4 ms·

Both my employer (120,000 employees) and our main contractor (20,000 employees) use Skype for Business. By use, I mean we've purchased it and deployed it to eve

Both my employer (120,000 employees) and our main contractor (20,000 employees) use Skype for Business. By use, I mean we've purchased it and deployed it to every employee in the world. It's never worked, ever, for anything. Not for audio, not for screen sharing, not for chat. I now decline all meeting requests that rely on Skype for Business for some essential part of the meeting.

apapli 9y ago
We are a 40 person organisation and use S4B via our Office365 subscription. It works perfectly. That said, being in Australia we don't have Microsoft-provided telephony in it, nor do we have any requirement for hunt groups and so forth. All our staff use their mobiles to talk, so Skype is purely used for teleconferences and video chats. Enterprise telephony is a weird space right now - Microsoft ought to emerge the winner eventually with their broader stack proposition, especially when compared with most other vendors that try to stick in their bloatware or poorly written software. But gee it is a painful and slow transition to observe from the sidelines. Just my 2c. :)
- locusm 9y ago
  Serious question - what is so compelling about S4B. Competition is very healthy in that space, last time I looked at Lync etc it was seriously lacking.
  - apapli 9y ago
    It's just the convenience that is compelling. If you already use Office365 the integration with outlook for web (and desktop for that matter, which I rarely use) is really neat and for the most part "just works". I've got some seriously non technical people in the business who find it super easy to now arrange a conference call, when previously they would be using their iPhone on speakerphone to merge calls.
user5994461 9y ago
I use audio calls, video calls or screen sharing almost every day. It works flawlessly and I despise every company that doesn't have Linq/Skype.
rasjani 9y ago
Worked for company that was bought by MS. During the acquisition period, I was working for 3rd level enterprise support and were main contact for escalation of issues from our OS X users and MS. And yes, it never worked. Higher up guys where patting themselves on the backs for migrating to Lync and now it was So Well Executed while we in the actual client interface where left to deal with abysmal (platinum) support, private hotfixes, fixes what worked at one release and didn't on newer ones and all sorts of crazyness. The "reason" that was said to be the issue was "our internal routing between the sites" and Yeah, pretty much every issue we had never manifested it worker was at home and used home connection or used cellphone client and gsm operator for data. But yeah, fuck Lync. Worst gig ever. One reason why I think rebranding Lync to Skype for Business made sense: let's fool someone to buy it by letting them think they where getting same tech as real Skype, not just same shit with different name.
- mathw 9y ago
  Except in my experience in an organisation forced to transition from Lync to Skype for Business, Lync always worked fairly well (although we only used chat and voice calls), and Skype for Business was wobbly and unreliable. Even though they were theoretically the same product, somewhere in the rebranding they managed to mess up the network behaviour too. Skype used to be pretty solid, years ago. These days it's just dodgy as heck and moving Lync to be Skype-branded was one of the more baffling decisions I've seen from Microsoft marketing, because none of us thought Skype had any pedigree worth trying to exploit anymore.
worldsayshi 9y ago
It seems to me that half of Microsoft is a rotten mess. Some parts know how to make good software for sure. The other half makes really bad decisions and keep rolling out patches that barely should've passed QA.
- mistermann 9y ago
  That's about right I think. Or in some cases, half of a product will be good (MSSQL engine), whereas the UI (SSMS) is a bug ridden mess (despite being head and shoulders above most other products).
flukus 9y ago
Audio works well for us, for 1 to 1 conversations anyway. I haven't tried but apparently it's not so good at n to n. Screen sharing did work well until the latest update, now it hardly ever works and we have to use webex. Chat is it's own mixed bag. Sometimes there is noticeable lag, you will get a popup showing you received the message but it will take several more seconds to show in the chat window. Very occasionally a message will take minutes to arrive or not at all. Copying and pasting is always a nightmare. I wish ICQ would take their client from the late 90's and make a business version.
jmiserez 9y ago
The connection issues seem to be company related. I’ve used it in companies where it always worked, and others where it would error out with a 50/50 chance with no discernable cause. But Skype for Business (ahem, Lync) also has some fun, enterprisey restrictions that make no sense at all: - You can’t send messages longer than a few sentences (stacktrace, code snippet are “too long”). - You can’t send messages to offline contacts and have them receive it when they go back online. The message just disappears.
ioulian 9y ago
I had a different experience. When we had a project with a team from another country we tried to use Skype. One person couldn't get it to work, so we tried a lot of other software just to have a video call and share the screen. None of them worked flawlessly, some required to install some software to be able to run inside a browser? The audio on the others didn't work good. The others had bad video quality and massive lag/delay on the screensharing. We switched back to Skype For Business/Skype (w/ personal account) and it was the best experience for us (except for that one guy :D), also very reliable! Skype for Business is also quite nice, and doesn't have any bloat. Just call and message. There was a discussion back here on HN, why nobody has written some good software just to call a client and share your screen. If you have millions of $, why is it so difficult to make a reliable app? I guess you can't get a lot of revenue on free calling software. A lot of the time we just call the clients landline and use TeamViewer for screensharing. It's like we're still living in 2001...
majewsky 9y ago
My employer (84,000 employees) uses Skype for Business. Audio, screen sharing and chat work reasonably well (with the occasional "Megan has to restart his client before joining" or "Jack cannot unmute himself for some reason"). However, any meeting with more than 40-50 participants leads to unacceptable general instability of the connection, so we need to use Adobe Connect for this. (The only reason why I still can't purge Flash from my work notebook.)
INTPenis 9y ago
I actually have very good experience with SFB in my org. For meetings it's the best app I've used. But for persistent group chat it seems to be worthless. We're trying out stuff like Rocketchat and mattermost instead.

apapli 9y ago

We are a 40 person organisation and use S4B via our Office365 subscription. It works perfectly. That said, being in Australia we don't have Microsoft-provided telephony in it, nor do we have any requirement for hunt groups and so forth. All our staff use their mobiles to talk, so Skype is purely used for teleconferences and video chats. Enterprise telephony is a weird space right now - Microsoft ought to emerge the winner eventually with their broader stack proposition, especially when compared with most other vendors that try to stick in their bloatware or poorly written software. But gee it is a painful and slow transition to observe from the sidelines. Just my 2c. :)

locusm 9y ago
Serious question - what is so compelling about S4B. Competition is very healthy in that space, last time I looked at Lync etc it was seriously lacking.
- apapli 9y ago
  It's just the convenience that is compelling. If you already use Office365 the integration with outlook for web (and desktop for that matter, which I rarely use) is really neat and for the most part "just works". I've got some seriously non technical people in the business who find it super easy to now arrange a conference call, when previously they would be using their iPhone on speakerphone to merge calls.

user5994461 9y ago

I use audio calls, video calls or screen sharing almost every day. It works flawlessly and I despise every company that doesn't have Linq/Skype.

rasjani 9y ago

Worked for company that was bought by MS. During the acquisition period, I was working for 3rd level enterprise support and were main contact for escalation of issues from our OS X users and MS. And yes, it never worked. Higher up guys where patting themselves on the backs for migrating to Lync and now it was So Well Executed while we in the actual client interface where left to deal with abysmal (platinum) support, private hotfixes, fixes what worked at one release and didn't on newer ones and all sorts of crazyness. The "reason" that was said to be the issue was "our internal routing between the sites" and Yeah, pretty much every issue we had never manifested it worker was at home and used home connection or used cellphone client and gsm operator for data. But yeah, fuck Lync. Worst gig ever. One reason why I think rebranding Lync to Skype for Business made sense: let's fool someone to buy it by letting them think they where getting same tech as real Skype, not just same shit with different name.

mathw 9y ago
Except in my experience in an organisation forced to transition from Lync to Skype for Business, Lync always worked fairly well (although we only used chat and voice calls), and Skype for Business was wobbly and unreliable. Even though they were theoretically the same product, somewhere in the rebranding they managed to mess up the network behaviour too. Skype used to be pretty solid, years ago. These days it's just dodgy as heck and moving Lync to be Skype-branded was one of the more baffling decisions I've seen from Microsoft marketing, because none of us thought Skype had any pedigree worth trying to exploit anymore.

worldsayshi 9y ago

It seems to me that half of Microsoft is a rotten mess. Some parts know how to make good software for sure. The other half makes really bad decisions and keep rolling out patches that barely should've passed QA.

mistermann 9y ago
That's about right I think. Or in some cases, half of a product will be good (MSSQL engine), whereas the UI (SSMS) is a bug ridden mess (despite being head and shoulders above most other products).

flukus 9y ago

Audio works well for us, for 1 to 1 conversations anyway. I haven't tried but apparently it's not so good at n to n. Screen sharing did work well until the latest update, now it hardly ever works and we have to use webex. Chat is it's own mixed bag. Sometimes there is noticeable lag, you will get a popup showing you received the message but it will take several more seconds to show in the chat window. Very occasionally a message will take minutes to arrive or not at all. Copying and pasting is always a nightmare. I wish ICQ would take their client from the late 90's and make a business version.

jmiserez 9y ago

The connection issues seem to be company related. I’ve used it in companies where it always worked, and others where it would error out with a 50/50 chance with no discernable cause. But Skype for Business (ahem, Lync) also has some fun, enterprisey restrictions that make no sense at all: - You can’t send messages longer than a few sentences (stacktrace, code snippet are “too long”). - You can’t send messages to offline contacts and have them receive it when they go back online. The message just disappears.

ioulian 9y ago

I had a different experience. When we had a project with a team from another country we tried to use Skype. One person couldn't get it to work, so we tried a lot of other software just to have a video call and share the screen. None of them worked flawlessly, some required to install some software to be able to run inside a browser? The audio on the others didn't work good. The others had bad video quality and massive lag/delay on the screensharing. We switched back to Skype For Business/Skype (w/ personal account) and it was the best experience for us (except for that one guy :D), also very reliable! Skype for Business is also quite nice, and doesn't have any bloat. Just call and message. There was a discussion back here on HN, why nobody has written some good software just to call a client and share your screen. If you have millions of $, why is it so difficult to make a reliable app? I guess you can't get a lot of revenue on free calling software. A lot of the time we just call the clients landline and use TeamViewer for screensharing. It's like we're still living in 2001...

majewsky 9y ago

My employer (84,000 employees) uses Skype for Business. Audio, screen sharing and chat work reasonably well (with the occasional "Megan has to restart his client before joining" or "Jack cannot unmute himself for some reason"). However, any meeting with more than 40-50 participants leads to unacceptable general instability of the connection, so we need to use Adobe Connect for this. (The only reason why I still can't purge Flash from my work notebook.)

INTPenis 9y ago

I actually have very good experience with SFB in my org. For meetings it's the best app I've used. But for persistent group chat it seems to be worthless. We're trying out stuff like Rocketchat and mattermost instead.