Transcript for Stephen Roux of L’Occitane Discusses Microsoft Lync

Blair Pleasant: Hi, this is Blair Pleasant with CommFusion and UCStrategies, and I am at the Microsoft Office event where we got a preview of what is new and upcoming in Microsoft Office. With me today is Stephen Roux from L’Occitane. He is a Lync user and has been a very happy and satisfied Lync user. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you are using it and what the user reaction has been?

Stephen Roux: We are using Lync for all of our information workers. So it means that for this research we are using all the features that Lync can provide including telephony. That is very important because I think that the value of the solution is really in the fact that you can use whatever measure, whatever workload you want with the presence on top of that, that provides the richness of the solution.

Blair: What about user reaction? Were they upset when you took away their phones?

Stephen: Very good, very good. It seems to be quite uncommon in the world but actually our users are pretty upbeat from the beginning with the solution.

Blair: So they are basically using softphones or soft lines?

Stephen: Softphone with headsets.

Blair: And you said Plantronics headsets?

Stephen: Plantronics, yes.

Blair: And what about call center? You mentioned that you have a call center.

Stephen: That was the key point. In order to move completely to Lync we have to move all the solutions. We were running a call center solution from Genesys. And we found out that the solution now is prairieFyre which is a Canadian editor. They provide a good solution for call center, fully integrated with Lync with a good user interface which is very important because the beauty of the solution, the beauty of the Lync environment is the rich client. So it is very well integrated with the Lync client. And our users are pretty upbeat with the call center solutions.

Blair: What about mobile capabilities? What sort of mobile capabilities are you using?

Stephen: Yes, that is the key point. Because we have a lot of roaming users traveling all around the world and for them it is invaluable to have a solution that is very easy to use so you just have to start your computer wherever you are and it works as expected. You can receive your phone calls, business phone calls; you can place your phone calls. And it works, it works – that is the beauty of the product.

Blair: Is there anything that does not work?

Stephen: [laughter] Good question. No, everything works as expected. That is incredible. [laughter]

Blair: And what are your future plans down the road with Lync?         

Stephen: Well, the plan is to complete the move to Lync all around the world. So for the moment we still have to migrate the Asia zone because the telephone feature is only available in Europe and Americas, so we still have to deploy telephony gateways in Asia. It will be a great project for the next year. And we will see after that.

Blair: Well thank you very much.

Stephen: Thank you.