Kressmark Unified Communications: The great Lync Conference of 2014

Thursday, February 27, 2014

The great Lync Conference of 2014

Lyncing like a swede!

So it was time again for the great Lync conference of 2014 or #Lyncconf14 as some of us called it. The conference were held in Las Vegas at the Aira - a Vegas sized hotel with some 4000 rooms and 15 restaurants. The number of conference attendees almost doubled from last year; around 1600 persons were here.

The main message from the keynote with Gurdeep Singh Pall (Corporate Vice President for Skype and Lync) was "The era of Universal Communications is here!" You can watch the keynote on demand here: http://www.lyncconf.com

Some of the major points and announcements were:

Updates to Lync will happen faster in the future and new features will continue to be released in Cumulative Updates for Lync. Hence, do not forget to keep up with the updates for Lync.
P2P Video with Skype will be coming sometime during the summer of 2014.
This will become available for existing Skype integrations.
Video Interoperability Server - a "videoation server" sort of a mediation server for video is coming.This server role will make it possible for third party video endpoints to join Lync video meetings, the server could be installed on a separate server or collocated with a Lync front end. The server role is coming in the next version of Lync.
Universal Communication Javascript API or UCJA (aka jLync) is a web based Lync API that could be used to create rich featured Lync clients for websites. This could be seen as "WebRTC for Lync" the feature will arrive in a coming Lync Server CU.
Lync Mobile for Android on Tablets - Lync Mobile is currently only supported on phones when it comes to the Android OS.

Then followed two days with a lot of good technical and non-technical sessions, and meetings with all the people in the expo area. To me, one of the best things with the Lync conference was to hang out with all the great people.