When we think of Road Warriors, we don't always think of Mad Max! We know some of you, from CIO to Sales Professionals, are stuck in a car, zipping up & down the motorway chasing the latest deal, business partnership or problem solving that on-site customer issue. We're thinking of you, and we want to tell you about Lync!

"GO ON THEN."

In the past, checking in to get email, conversation history, documents and such like all meant not only connecting to the Internet, but then piggy-backing onto a flakier than flaky VPN connection put together by your IT Dept. and held together with hope & faith. Not always easy on the M26 with only 3G for company, and a data cable tethering your phone to your laptop, (excuse the dog bitemarks) 

WELL NO MORE OF THESE PROBLEMS MY FRIENDS.

With Lync, simply login via your smartphone, fire up your Lync client to take calls on the move. If you have your laptop connected to the Internet, browse with easy historic conversations, and share files with your colleagues back at the office simply with drag and drop. No more VPN - no more drama.

You can see here how awesomely easy it is to just share anything from files, your screen, a whiteboard, all from the comfort of your office. In most cases, a Diesel Mondeo!?

"How else can Lync help me when out on the road."

We're glad you asked, when it comes to making calls, quality is carrier grade. If your client is on Lync too, you can chat, IM and see presence direct from your mobile or laptop. Presense is a massive help, especially when out of the office, all your team know exactly where you are, even if it is cooped up in a hot car in the middle of Barnsley!

You can even govern who can see what, and its easy as ABC to configure the options straight from the Lync client.

" I want one of those fan-dangled headsets, you know, for that Call-Centre look"

Then no problem, Server Centre have partnered with Jabra, to offer a range of Lync certified high quality USB headsets so you too can look like Madonna. Whats more, try our Lync demo for 30 days and we'll even offer you a headset for free when you have five or more Lync accounts. We can't say fairer than that  surely!?

So we use Lync throughout our org as our main communication tool. We love it. It's our telephone system.
Sometimes it's our meeting sharing space, sometimes its our web video conferencing system. Sometimes we use
its IM features to arrange drinks on a Friday. But this week we've been tinkering to truly understand the
potential of Lync, and its plug in library which of course, will get bigger as time goes on.

We're social here at Server Centre, and we feel it's important to leverage every aspect of Social Media,
so we were happy to see two plugins this week, the first although labelled 'Lync Social' isn't quite what
you'd initially think.

Developed by Xstran, it scans incoming emails and identifies if the sender uses Lync and suppports
federation. It then pops up a box (see below) asking whether you want to move them to your contacts
list. You can download it here

The second is more social, and allows you to update your Linkedin & Twitter using the Status update
directly in the link client, prefixing anything with a custom command, typically #LI or #TW etc, but
these really can be anything. It's a great way of updating your professional status in one place,
and you can download the tool here.

We've been busy here at Server Centre this week, getting our provisioning tool up & running for all our partners, and
potential new partners & resellers.

Anyone who tinkers with Lync under the hood, will know that as a product, its quite complicated. Using a combination of
scripting & powershell commands to build & create both the environment configuration & the users themselves, it's not
always for the faint hearted.

At Server Centre, we have a bespoke provisioning tool which gives you a full graphic point-and-click interface, whilst it
squirrels away under-the-hood, and performs all the complex PowerShell scripting. It's awesome, and it's something we like to call JARVIS.

No, it's not quite akin to IronMan's home based artificial intelligence, but it's just as good. You can walk yourself through
every step of provisioning a user for Lync, Hosted Exchange & even Sharepoint if need be. As a partner opportunity, we're I suspect the ONLY people in the UK to offer a slick all-in-one provisioning tool for you, our valued partner & resellers.

 If you want to see JARVIS in action, and fancy setting up your own Lync accounts ready to resell, why not get in touch with us today on 0845 413 3800.

We have just recently come back from a rather rainy and wet Manchester, as we attended, exhibited and spoke at the Convergence Summit North. If you don’t know, the Convergence Summit, held annually both in the North (Manchester) and South, is the ‘go to’ event for everything in Unified Communications. All the major playors are there including us, and it was a delight to speak to you all, meet you and a big hearty thanks to everyone that came to say hello to us on Stand 14 and had some of our sweets!

“In the office, on the move, wherever you are, Lync”

That was our strapline and it’s certainly true. If you have’nt already tried Lync, we thoroughly recommend you do. The channel is very much new in terms of experience with Lync, and we are proud here at Server Centre to be one of the leading providers of Lync, having built extensive experience and knowledge of the product, platform, provisioning and shortfalls which are few to be fair. To try Lync today for 30 days, why not give us a call, or drop us an email, we’d love to talk to you.

“Is Lync really carrier grade!?”

A question which was asked a lot during the summit and one we’d like to passionatley say a big “YES”. Why not pop that search term into Google, and check out our video, Lync uses a slue of packet correction, validation and error checking to ensure call quality is simply exceptional. It’ll even work on a fairly low speed internet line (contention permitting), as opposed to VoIP of old, which would fall over at the earliest opportunity! Don’t believe us, call us today. We use Lync in our office throughout.

“In laymens terms, what can Lync do for me then!?”

In a nutshell, hosted Lync with Server Centre offers you an opportunity to bring all your business communication (IM, Video Conferencing, Enterprise Voice calling, Presence and Outlook integration) all under one roof, one client, and one location. Hosted offsite in our secure data centres, you can be sure of uptime, redundancy and no more expensive on-site engineer visits just like when your dusty old PBX breaks. You can retrieve your Voicemail, store message and contact history (useful for governance and industry compliance) and with a range of plug in features (discussed below), Lync really is a low-cost way of providing your teams and staff with an all-in-one communication product!

“We love our iPhones, can we use Lync on them!!?”

We love our iPhones too! We also love our Androids, and a few of us on the Service Desk have even been known to use Windows powered smartphones. The good news is that Server Centre have partnered with one of the best 3d party providers of mobile clients for Lync. We have a product called MaxACD which allows you at a end-user level, to take the full Lync experience with you on your smartphone. IM, chat, conference and swap files just as if you were at your computer. Take your desk number with you, and the beauty of it is it’s all wrapped up in one shiny interface. (We think it’s better than the current Microsoft Lync client, but that’s for another blog post!)

The MaxMobile client (offered as an extra paid for option with Lync) allows users to make & receive calls, IM and view presence and other data straight from their mobile smartphone. Its quick, efficient and works really well!

“ok well I’m interested, how can I get Lync?”

That’s the good news! Getting Lync is easy. First of all, head over to our download area and grab yourself the suitable client (here) and then call us on 0845 413 3800 or email hello@servercentre.net and we’ll set up some demo accounts for you & your organisation. Once you’ve seen Lync in action, we have no doubt you’ll love it!

In the meantime, have a great day, and remember, if you need Lync, you need Server Centre!