The enterprise version of Lync lists for $4,000, with CAL licenses costing from $31 to $107 each. As is Microsoft's way, Microsoft claims to be the lower-cost option. However, Cisco's network gear has also been certified to work with Lync. Lync/Juniper/Polycom competes directly with Cisco/Tandberg. Once upon a time, Microsoft and Cisco were friends - no longer. The list also included new cameras, IP phones and display devices introduced by Polycom designed for Lync. Among Lync's certified gear are Juniper's routers and switches. What I found most interesting in the news today is the over 70 devices optimized for Lync, many of them new. The lack of that feature in OCS kept many enterprises from adopting it (and certainly from yanking out their PBX in favor of Lync). The big news for the enterprise is that Lync now supports E911 with location detection. That cloud version will be part of Microsoft's own SaaS offering built on Office 2010, Office 365 - the next generation of Microsoft Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS) suite. Trial versions of Lync are available today and the product will be available in December, with the cloud version available in 2011. Previous versions of Microsoft's IP PBX were called Office Communications Server (OCS), but with the new Office 2010 version, the company came up with the new name of name Lync. It also promised that support for Lync on the iPhone, Windows Phone 7 and the Xbox with Kinect would be coming later this year. The company lined up an impressive array of over 70 hardware devices certified to support Lync. UPDATED 11/18/10: As expected, on Wednesday Microsoft officially launched its next generation audio/video conferencing "PBX replacement" dubbed Lync.
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