A presentation went up this afternoon (GMT+1) from TechEd 2011 NA by Kirk Gregersen titled Lync 2010 & the Future of Productivity. It’s about an hour long and covers a lot of content. It is somewhat high level, but there are a few things covered in this video that are well worth the watch (I’ve highlighted the super important ones in bold):

• How the user experience is the key focus of the product group. It remains pretty high level for the first 10 minutes and includes a demo of Lync (focusing on contact card pervasiveness in Outlook, SharePoint etc).
• Live demonstrations of:
  • The language translation app running on Silverlight.
  • The meeting schedule and join experience.
  • PowerPoint controls in a meeting, allowing a user to jump back and forth through slides.
  • The meeting recording experience.
• Mobile client demos (32 minutes in) of Windows Phone 7 and iPhone.
• Case study videos from LA Fitness, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Herrenknecht.
• More demos of application development and client extensibility:
  • IM and Expert including how questions are asked, how an expert provides data on their knowledge and the interaction that takes place between the question asker and the answerer via the bot on Lync.
• A demo of Polycom multi-party video conference.
• A brief overview of the Lync Roadmap for 2011.
  • US and UK pilot around online voice later in the year.
  • WP7, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Nokia clients coming by end of calendar year.
• A few words on the Skype purchase and what this means for Lync. “We (the Lync Product Group?) have been working on this as far back as January”.
  • Compares Lync to Skype, and how there is an interesting opportunity to marry the two via networks/federation.
  • The first public comments from the Lync team on the Skype integration.

You can view the presentation here. Some really exciting developments today, mostly around seeing the iPhone mobile client in action for the first time. Let’s hope we see Lync showcased some as TechEd NA rolls on.