The Bahrain’s General Organisation for Youth and Sports (GOYS) has announced the deployment of Lync 2013, a unified communication platform for the enterprise by Microsoft.

The platform enables cost-effective, multi-channel communication and promotes a cross-platform mobile strategy that drives up productivity.

Hisham Bin Mohamed Al-Jowder, president, GOYS, said: “The ability to communicate and collaborate with internal and external parties is becoming a key business differentiator which we have realised 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.”

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,” said Sherif Tawfik, general manager for Microsoft in Bahrain and Oman. “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.” 

Microsoft has also developed Lync Mobile apps for Windows Phone, iOS and Android.

Nani Butti, chief information technology, GOYS, explained “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.”

 “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,” Butti said.

“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”, she added. “Since the deployment of Lync 2013, we were able to achieve a communications cost cut of at least 40 per cent and we anticipate further savings.”

Microsoft Lync is an enterprise-ready unified communications platform; it provides a consistent, single client experience for presence, instant messaging, voice, video and a great meeting experience. Lync users can connect to anyone on Skype, enabling rich communication with hundreds of millions of people around the world. – TradeArabia News Service