I’m very happy to announce that CGNET has achieved “Gold” status as a Communications partner with Microsoft.  CGNET earned this competency as part of training to offer Microsoft Lync Enterprise Voice and Lync Online services to our customers.

This was not a simple achievement for us.  We had to:

• Have four engineers pass two very tough Lync technology exams
• Pass two sales assessment and sales engineering exams
• Submit five customer recommendations
• Solicit customer satisfaction feedback

Fortunately, our customers were happy to help us with recommendations and valuable feedback.  And our engineers and sales staff studied hard so they could pass their exams on the first attempt!

With this Gold Communications competency, CGNET is in a position to configure, engineer, install and maintain Lync Enterprise Voice solutions, which extend the communications potential of Microsoft Lync to all endpoints, not just IP-based endpoints.  As I like to say, this means an organization can now use Microsoft Lync to order pizza as well as communicate across the world.

And our Microsoft Lync Online customers benefit as well.  CGNET is able to apply the knowledge it has gained to address configuration questions, make sure video and audio conferencing services are working properly, and troubleshoot potential bandwidth issues.  Customers who use either version of Microsoft Lync (I should be saying “Skype for Business,” but that’s for another post) tell us that its pervasive nature makes it a no-brainer for adoption and use.  So being able to help customers refine and extend their use of Lync is something we wanted to be able to do.

And we’re not stopping there.  In the coming weeks and months we’ll describe the other “cloud” competencies we’re working to achieve.  It’s been just a few short years, but we’re making great progress in transforming our own company to a “cloud first” organization.