However, the Demo Gods swiftly departed for a more pressing engagement: today’s demos of Microsoft Lync suffered enormously, from capricious Wi-Fi links, low external bandwidth and the product demonstrator’s “all on a laptop” lifestyle.

If it was me having to demonstrate a heavy piece of kit built three or four stacked products deep on top of Server 2008, I’d have a quad-core laptop and a pared-down server as a virtual machine, just in case; but pretty clearly, the Lync demo team were not aware of just how good their bad demo actually was.

Lync, before I go on to explain that cryptic comment, is the new name for Microsoft’s integrated communication server. It brings together Exchange, Sharepoint, IP telephony, instant messaging and Federation (making ad-hoc links with external business counterparties for IM and shared whiteboard traffic). Oh, and it can do industrial-grade HD-resolution video conferencing, too. There are plenty of potholes awaiting the incautious implementer of any of these communication methods, ranging from obfuscatory telcos through to maverick users, incompatible hardware, and invisible transport failures – which brings me back to my cryptic point.

While the smooth, suited, multilingual bit of the Lync  presentation was crashing and burning in the worst way possible, the scrappy, immediate recovery from that was being conducted over Lync itself. The system, you see, is bandwidth-aware. Microsoft guys brought in over the Lync client via text chat were nattering away on the other presenter screen, deciding how much of an ad-hoc video, audio or chat conference they could throw up at zero notice based on the wavering and substandard connectivity in the convention centre.

To my mind that meta-demo, of a team of people genuinely using a software feature to get around the realities of 21st-century communications infrastructure, is the best indicator of a tool that’s worth investigating. A hundred times better than a slick and ultimately empty Powerpoint demonstration.

Lync is in beta at the moment, and it’s a brave sys admin who downloads that to sit on top of their Exchange server. Full release with fanfares (possibly recorded offline and shipped later when communications improves… but I’m being cruel) is scheduled for next week. I’ll look at in a future edition of PC Pro.

Go to this page on the Microsoft downloads area and then download the file which is the Exchange Hosted Services Service Level Agreement document.

Scroll down to the bottom, and you will find what Microsoft will pay you if they fall foul of the SLA.

Basically, they will give you “Service Credits” for downtime, and at no point will the Credit exceed the value of what you pay Microsoft for the month of service provision.

Now look at the percentages: to get 100% of your money back, Microsoft has to fail a 95% SLA.

For the sake of easy Maths, let’s assume there are 30 days in a month, which equals 720 hours. 95% uptime is 36 hours over the entire month. 36 hours is 4.5 working days of downtime, assuming an 8-hour work day.

So the most you can get back from Microsoft only kicks in when you have had your hosted exchange server down for almost one week in four, assuming all the unexpected downtime happens within your working day. Hardly generous, is it?

But there’s more: “Scheduled downtime” is excluded from this rebate scheme until it exceeds another 10 hours per calendar month.

Quite apart from this, the document is a wonderful example of legalese and obfuscation. How about this part:

“‘Monthly Uptime Percentage’ for a specific Customer is calculated by taking the total number of minutes in a calendar month multiplied by the total number of licensed users minus the total number of minutes of Downtime experienced by all users in a given calendar month, all divided by the total number of minutes in that calendar month multiplied by the total number of users.”

Well that’s perfectly clear then.

By the way, it’s the same terms for the hosted SharePoint and hosted Live Meeting too. And of course, there is no link between these SLAs either, as far as I can see.