between new end-user features, manageability, etc.

4.) You'll need to ask Cisco. They don't document their protocols like Lync does.

5.) Nope - the IVR functionality historically came from Microsoft Speech Server (my first job at MSFT!) but has changed a ton since then. You can download the 2013 virtual machines which can give you a playground for a lab environment - check them here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40266

6.) MSDN has all the best information on the developer side: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/lync

One more, Any plans on making Lync "free" soon? I think it's a great chat client and if you guys get the Skype federation working well then it means I can delete the horrible Skype application from my computer. If you make Lync Online free then I'm sure more users would make the switch.

We have a basic client that is free (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/lync-help/what-is-lync-basic-HA103437092.aspx) and we give away the clients for IOS, Android, Windows Phone, Windows App Store, etc.

If folks just want to try it out, you can always do a trial of Office 365 here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/compare-office-365-for-business-plans-FX102918419.aspx?WT%2Eintid1=ODC%5FENUS%5FFX102004552%5FXT103977427&WT%2Eintid2=ODC%5FENUS%5FFX102918418%5FXT104063440

Sorry for the horrid URL. Jamie

Crap, ignore the "ok Really, last one" part of the last reply. What is with LyncOnline and audio conferencing? I go to the list "one of the audio conferencing providers in the Office 365 Marketplace." and it only has BT Conferencing, which gets HORRIBLE reviews. Give us better integration options with audio. Uberconference would be nice :)

Sorry for all the replies, not everyday that Reddit has a focus on my industry :)

It's all good on the replies. I think the marketplace is sorted by geography - it's my understanding that we have more ACPs with Lync Online but I wonder if they're not showing because they don't serve your geography. pinging my colleague for a list....

Jamie

Hi LyncTeam, we're currently paying our exchange provider (Telus in canada) for communicator 2007. I'm just wondering why a large company such as Telus hasn't moved over to Lync yet. Are there a lot of changes / costs required to move from communicator 2007 r2 to Lync?

Just seems a bit silly to be using office 2013 and communicator 2007 when there's a better version out. I'd love to be able to use my tablet to chat when i'm away from my desk. Thanks!

Good point. We are trying to work with providers such as Telus to help provide you with the functionality you need. Your own feedback is probably important too :) - Taimoor

Hey, Lync Team.

What department at the NSA typically listens in on our Lync conversations?

It's not that I'm angry about it, because I know you give them access. I would just like to be able to address them in the conversation and tell them hello.

Yay! Our first NSA question!

Big surprise, we don't know any more than you do. Our chief lawyer wants to change that: http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2013/08/30/standing-together-for-greater-transparency.aspx

• Jamie

Thanks for doing that AMA!

Two questions:

• I keep mixing up Lync (your product) and Linq (from C#)... Which one was first and why didn't the other one pick a more distinct name?
• I very much appreciate the idea of unified communication. However, I think that unified communication basically should mean unified but open communication standards, to enable every last product to jump on the same bandwagon and actually unify something instead of adding another single (proprietary) solution to the pool of incompatible approaches. How could this be accomplished by Microsoft (of all companies)? Don't confuse this for the age-old open-source-everything-demand. You should earn your money with your implementation. But what other way are you trying to go if not that of open protocols and standards?

Thanks for your time!

1.) Because us Marketing folks went through a crazy amount of work to get to Lync. I have no idea which was first but I honestly don't remember Linq even coming into the conversation. If that was because it was a bunch of Marketing people who cannot spell "SEE POUND SIGN" or another reason I can't say. Sorry for the confusion.

2.) Lync uses open protocols as much as we possibly can. SIP, SDP, TLS, SRTP, ICE, STUN, TURN, etc. The thing is, this space is moving crazy fast - customers are asking us for more capability yesterday. So for anything we implement that isn't codified in an industry standard, we document the protocols completely in the Office Protocol Documentation (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc307432(v=office.12).aspx We're the second-most open IP-PBX to Asterisk - we don't give you the source code.

On a related point, this is a big part of our strategy. We like open - it means that everything from phones to gateways can plug into Lync and customers get tons of choice on features, pricing, etc. More here: http://technet.microsoft.com/UCOIP

Jamie

Hello! We are currently rolling out Lync 2013 company wide (1000 users). I have to give a few training sessions next month and was wondering what the main issues people having with Lync from a user side. To me it seems pretty straight forward and is awesome. We have a small pilot group that didn't report anything. Any tips to how I should approach these training sessions would be great!

Have a look at the Lync 2013 rollout and adoption success kit here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/lync/jj879331.aspx . This includes a lot of good content covering various aspects of a Lync deployment. Planning, Training, Helpdesk, Ops etc. For example, there's a doco with common issues for the helpdesk. Any feedback on this content would be appreciated! - Stefan

I think good training strategy is to work out the most popular use case scenarios and walk through those.- Taimoor

Have you seen the Rollout and Adoption Success Kit (RASK), we released for Lync 2013? http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=37032

For me, the important thing to about end user training is making is real for them in their daily routine. Focusing on little time savers, and standard tasks. - Craig

Everyone says Microsoft is one of the most difficult companies to interview for. What was the interview process like? Any ridiculously hard questions come to mind?

There is some pretty smart people working for Microsoft. Not a day goes by that I don't learn something new. Cant think of a particularly tough question I was asked since its been years, but ill come back to this if I remember. - Taimoor

Yeah I'd like to report a bug - it seems italics doesn't like to turn off right away.

Also, can you just remove the emoticons altogether? Seems unprofessional and as a developer, there have been a few times where an emoticon is sent instead of the actual text lol

I accidentally sent a coworker lips once instead of (k)... awkward!

That is awkward. What was the reaction. We will look into this seems interesting. -Taimoor

Do you expect to have any open standards in Lync?

Specifically XMPP or anything remotely similar?

Lync 2013 has an XMPP gateway built in. Further, Lync uses SIP as the underlying protocol for everything it does. Lync provides SIP interop with most major IP telephony systems and gateways. Lync supports H.264 for High definition video. What other standards are you looking for? -Taimoor

I'm working on a Lync implementation and need to know. What FIPS 140-2 compliant encryption is supported for SRTP?

You have to make sure the underlying OS is correctly configured but both Lync Server 2013 and Exchange 2010 operate with support for FIPS 140-2. See more here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg398577.aspx -Stefan

Thank you very much for is IAMA, why can't i upload a picture to lync to use as a profile picture, i have to upload the pic to a website first !!

We use pictures that are stored in Active Directory. We think that is the best representation of your corporate image. Plus, we need a place to store it so people looking you up can retrieve it. -Taimoor

Hi! Thanks for the AMA.

I'm a gamer and I stream, and I use skype to communicate with my teammates. When playing at a certain level of competitiveness there can be some foul play. Is there any plan to shore up the security of Skype/Lync? Last time i checked people can still easily obtain your IP address (resolve skype name) when using one of these programs and then proceed to ddos the target. Are there any features I'm missing to further enhance my security without having to use a different more secure program? Or is that my only option, among others , such as, paying for proxy services?

Thanks,

All the best,

Rob

Wow, that's certainly a scenario that has never crossed my mind before. =) Just to make sure I understand, are you saying that someone outside the people you communicate with can find your IP because you are using SKype/Lync? On The Lync side, you would need to communicate with that person or somehow be in the network path between the user-user or user-server in order to see the IP.

Thanks guys, appreciate the time.

Question: Is there a way to prevent Lync from adjusting my microphone recording volume down to 40% all the time?

I use other voice programs, and have to adjust my recording volume quite often and Lync just doesn't seem to care. Any way to lock that down so that when I get a Lync voice call or conference it doesn't adjust my mic input? Heck, most times I answer the call on my CX600 (not USB tethered) and my desktop mic volume is still impacted.

Thanks for taking the time to ask questions! =)

Are you saying that if you go in to the Lync Options, Audio Device Settings, and adjust the mic level per device that this doesn't get saved? When is it going back to 40%, when you open the Lync app again? -Stefan

At my place of business, we get a lot of support calls from users who get credential prompts after changing their passwords. We find that this is normally caused by stored credentials, the communication server certificate, the SIP profile or the registry keys for Lync.

What I'm curious about is why does this occur? Is this an issue with how our company has things set up, or is this an inherent flaw with changing passwords ever 90 days? I don't have an extensive knowledge about how my business has everything set up as I'm not upper level support, but I know they run Exchange 2010, Outlook 2007 and Lync 2010.

Make sure you deploy the latest client update as I have seen some fixes around this in the past. We also have a support article with suggestions here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2298541 -Stefan

Thanks for the AMA. At work we use Lync for communications. I really want to like the software, but unfortunately I always have issues with screen sharing. On Mac OS X I always get the "Sharing failed to connect due to network issues." Is this a common problem in your issues queue?

What version of the Mac client are you using? Jamie

So.... how you guys doing?

Doing good so far. Seeing some smoke come out of my keyboard. Haven typed this much in a while. - Taimoor

Not so much a question, but I work for a very large, multi-multi country company. We were previously using OCS, but now the majority of the company has moved to Lync.

It was certainly a change, but I give you kudos from the changes you made to make some things easier. In particular desktop sharing (and control) as well as multi user phone conferences became a lot easier to use in Lync.

The version we run still has some bugs in it, but I believe that is due to software updates being slow and severely lagged in the company.

So, like I said, thanks for improving what you did. Looking forward to further improvements.

Thank you very much for your comments. Keep Lyncing :) - Taimoor

When is support for Lync-Skype video expected to be released?

And when it is released will it be p2p video only (like live messenger was) or will Skype users be able to join multi-party calls?

Great questions. Unfortunately don't have any more specific timeframes for you, other than what was announced in Feb. 12-18 months (from feb). - Taimoor

Have any of you been involved in the Lync Room System developments? have you worked with any or much of the different hardware partners products yet?

We have worked very closely with our partners. What would you like to know? - Taimoor

Hi thanks for the AMA!

What do you think of the Cucilync integration?

I know your goals regarding recording. Why is the resolution fixed to 800x600? Why do you think it's worth to sacrafice the ability to create good quality training videos for the goals you had?

It makes us happy to know that cisco wants to create plugins and applications on top of Lync. Having said that, CuCiLync involves a level of complexity that I don't think provides any value. Multiple clients to deploy, to manage, to support and to interoperate. Plus it takes away all the cool things around media and conferencing that Lync can do. - Taimoor

Have there been any thoughts or discussions internally in at least moving the AutoAttendant feature out of Exchange UM and into Lync? Having to bring up Exchange UM for a pass-through automated answering service seems a bit much while it would be a perfect fit as a native Lync feature. (Think of SBA's and small office survivability who rely on an AutoAttendant).

Its a great thought. Have you explored the response group feature of Lync. Some powerful stuff there. As for the resiliency, we are always looking for ways to make this better. This has come up before as well and we understand this is a need. - Taimoor

Lync isnt just for work???

You can call your friends and family on Skype and they would be none the wiser. - Taimoor

Does Lync use LINQ under the hood?

We could tell you, but then you'd have to sign some paperwork. - Taimoor

Just wondering where you see the UC and soft switch market heading over the next two to three years? What are the customers asking for?

Its a great question. I don't get to look at my crystal ball much. Its a fantastically diverse market and I don't think there is a one size fits all. Having said that, Lync is seeing tremendous market growth for voice and telephony. We think that its going to be a device centric market as users want to be more mobile, use a diverse set of devices and have ubiquitous communication functions. - Taimoor

I just started using Lync this week at the company I work for. So far I like it, just need to learn more about it. Any online tutorials? What are some cool features that I should try? Thanks

Yes! Training for all the Office applications is here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/support/training-FX101782702.aspx

(and for the IT Pros that are reading this - check out the Lync 2013 Rollout and Adoption Success Kit here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=37030 - tons of great resources for end-user adoption)

Jamie

moving from exchange 2010 to 2013 some users have lost the ability to manage groups of people on their buddy lists ("cannot add,remove,or move contacts at this time...") - any ideas on these? also Moving over to enterprise voice from callmanager - any crazy gotchas I should look for? Whens the next service pack coming out? --- thanks guys keep up the good work!

Hmm, the exchange issue is intriguing.

No crazy gotchas, you will have a lot more time to Reddit because of the time you will save looking for and communicating with people. :)

Thanks for the comments. - Taimoor

[deleted]

This is indeed important. Although I don't have a schedule for you, ill try and find out. I know that a smiley drinking beer has been proposed in this thread before. - Taimoor

Why doesn't Lync work with MOC and vice-versa? When will we get an iPhone app for MOC?

By MOC do you mean Microsoft Office Communicator? If yes, then im not sure by what you mean, doesn't work? Lync Server is backwards compatible with clients. What version of server and client are you running? - Taimoor

Does your team work on the the Mac version of Lync as well? Why are there so many deviations in the versions?

We strive to keep feature parity for the lync clients, but because of the platform differences and the design languages required, some deviations are inevitable. - Taimoor

Trying to maintain a text conversation from Deloitte to HP using federated lync felt like I was being whisked back to pre 2000 levels of instant messaging. I don't know if it's an issue with the infrastructure of the companies or the protocol, but every message would need to be sent 2-3 times because they would always "fail to send" or "fail to connect" or some other error

There is definitely something wrong with that. I've personally had federated conversations with one of those companies and haven't had any issues. I would guess its an Infrastrucutre issue. - Taimoor

Hi, are there any plans that Skype and Lync will come closer togther. Personally I prefer the Lync Desktop Client more than the Skype. Since Microsoft has now different division which should work closer, then it should be possible to share the code.

Jamie has talked more about this above. We have brought together the engineering teams and continue to evolve to bring the best experiences forward. - Taimoor

My company launches Lync next month & I can't wait. What do you suggest I do to get my department to buy in & start using it? (especially the hard core mac users)

Send everyone a joke everyday over Lync :)

We have a lot of adoption videos that you could share with you. Look for Rollout and adoption kit on bing.

Im excited for you and your company. Do lots of video. Drag and drop people into conferences. - Taimoor