Telligent Connects With Microsoft Lync

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Telligent continued to expand its integration capabilities with Microsoft products, Thursday releasing the beta version of Telligent Connect for Microsoft Lync, which connects its community software with Microsoft Lync Server 2010.

Both Telligent's software and Microsoft Lync Server 2010 are designed to enhance and enable collaboration. Lync Server 2010 incorporates instant messaging; telepresence; audio, video, and Web conferencing; enterprise voice; and group chat, allowing users to communicate via the Internet, phones, or PCs with a consistent experience and interface.

For its part, Telligent Connect for Lync is part of Telligent Enterprise, a social community application designed to destroy data silos and empower employees to easily share information across the corporation. Telligent Connect for Lync includes presence, allowing workers to discover who is online and available to immediately collaborate within Microsoft Lync; the ability to begin a chat with colleagues and respond to co-workers within the Telligent community; and the capability to initiate videoconferences from inside Lync -- adding users, sharing applications, participating in whiteboard sessions, and connecting using VoIP, according to Telligent.

"I can tell you all of us at Telligent are thrilled to integrate with Microsoft Lync Server 2010. But, we aren't stopping there. Our team is continuing to innovate and integrate with Microsoft technologies to create easier, faster, and more inspiring ways for employees to communicate and collaborate in their favorite tools," wrote Wendy Gibson, chief marketing officer at Telligent, in a company blog.

Indeed, this release comes about six weeks after Telligent took the wraps off the beta version of an integration package for Microsoft SharePoint 2010. In that application, Telligent created a unified platform for knowledge-capture that melded together Telligent's social community software with Microsoft's document-collaboration tools. This enabled employees to use Telligent Enterprise's interface to check out, edit, and organize documents, and then use the controls within Microsoft's Office applications, according to Telligent. The Telligent Enterprise user interface allows employees to review prior versions of documents and revert to previous editions from within the social collaboration software, Telligent said.

"The Telligent Connect family of integrations allows customers to integrate their Telligent applications with leading third-party applications like Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Lync," Gibson said.

Increasingly, businesses are seeking ways to enable employees to collaborate and access information previously locked away or difficult to access. After all, companies will generate about half of their Web sales through social and mobile applications by 2015, according to Gartner.