I have a personal Holy Grail that I have wished Microsoft would address for a long time. As a Lync developer I sometimes have a need to be logged into multiple Lync instances. In the past it wasn’t possible to log your Lync client into two instances at the same time for testing or to just show your presence and communicate on two different companies’ Lync installations. I always had to resort to one client on my laptop and one on my desktop PC. Kind of aggravating having to run multiple machines to achieve multiple log ins.
Well, now with Windows 8 there is a way to achieve that. I installed the Windows Store version of the Lync client on my Windows 8 laptop, I also installed Office 2013 on the lap and as part of the install I got Lync 2013 on the desktop. I noticed that I could connect with both versions running at the same time so I got to thinking…
What if I logged each client into a different Lync installation? Would that work? Could the Windows 8 interface carry on a conversation with Lync running on the desktop on the same machine?
Well the surprising answer is YES! It does work for IM but you can open a voice call between the two for obvious reasons.

