I am definitely one of “those people” who does NOT buy the first model year of a car, or the newest fashion until it’s worn by almost every 30 or 40 something male in the population, or the latest and greatest 3G super phone until everyone else has suffered through all the bugs and they get it right.

So for me to say it’s time to dive head first into UC is significant.  Yesterday (11/17/10) Microsoft announced the release of their new Lync product-the latest of their UC products building on OCS 2007.  They have worked out the kinks with presence management, IM, and video making it easy to add and remove parties to multimedia conversations. They are addressing branch office deployments with their Survivable Branch Appliance (SBA) providing branch office workers with a richer experience in the event of WAN connectivity issues.  

The number of Microsoft partners supporting UC has grown significantly and includes very well known peripheral manufactures.  I was pleased to see Dialogic prominently featured as one of a select few Partners providing SBA.