Microsoft Lync Released to Manufacturing
Today I have the pleasure of blogging about the final engineering milestone for Microsoft Lync 2010 - the next release of Office Communications Server and Communicator - also known as Release to Manufacturing, or RTM. We're incredibly excited about this release as it's really the culmination of a five-year journey to help customers transform the way they communicate. This platform has evolved over the past few years. Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS 2007; released November 2007) introduced Communicator and a totally new experience for enterprise IM, presence and conferencing built into the Office applications people use every day. In February 2009, OCS 2007 R2, added on premise audio conferencing that was easy to manage, saved customers money, added core enterprise telephony features, and better supported collaboration through richer online meetings and ad hoc conversations via Communicator.
The Lync 2010 release takes collaboration and productivity to the next level by:
- Providing a single platform that integrates the various modes of communication necessary for people and businesses to be productive. It does this for the end user via a single client experience, and on the back-end with a unified infrastructure and management experience. We knew that for customers to see real value, they would need to achieve cost savings that come from bringing this all together as well as a smart interface to encourage user adoption.
- Enabling an extensible and open platform that invites corporate and professional developers around the world to help us provide customers with greater flexibility. Many developers are already reshaping their business models based on the Lync platform. For example, Joe Schurman, a Microsoft partner at Evangelyze Communications, recently said that the Lync platform "has forever changed how our organization develops and produces software." The success here will be driven by our open approach to interoperability which enables Lync to work with existing communications systems while implementing a single API set across all modes of communication, simplifying the developer experience.
- Rounding out enterprise voice capabilities so that Lync can help the broadest set of customers reduce legacy infrastructure costs and enhance that infrastructure with an incredibly rich set of softphone capabilities. Employees are able to work more effectively from home, on the road, or in any number of evolving workplace scenarios.
- Supporting our partner community by enabling them to provide an optimized experience with Lync. This is exemplified by the enormous range of devices available from partners around the world. We and our partners will have a ton more to say about the advances here at launch.
What's next for Lync? The final milestone is general availability (GA), which means making Lync 2010 available to customers and partners around the world. We're on track for GA and planning a worldwide launch event on Wednesday, November 17, 2010. We hope you'll tune in here: https://www.microsoft.com/lync to watch live demos of the final product, see examples from the more than 100 new Lync certified devices and hear from customers who have deployed early releases of Lync 2010. The launch event, to be broadcast live, will feature a keynote from Chris Capossela, senior vice president of the Microsoft Office Division, who will talk about how Lync fits into Microsoft's broader productivity platform, including SharePoint, Exchange and Office. Chris will be joined by a few special guests, including Gurdeep Singh Pall, corporate vice president of the Office Communications Group and Lync R&D team.
If you caught our Office 365 disclosure last week, you saw that the next version of cloud productivity from Microsoft will also deliver the 2010 suite of products, including Office, Sharepoint, Exchange and Lync, to customers of all sizes. Additionally, Lync Online will federate with consumer communication applications like Windows Live Messenger (now supporting high definition audio and video), and with IM and presence with AOL, Yahoo!, Google and Jabber. Getting connected with others is a beautiful thing!
On behalf of the entire team, I want to thank our customers and partners who have helped us reach this milestone. Kudos to the incredible Lync product team who have been marching hard with three major releases in as many years to deliver the platform our customers and partners have been waiting for. We look forward to hearing your feedback on Microsoft Lync.
Kirk Gregersen, Senior Director
Comments
Anonymous
January 01, 2003
Where do I find the technology changes between the RC and the RTM application. There shouldn't have been any changes to the schemas for the SQL databses or AD, but i would like to make sure.Anonymous
January 01, 2003
JP, there is no supported upgrade path from RC to RTM as the Release Candidate documentation stated that it should only be deployed in test labs and not into a production forest. Only organizations involved in TAP/RDP early-adopter programs with Microsoft were assisted with in-place upgrades from build-to-build: blogs.technet.com/.../upgrading-lync-server-2010-release-candidate-to-rtm-no.aspx Also no Schema changes were reported between RC/RTM but until the code (or an official statement) is released there is the possibility that something was changed. Additionally the public release (GA) of the software itself is slated for Nov 17 as Kirk stated in this article, RTM is an internal-only product release and signifies that the code itself is 100% locked and finalized. Full documentation will likely be released and posted to TechNet on the same date, and this will include migration paths and all other documentation not yet available. This covers the coexistence scenarios which do include paths for both OCS 2007 and 2007 R2.Anonymous
October 27, 2010
Will they be an upgrade path from RC to RTM ?Anonymous
October 27, 2010
Where can we download the source ? Is it available to MS partners ?Anonymous
October 27, 2010
Where can we download the source ? Is it available to MS partners ?Anonymous
October 28, 2010
Do we have the OCS R2 to Lync migration document released and if so where can I download it from?Anonymous
October 28, 2010
Can Lync Server coexist with an OCS 2007 environment? I mean would it break my OCS 2007 setup if I installed Lync Server in the same domain?Anonymous
October 28, 2010
Martin - Lync 2010 and OCS 2007 can coexist. The migration path would be moving the users from OCS 2007 to Lync 2010. Microsoft usually releases documentation, blog articles, and TechNet articles detailing the migraiton/upgrade path.Anonymous
October 29, 2010
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October 29, 2010
Microsoft - release source code? Have you guys not taken your meds today?Anonymous
October 29, 2010
What percentage of Lync users do you estimate will have hardphones?Anonymous
October 31, 2010
Hi All, I need documentation for this because I want to make a total deployment guide for my blog kindly let me know that from where can I download the deployment guide if its available on partner's site or even any other place? Regards. Shafaquat Ali.Anonymous
November 03, 2010
The comment has been removedAnonymous
November 09, 2010
Unfortunately Eric, in the RC version, none of these features are available..Anonymous
November 12, 2010
When is the complete documentation of Lync 2010 SDK intended to release.Are there any changes in the SDK from that of OCS 2007 SDK. Are the WMI classes present in OCS 2007 available in Lync 2010. waiting for your comments!!! Regards Hakim Dilawar Hussain