[al452]

Excellent site, love it.

I can't provide a funny story or eulogy, but have a scary one... "Microsoft Lync" [item 10 on the list right now] is not dead, it's aaaalllliiiiivvveeeee...

Those of us who work in the nightmare planes, where Microsoft products are mandated, once hoped that Microsoft's "Skype for Business" would bring us a bit of non-corporate real-world better-because-it-had-to-compete-on-its-own-merits product to save us from the eternal pain of Lync.

But no, it turned out that "Skype for Business" REALLY IS just Lync, with only two changes. 1) rebranding 2) somehow, despite changing almost nothing, they managed to break copy-and-paste, it doesn't work reliably any more

It's a zombie horror story!

[dingo_bat]

The executable is still named lync.exe.

[ndduong]

That does sound like a horror story... I guess zombies still belong in the graveyard.

[Nexxxeh]

As a bit of a hijack, copy and paste is fucked.

But paste without formatting works, which is something like Shift+Ctrl+V.

Stupid, but just about usable if desperate.

[FussyZeus]

Our office still uses Lync as the backend for VOIP. It is the bane of my existence, somehow they managed to work every single Microsoft anti-pattern into this product.

[option_greek]

Yes. And the UI sucks as bad as the older one. I can't believe such a poor product with constant UI freezes is still in production. Time gap from launching to the point of usability on this atrocious piece of shit is an incredible 1 min on my modern PC. This is one product I hope everyday to see on this product graveyard.

[arthurcolle]

I actually like Lync. Why don't you?

[js8]

I hate it, for several reasons (some of it could be user error or local configuration, but still):

- For a long time, the status of other users it showed was completely off. Like showing people online when they weren't. Also, sending messages sometimes mysteriously failed.

- Cannot copy conversation as text (formatting is messed up). Cannot save it as text without removing smileys.

- Cannot paste text verbatim into conversation without making silly smileys everywhere.

- There is a (relatively small) limit on how much text you could paste in.

- Couldn't transfer certain files (like .js or .exe).

Many of these things make sense for things like unmoderated chat, but I need to work, and sometimes exchange larger amounts of text and binary data.

[nkrisc]

I'd add: completely unreliable conversation history. I never figured out why it saved some messages but not others.

[murph-almighty]

Basically why I loved it when we started using Slack.

[arthurcolle]

You are so right haha. I guess working at a bigco has trained me on it and also because of the (relatively) "pretty" UI. Ive used Slack for side projects and its definitely a lot smoother/modern.

[danielvf]

I'm not the GP, but I have a client who uses Lync. We usually have conference calls with three or four people, and someone always has an audio problem.

The screen sharing also seems to take a while to sync up. Worse, it silently stops updating somewhere in the call. Lync seems to have the worst real world performance of any screen sharing / conferencing app I've used.

[Ecio78]

have you checked firewall issues? MS has a list of ips, urls and protocols that need to be open in order to use it.

[tinus_hn]

It is annoyingly in your face, ugly, slow and unreliable. It offers nothing that isn't done better by another program.

The only reason it can compete is because of Microsofts package deals and the anticompetitive integration with the rest of their ecosystem.

[unixhero]

Me too. It is a key tool for me as a PM. I have run meeting with hundreds on call.

[murph-almighty]

I currently use Lync for Mac, but we're "transitioning" to Skype for Business. I'm saddened to learn that it doesn't make a difference.

[ghostly_s]

Unlike the Windows client (of course!) the Mac S4B client is in fact a complete re-write compared to Lync for Mac. It is still horrible, in different ways (of course!) than the Windows client, but generally is a modest improvement on Lync for Mac.

Windows Lync>Skype for Business is literally a registry key you roll out that changes the name and some minor interface chrome.