“For standards-based video, interoperability is a challenge because there are so many variations and unless you have a program that can prove the quality of the interop you can get in trouble with features that aren't going to work properly.” He said that while Lync has some proprietary features it is standards-based and has been designed on an open framework to allow other vendors to interoperate with it.
“It may be a matter of taking a software-based solution and integrating that with good hardware, but with hardware these days you have a choice of what to use and it doesn't have to be an expensive telepresence solution to get really good quality.” “Some seem to have assumed that hardware-based video conferencing systems is what you had to have for diagnostic-quality video but that's not necessarily the case these days with the software-based solutions available,” Mr Chapman said.
Lync for mac video quality software#
The various state, federal and organisational guidelines around what technology to use for telehealth provision don't specify what hardware or software health providers should use, but they do recommend that they be standards-based. Lync Online costs as little as $3.20 per user per month and according to Mr Chapman, offers better video quality than Skype due to the high-quality video codecs Microsoft Lync uses. Generation-e this year provided a telehealth system for the Lynden Aged Care facility in Melbourne, using Lync Online, the cloud-based version of Lync that comes with the Office 365 cloud service. “We've also been working with Medicare Locals on deploying UC as a collaboration tool within Medicare Locals to improve collaboration between the different health agencies and care providers.” “We are seeing people coming to us saying they have this funding and wanting to know what technology to spend that on,” he said. Mr Chapman said telehealth is now a growing part of Generation-e's business, particularly since the introduction of the federal government's telehealth incentives program last year. They have made it clear that that is direction they are going but they have had a lot of work to do with Skype as it was a very proprietary system to get integrated.”
Lync for mac video quality update#
“Lync has a quarterly update cycle … so it is possible that Skype video could come as a cumulative update in one of those quarterly releases, or it might be in one of the major releases in another couple of years. “That is going to be the big thing and that is where to be going, but it seems like they have not had the time to get all of the functionality ,” Mr Chapman said.
Nathan Chapman, chief technology officer with unified communications (UC) specialist Generation-e, said while Lync users will be able to share presence, instant messaging and audio calls with Skype users, it was not yet certain when video conferencing federation will be achieved. While Microsoft has not disclosed a specific date for the release of Lync 2013, it did release a preview in July announcing the integration – or federation as it is known – with Skype, which Microsoft bought for $US8.5 billion in 2011.įigures for telehealth-specific Skype users are not available, but anecdotal evidence suggests it is the most popular choice for general practitioners and specialists offering telehealth services in Australia. The forthcoming release of a major new version of Microsoft's Lync unified communications software will see it “federated” with the Skype voice and video conferencing service that is popularly used for telehealth provision in Australia.
0 kommentar(er)
