HD Video Conferencing

Lync was historically very limited in terms of video resolution for peer-to-peer calls and especially within any conferences. Office Communications Server 2007 R2 was limited to CIF quality 352×288 resolution for conferencing, and Lync Server 2010 allowed only up to VGA quality 640×480 for any conferences. These resolutions were perfectly acceptable for meetings exclusively involving workstation webcams and small screens, but as screen sizes have grown and webcam quality has improved, these resolutions were inadequate in a full-screen mode. These low conference resolutions looked especially poor on large HD television screens used by room-based video systems.

Lync Server 2013 has thankfully added support for both 720p (1280×720) and 1080p (1920×1080) HD video conferencing within the A/V MCU. Again, businesses were previously forced to leverage expensive third-party MCU hardware or software to take advantage of these resolutions in older product versions, so this is a very welcome addition.