That's what I'm complaining about, MS keeps taking two different products and giving them the same name. :)
I have major problems with Lync/S4B's IM implementation. The most obvious are the lack of store-and-forward for messages to offline users and the poor to nonexistent support for persistent chat rooms (my solution: a "conference call" that's been going for weeks without anyone having turned on the audio). It's also very bad at handling changes in network connectivity, docking/undocking my laptop drops me from IM for at least a couple of minutes and often requires a restart of S4B.
I will agree that the softphone support is pretty good, but it's non-interoperable with our VoIP environment so it goes almost entirely unused. Unfortunately this has been the case everywhere I've worked except for one place that had WebEx and Cisco phones - those would get along with each-other sometimes if you were lucky, but it wasn't very reliable.
My point is that I've found the office communications landscape to be a terrible backwater of technology. I dislike Slack but I can see why it's taking off - most of the on-prem options for IM fail at basic IM features while adding VoIP/telepresence options that are non-interoperable and complex to implement and support. It says something that my employer has multiple FTEs dedicated to scheduling and setting up the videoteleconference rooms, because it takes a specialist just to make a call these days.
Actually, the product I got hired out of college to work on was a store-and-forward extension for OCS 2007... It was a nasty inherited mess of SIPScript and mostly broken UCMA 2.0... It's possible to do, but not easy.
There are persistent chat rooms available (at least on-premise, if you install the extra server for them - not on Office365, though), but it's a little half-baked.
If we're piling on, there are some other kind of crummy limits, for a large enterprise IM platform. Sending an IM to a large number of recipients is pretty gimped (I believe the limit is in the 100-250 user range), because any chat between three or more users is bumped up into an AV conference. There's limitations on the number both of users who you can subscribe to presence updates, and how many other users can subscribe to your presence.
The client also seems to have some bad memory leaks. Particularly with any kind of extension that makes use of the COM API.
I have major problems with Lync/S4B's IM implementation. The most obvious are the lack of store-and-forward for messages to offline users and the poor to nonexistent support for persistent chat rooms (my solution: a "conference call" that's been going for weeks without anyone having turned on the audio). It's also very bad at handling changes in network connectivity, docking/undocking my laptop drops me from IM for at least a couple of minutes and often requires a restart of S4B.
I will agree that the softphone support is pretty good, but it's non-interoperable with our VoIP environment so it goes almost entirely unused. Unfortunately this has been the case everywhere I've worked except for one place that had WebEx and Cisco phones - those would get along with each-other sometimes if you were lucky, but it wasn't very reliable.
My point is that I've found the office communications landscape to be a terrible backwater of technology. I dislike Slack but I can see why it's taking off - most of the on-prem options for IM fail at basic IM features while adding VoIP/telepresence options that are non-interoperable and complex to implement and support. It says something that my employer has multiple FTEs dedicated to scheduling and setting up the videoteleconference rooms, because it takes a specialist just to make a call these days.