This stuff still totally blows my mind.

I was at a restaurant for lunch recently with some colleagues. Service was slow, and as a result I was going to be late back to the office, and I had to join a Lync conference call from the table (which is rude but unavoidable). Rather than dial in I chose to use the Lync 2013 app on my iPhone, which uses VoIP to connect. Finally our meal ended and I headed to my car.

As I turned the car on, the radio woke up and connected to my iPhone using Bluetooth. The audio output immediately shifted to the car’s sound system, and the car’s microphone was now the audio input in use. I love listening to calls on a big sound system, as I’m a little hard of hearing, so being able to crank the volume is just great for me.

I arrived back at the office car park, plugged in a headset, and the audio transferred straight back to that, and I was able to walk back up to the office, at which point my phone handed off to WiFi and with only a brief blip, the call continued in my ear. Now I could join the screen sharing too, since I was on WiFi.

The meeting room has a Polycom IP Conference Phone in it which links to Microsoft Exchange, so it knows when the meeting room has been booked and – if the meeting has been configured as online as well – it’s a couple of button clicks to join the Polycom phone unit directly to the Lync conference using HD Audio; none of your tinny narrowband phone quality here and, equally importantly, no need to dial into our own Lync conferences as a guest any more.

Truly, we live in amazing times. My client can have immediate high definition access to me any time, any place. Uh, wait a second…

 

30 Blogs in 30 Days

This post is part of my participation in Etherealmind’s 30 Blogs in 30 Days challenge.