In addition to the anticipated launch of Office 365 on Tuesday, Microsoft recently announced Lync Power Pack, which has six applications to enhance the Lync user experience.
Lync is part of the Office 365 suite and provides unified communications for organizations, integrating Instant Messaging (IM), VoIP, presence, and conferencing. Lync also features extensive Outlook integration including single-click meeting scheduling.
Lync Power Pack is part of the Lync Adoption and Training Kit, which provides resources such as primers, templates, user education and training. Applications include:
- IM an Expert: A tool that helps people in an organization ask questions and find experts within their company. The tool categorizes user questions into topic areas, finds experts best able to answer, and then forwards the questions to those experts.
- Conversations Analyzer: Reviews a user's Lync IM conversation history. It then scores for use of trust-building language. The analyzer applies trust rules to determine the occurrence of words and phrases that have a positive or negative effect on trust.
- Conversation Translator: Provides real-time translation for Lync IM for up to 35 different languages.
- Information Dowloader: Provides current information about a contact's location such as date, time, whether a user is calling the contact during regular working hours, the weather in that location, and news feeds pertaining to the location.
- Tabbed Conversations: Give users a tabbed conversation window for viewing multiple IM conversations in a single window.
- Group Chat Stress Tool: Helps users verify Lync Server 2010 and Lync Server 2010 Group Chat hardware deployment. It's comprised of two applications: Group Chat Stress Tool and Group Chat Loaders. Using the stress engine in the Stress Tool, users can create the configuration files for the loaders and distribute the binaries to remote machines that will run the loaders. Group Chat Loader is used to apply specific load parameters on the Group Chat Server.
The Lync Power Pack is available to Office 365 customers as a download.
For more, see PCMag's review of the Office 365 Beta and the slideshow below.