For those of you who follow American Politics, here’s a nice tidbit for you. Microsoft has revealed that President Obama’s campaign used the software giant’s Lync communications platform during the 2012 election.
“The Obama for America campaign selected Microsoft Lync as the communications platform for hundreds of campaign staff in its Chicago headquarters and in some states for the 2012 elections. The campaign needed to upgrade from a private branch exchange (PBX) system to a more flexible cloud-based solution that could scale and adapt to support thousands of mission-critical calls in multiple locations at any given time,” Microsoft stated in an official blog post.
Lync, for those that don’t know, allows one to utilize several different communications means to get in touch with people anywhere. The Obama campaign wanted scalability and deployment efficiency in their communications system, so they selected Microsoft’s Lync platform. “Controlling our systems with Lync also provided much more flexibility,” Chief Information Officer at Obama for America, Rajeev Chopra stated.
The “work from anywhere” ability made Lync a sought-after platform for the Obama campaign since it could adopt to the way they operated. Lync was deployed to the campaign’s Chicago headquarters as a test and it turned out that employees were able to use it seamlessly.
“On election day, volunteers wanted to keep answering phones, even when their relief had arrived. Instead of turning people away from headquarters, we were able to plug them in, light up a port and place them anywhere there was an empty desk. Our voter protection hotline was able to be increased at any time,” Chopra added.
