UC Within SharePoint
SharePoint has become a trendy portal where many information workers spend a good part of their time. Making decisions about how to best reach someone from within SharePoint is easy – contacts’ names and status appear on each page where they’ve loaded or updated a document or workflow. You can email, IM, call their work or cell #, or view their contact card, right from the pop-up that flies up when you hover over the contact’s name

From within the Lync client itself, you can use SharePoint-based Skill Search to help you find the expertise you need. In Skill Search, you can enter keywords that describe skills, expertise, and group information to get a list of experts in your organization who have the skills you are looking for. Results are displayed directly within the Lync 2010 client.
And when you’ve found experts with the right skills, you can contact them directly through Lync 2010.
Additional recorded meetings can be saved directly to a SharePoint asset library. This enables organizations to treat meeting recordings like other digital assets by setting retention periods and adding meaningful metadata.
Finally, SharePoint workflows can initiate communication functions within Lync. This is non-standard capability is valuable for workflows that usually stand still or stall when traditional notification methods (namely, email) are not timely enough. Take for example, the case of a scheduling application within SharePoint. If a slot on the schedule becomes available and needs to be filled quickly, sending emails to available personnel may not be fast enough. The first to get the email may take an hour to reply, at which point a second may be alerted, etc. The process can be made much faster by using presence from Lync – if the first available person is online and available, they may be sent an IM, to which they can reply yes or no to their availability. If the answer were no, then the scheduling app could try the second available replacement immediately, rather than wait for a preset timeout.
The example below shows how when a task in a workflow has been assigned to someone, SharePoint can alert Lync with pertinent syntax about the task, ensuring the assignment is understood and acknowledged.

To summarize, Lync users can do the following when in SharePoint:
- Use the Skill view, in Lync search results, to search Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 My Site pages for people with specific skills or expertise
- Access their SharePoint Server 2010 My Site profile page from the Lync - Options dialog box
- On a SharePoint Server page, view a user’s Lync presence indicator and its associated menu or contact card
- Get alerts from SharePoint workflows, with instructions and options to get more information, interact with the business process, or launch a communication with decision maker
The integration involves no scripting or back-office integration… simple dlls on the desktop allow client PCs with Lync installed to see presence and communication options on the SharePoint screens. Specifically, to display the presence indicator and its associated contact card (in Office 2010) or menu (in Office 2007 and Office 2003), SharePoint uses the Microsoft ActiveX control name.dll. The ActiveX control makes calls directly to the Microsoft Lync 2010 API, and then Lync makes MAPI or Exchange calls to supply the requested information.
For details about how presence is displayed on a SharePoint Server page, see "How to add presence/pawn to SharePoint contacts list" on the Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=147181.