Ok so over at Microsoft’s YouTube channel they just posted an interview from CES with the Vice Precedent of products at Skype that said that a Windows Phone Skype will be coming soon. He also said that there are 200 000 000 monthly users that made 300 000 000 000 minutes of calls last year and that’s about a quarter of the worlds internationals long distance calls.
The question that everybody asks, when are MS and Skype going to be more integrated. “We are working on it with a lot of MS products groups, Windows Phone, Windows 8, Xbox and Lync”
No real news, but its good to hear that they are working on it.
Well Lync licensing is divided in two parts. Server and client.
Lets start and look at the server side, you need a server license, it can be either a Standard server or a Enterprise server, and if you are ok with just one server and no high availability the standard server is ok. If you want HA you should go with the enterprise server. And then there is the rest of the server roles, but from a licensing perspective we don’t need to think so much about that regarding Lync. For the full details look here
Ok so what about the client side? Well there are three different Client Access Licenses that we need to learn about.
Standard CAL – Basic IM/Presence functionality.
Enterprise CAL – Meetings and conferencing
Plus CAL – Telephony
And what about the infrastructure? There are some different server roles but the main ones are the Front end servers, the edge servers, and the mediation server role.
Then there are some supporting roles like director, monitoring, archiving, group chat, backend (SQL) to see how they work together have a look here http://zoom.it/36Qq
Now take a look at this page from Cisco, for just 10 seconds and come back to me in the comments with what I need if I’m about to go Cisco Unified (really, they actually calls this unified?) Communications…
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/sw/voicesw/products.html
Its about 150 products listed and I have no clue what is needed??
I just found Amplicate and thought it would be fun to se what the internet likes and hates about some of the stuff I’m working / playing around with in my daily life.
So, as it poped up in my head, and without analyzing… here it goes.
Go ahead and play around with it.
VHD Test Drive – Lync Server 2010 VHD (Dev)
The topology contains a Terminal Services virtual machine that has a wide range of developer samples installed and deployed from the Unified Communications Managed API 3.0 SDK, the Lync 2010 SDK and the Exchange Web Services Managed API 1.1 SDK, as well as end-to-end scenario demos shown at various events, such as:
- Microsoft Lync based contact center with web chat, speech enabled IVR, ACD, Music on Hold, etc.
- ‘Crowd sourcing’ demo using the power of the Microsoft reference application “IM an Expert”, combined with HTML based Web Chat.
- Real-time document approval demonstration leveraging presence and instant messaging based on a Lync enabled SharePoint Windows Workflow.
- Custom calendaring application, implemented in WPF, with the look and feel of Outlook, yet written in the Exchange Web Services Managed API.
- A dozen or more small quick starts from the SDKs illustrating the basic capabilities of the Microsoft Business Productivity developer platform.
The complete topology consists of 7 virtual machines that require a total 16 GB of RAM and a powerful dual core or any quadcore host machine, and up to 150 Gb of disk space for the full topology.
I know that MANY people have been waiting for this. and its 6 days late but whatever 
The package is released and accessible through Volume Licensing site. https://www.microsoft.com/licensing
And the docs can be found here:
Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Multitenant Pack for Partner Hosting is a unified communications (UC) solution for telecom and hosting providers. Unified communications is a way for telecom and hosting providers to expand their service offering to the present base customers. The Lync Server Multitenant Hosting Pack features include integration with Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Outlook, and other communication technologies. Lync Server Multitenant Hosting Pack enables customers to manage geographically dispersed offices and mobile users in a way that reduces travel expenses, while maintaining highly collaborative team environments. This increased integration of communication channels translates to improved organizational flexibility that is often difficult to find in larger enterprise organizations.
The brand new Office 365 TechCenter has some good stuff so go ahead and check it out.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/default
Office 365 Virtual Labs for IT Pros
Preparing to move to the cloud
Exchange Online virtual labs
SharePoint Online virtual labs
