In November 2009 Cisco Mail was introduced to the world, but yesterday Cisco announced that they were abandoning this hosted mail service. It should come as no surprise that we have been watching the coverage with some interest and have some thoughts...

In this blog post, I want to talk about how, when nature disrupts our lives, technology can help us keep things going. A couple of years ago in Seattle, where I live, our city shut down when it was hit by a powerful snowstorm. Because I had Office Communicator...

At the Microsoft Lync launch in November, we introduced more than 70 new devices including IP phones and USB peripherals to the market. We previewed new video end points and announced interoperability with several industry standard telepresence systems...

What a fun week on the UC Blog! We saw lots of spirited comments from the Notes community, especially in response to my Monday post . Certainly, there is a lot of passion among Notes users. There is a lot of passion in the Exchange community, as well...

Severstal is one of Russia’s largest steel and mining companies. With 92,000 employees in 10 countries, Severstal had been on Lotus Notes since 2003. But as the company grew rapidly, Severstal was finding that it was difficult to integrate Notes...

Exchange is fortunate to have a strong Partner community that helps our customers plan, deploy, and manage their Exchange environments. Our Notes migration Partners have added an extra dimension by providing services and tools to move customers’...

Almost everyone knows the Toshiba brand, but you might not know that they recently switched from Lotus Notes to Exchange and SharePoint. Toshiba has 130,000 employees worldwide and is a global leader in electronics manufacturing. Their story is very typical...

The new year is starting off with a bang – a great new set of Notes customers decided to Exchange and SharePoint. At this rate, 2011 could be one of our biggest Notes “switcher” years, yet. With IBM’s annual Lotusphere conference...

In this post I’d like to talk about how the Microsoft Partner ecosystem offers customers a real choice when they need help transforming their communications platforms. Black & Veatch, an engineering, consulting, and construction company, was...

I’m excited to share with you that InfoWorld has published its 2011 Technology of the Year Awards and Microsoft Exchange 2010 was selected as the Best Mail Server ! This is a wonderful acknowledgement of the value of capabilities of Exchange 2010...

Ensuring and managing Exchange security is always top of mind for customers. Toward this end, I’m excited about the recent announcement of Forefront Protection Server Management Console 2010 (FPSMC 2010) which helps improve security management and...

Keeping your email up and running is mission critical. While other business applications can go down without much notice, when email is down for even a minute everyone in the organization notices and wants answers. As such, Exchange admins have long had...

It was just over a year ago that I had the privilege of launching Exchange 2010, standing on a stage in Berlin demoing some of the great new features in Exchange. My enthusiasm has only grown in the past year. Up to that point, I had already been on Exchange...

Lync 2010 launched on November 17, marking an important milestone in our journey to bring together different silos of communication. Chris Capossela and Gurdeep Singh Pall unveiled the product in New York and we enjoyed hearing from Bill Gates and our...

My first week on the Lync team was back in the beginning of March. With VoiceCon in Orlando happening that week, it was a great chance to jump right in with both feet. When VoiceCon was over, the comments I’d heard in many customer conversations...

The other day I was riding a shuttle bus between buildings on the Microsoft campus in Redmond and I took a few minutes to check my Outlook Mobile Inbox on my smartphone. There wasn’t anything urgent I had to respond to immediately, but I did notice...

In this post I want to talk about one of our partners. Wonderware is a leading supplier of industrial software for manufacturing operations. Its solutions are used in approximately 125,000 plants worldwide. Wonderware recognized that many of its customers...

Last Wednesday I posted that we'd released Lync to manufacturing, meaning our code is locked and the product is ready. We received some great questions as a result, so I wanted to address a few of them here. First, there are still a few more steps...

Today I have the pleasure of blogging about the final engineering milestone for Microsoft Lync 2010 - the next release of Office Communications Server and Communicator - also known as Release to Manufacturing, or RTM. We're incredibly excited about this...

Today, we announced Office 365 , our next generation cloud productivity service. Office 365 brings Exchange, SharePoint and Lync Online together with Office desktop software as a cloud service. The technology will provide the latest, most complete, up...

Today, Microsoft announced Office 365, which we believe will define the future of productivity. Office 365 is a new cloud service that brings enterprise-grade productivity to everyone - helping professionals and smaller orgs get access to enterprise-grade...

This week I'd like to talk about LA Fitness and its Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2 (now called Lync Server 2010 with the latest release) solution. As LA Fitness has continued to open sports clubs all over the US and Canada, it ended up...

I would like to introduce you to Alutiiq LLC. Founded in 1971 as part of the Afognak Native Corporation, its profits benefit the Alutiiq people of Afognak Island in Alaska. Today it has offices across the United States and provides services such as construction...

Email continues to be the lifeblood of business communications so it should come as no surprise that vendors of all shapes and sizes want a piece of the action. The fact remains, however, that the vendors that will win in this space – and deliver...

The Release Candidate for Microsoft Lync became available yesterday for customers and partners to download and try. This is a significant milestone along with the unveiling of the new nam e, and we are very pleased with the customer, partner, press and...