For IT, Blood says the integration of Lync makes life easier because they need just need a PC and one set of servers from one supplier to use Lync.

With Lync, Microsoft is providing better bandwidth management than it did with OCS.

"They've added Call Admission Control, a common function in PBX systems that monitors how many users are allowed onto the network at one time," says Blood. "With OCS there was no ability to monitor how many users were using bandwidth. You could just keep adding users, which would eventually deteriorate call quality."

Lync's bandwidth management upgrade also allows IT pros to split what goes over the WAN and what goes over the Internet. For example, you can route voice calls over the WAN but route video over the Internet if the video doesn't have to be perfect quality. This is something you could not do with OCS.