Web Conferencing

Probably the biggest driving force behind companies implementing Lync Server 2013 is replacing outsourced web conferencing services. Many companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on services such as WebEx or GoToMeeting. Although there might be situations in which a company running Lync Server 2013 needs to create a conference so large that its infrastructure isn’t sufficient, the other 95% of the time it can use a platform it owns rather than paying an external company for the services. In many environments, Lync 2010 implementations paid for themselves in three to six months for this reason. Lync Server 2013 looks to offer similar to faster return on investment for companies in need of web conferencing.

Whereas the Mac Communicator client did not support web conferencing, the Lync:Mac client does! It offers an almost complete experience as compared to the Windows client; see the comparison in Table 23.1 for more details.