MANAMA: The Bahrain’s General Organization for Youth and Sports announced the deployment of Lync 2013, a unified communication platform for the enterprise by Microsoft, to enable cost-effective, multi-channel communication and promote a cross-platform mobile strategy that drives up productivity.
“The ability to communicate and collaborate with internal and external parties is becoming a key business differentiator which we have realized with the enablement of the Lync Solution. Our mobility strategy empowers users to call, IM or hold a conference with any colleague irrespective of their location,” Hisham Bin Mohamed Al-Jowder, President, General Organization for Youth and Sports (GOYS) said.
Lync 2013 provides a raft of features that make internal and external communications effective and efficient; it ties real-time presence information with instant messaging, video conferencing and voice communication, and it also integrates with Exchange email and other Microsoft Office applications.
“We are honoured to be chosen by GOYS to supply their communication solutions,” Sherif Tawfik, General Manager for Microsoft in Bahrain and Oman, said.
“In today’s world communication is imperative for any business; we at Microsoft understand the importance of mobility and have developed Lync a cross-platform technology that works across all operating systems to provide enterprise customers like GOYS with streamlined communications across different locations and time zones.” He added that Microsoft has also developed Lync Mobile apps for Windows Phone, iOS and Android, so Lync communications are available almost universally.
“We carried out a thorough research of all the available options, the unified platform suppliers and roaming plans from different providers. Eventually, we chose Microsoft Lync 2013.” She said that “Voice over IP (VoIP) is not a technology we would have considered in the past, but today it’s so advanced, reliable and robust that it not only matches others but actually supersedes them, especially in cost,” Nani Butti, Chief Information Technology, GOYS, explained.
“As soon as we began using Lync 2013, communication problems were solved. The President could simply set up a conference with the office from anywhere. This immediately revealed the value of Lync 2013”, Butti added. “Since the deployment of Lync 2013, we were able to achieve a communications cost cut of at least 40% and we anticipate further savings.”