Those of us who found Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 to be a bit of a mouthful will be happy to note that its name, going forward, is now Microsoft Lync. Today, Microsoft announced the “release candidate” for a broad suite of unified communications software that will carry the Microsoft Lync brand. It is available as a free download here. It includes the Lync 2010 client software (formerly known as Communicator) and Lync Server 2010 (formerly known as Office Communications Server).

The products will be generally available before year’s end. So will details regarding the availability of Lync online (a hosted version of the server software) and Lync Web App (a Web-standard conformant client). All support initiation enterprise enterprise voice, instant messaging and web-, audio- and videoconferencing into a new, connected communications experience.

As noted in the press release, more than 120 enterprise customers have already been engaged in the Microsoft Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for Lync. Likewise 30 partners have announced beta versions of Lync-compatible hardware, software or services – though finding details on the partnerships has been very difficult.

Rebranding and packaging of the Unified Communications suite is a timely (and most likely expensive) step for Microsoft. From our perspective, OCS has been a major “win” in Microsoft’s efforts to dominate enterprise IT “from the desktop in” as employees use it to initiate instant messaging, conferencing and other forms of real time communications. Existing customers and partners will find Lync to be a more coherent way to integrate email, messaging and collaboration tools embedded in legacy Office, Exchange and Sharepoint installations.

As we suspected when we issued this briefing after the SpeechTek Conference in New York City, the speech processing capabilities – once packaged as SpeechServer and began its disappearing act when it was integrated into Microsoft OCS 2007 – have evaporated from Lync. The target isn’t so much voice dialing, message dictation, or voice-to-text translation as integration of telephony and messaging into productivity software.

Classic Interactive Voice Response (IVR) has totally disappeared from Microsoft’s UC repetoire. This confirmed what we were told by Tellme’s Grant Shirk during a briefing at SpeechTek. In essence, speech-enabled IVR applications will be instantiated “in the cloud” by Tellme. This will make for some very challenging development efforts as competitors in the world of RC (Recombinant Communications) simplify the process of adding speech recognition in ways that promote both collaboration and customer care in ways that transcend traditional boundaries between individuals in contact centers, cubicles, home offices and mobile situations.

It will be interesting to delve into the areas of intersection between Lync and the broader challenges associated with developing and promoting its “natural user interface”.

Categories: Articles

Tags: speech processing, Microsoft, Unified Communications, Collaboration