Those are two things that I would never say together. Lync is great if you are all on Windows within the same building or campus perhaps, but the video quality is horrible compared to Google Hangout or (consumer) Skype for cross country and international communication.
Depends on how you build it out, but yeah I do agree that Lync/SfB is the weak point in the suite. But the Exchange/Outlook combo is the gold standard for corporate communication.
No. It does not depend on how you build it out. Lync sucks, period, and has for a long time. Similarly, Sharepoint sucks irredeemably. It looks and acts like bad 1990s software. It's consistently the most painful, frustrating part of my workflow, and I use it as little as I can possibly get away with.
Next time you want to defend the full Microsoft software suite, just don't mention Lync and Sharepoint, and your argument will do better.
Sharepoint is a core part of it; and while I agree that Sharepoint is awful, it's a necessary evil that's better than the alternative.
Sharepoint just generally sucks because it's a platform for building one-off custom apps that part of your accounting department uses. Any platform with that use case is going to suck. But maintaining a Sharepoint environment is a lot easier than maintaining 30-40 individual web apps running on separate Linux machines, and it's a lot more maintainable of a business process than doing everything in an Access database or a shared Excel file.
It's also just flat-out ubiquitous. It really doesn't matter how much Sharepoint sucks because nearly every company uses it in some form.
Those are two things that I would never say together. Lync is great if you are all on Windows within the same building or campus perhaps, but the video quality is horrible compared to Google Hangout or (consumer) Skype for cross country and international communication.
Also: Lync is now called "Skype for Business" and old Lync will be sunsetted per http://research.gigaom.com/2014/11/microsoft-announces-skype...