7 ms·

Um.. I'm not sure the article author is familiar with the fact that "Skype for business" (the "complex" one) is actually home grown and was just rebranded from

Um.. I'm not sure the article author is familiar with the fact that "Skype for business" (the "complex" one) is actually home grown and was just rebranded from Lync. This is not at all the same as the consumer Skype, which actually tries to be a weird mixup between Snapchat and whatnot at the moment (failing utterly of course). Skype for Business (+ PSTN calling) is actually pretty great on Office 365 tbh...

nkoren 8y ago
Unless you're not using Windows, in which case it functionally doesn't exist. Seriously. I have never successfully connected a single call with it. (Understood that the same criticism can be levelled at Facetime etc -- which I also don't use.)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- toyg 8y ago
  > I have never successfully connected a single call with it. I have (on mac), but then I have been treated to terrible call quality and an incredibly poor UI (half the time we need remote control, there is no option for it, for some reason).
- djsumdog 8y ago
  I use Linux as my native OS at my current shop and thought "Well they use Skype for Business and there's a new Skype for Linux client" .. but nope. Just as stated in this thread, it's a totally different protocol that's part of their Lync product. I ended up getting a license for Sky, a 3rd party commercial Skype for Business client for Linux. It's pretty decent for what it is, but I could have just installed a Windows VM, used VNC, shared the VNC session and gotten the same thing.
  - sloxy 8y ago
    > but I could have just installed a Windows VM, used VNC, shared the VNC session and gotten the same thing I'm pretty sure there would be a noticeable(couple of seconds) lag between both incoming & outgoing audio to the VM making smooth flowing conversation near to impossible.
    - djsumdog 8y ago
      At my old job I had this setup for WebEx. I did voice over a standard phone, so only video went over x11vnc -> vnc client in Windows VM -> WebEx. It worked pretty well; way better than Sky (Linux Skype for Business client) which is just laggy as hell.
  - g8oz 8y ago
    On Linux Google Meet using Chrome is really good in my experience.
  - StringyBob 8y ago
    Used to be the case that if a mac or Linux user connected, the call quality degraded for everyone on the call. Don't know if improved... http://blog.schertz.name/2016/06/skype-for-business-vbss-update/ http://blog.schertz.name/2016/06/skype-for-business-vbss-upd...
stephenhuey 8y ago
I do not understand why a software company who has long made money in the enterprise with Office, SQL Server, etc cannot make an integrated chat program that works well in a corporate environment. This Lync Skype beast is so buggy and it doesn't even have code paste one tenth as decent as what Sametime had a decade ago, and MS makes TOOLS FOR DEVELOPERS! Do they not use Lync/Skype in-house? Dog-folding should make it better right away, unless MS employees just don't collaborate with each other?
- wilde 8y ago
  They use it internally. It’s equally shitty, but it makes enough money no one cares.
- tzahola 8y ago
  Dog-folding Microsoft Origami Club to the rescue!
- abiox 8y ago
  i think that at this level, what ultimately matters is that a) "it's Microsoft" and b) can the MS sales person/marketing materials convince some manager to sign off. business-wise, making things better is only worth pursuing insofar as it helps maintain or advance market position. hopefully they'll see it that way at some point.
- ConceptJunkie 8y ago
  Several years ago I worked with an ex-Microsofter who'd worked on the NT kernel and SQL Server. There were several times when I asked him why so-and-so was so awful, and his response was always that they didn't have the good people working on it, because they were all working on NT and SQL Server. My response was that as big as Microsoft is, they should have enough good people to go around. Really, I'm convinced it's not the average engineers in the trenches who make the products so horrible, but management and marketing's influence over management that causes everything to be a trainwreck.
gambiting 8y ago
I work at a large corporation where we use Skype For Business and I swear, this is probably the worst piece of software I have ever used. They can't get basic things right - I can send a message to my coworker right now, and it will appear in the list of messages on his machine somewhere in between past messages. For a while, we had someone who couldn't receive any attachments, skype would just say "failed sending" - we had an actual Level 3 tech support from MS remote over to his machine to find out the issue, it was some broken registry settings. Selecting and copying text is a lottery - sometimes it will copy exactly what you highlighted, sometimes it won't - which is bizzare for an IM program. And then there's the conferencing, oh my god the conferencing. If you are in a conference room and someone left another account logged in with skype open, then no other user on that pc can make/receive calls - the only way to fix it is to restart the machine. I honestly can't believe we're paying money for this thing.
- 0xfeba 8y ago
  Yeah, I got the latest "Unified" version now with Win10 and it takes more clicks to do the same things now. Plus it keeps insisting on showing my profile photo over any new screenshare, and doesn't remember when I pop it out and minimize it. Buttons hide and show (but the background behind them is still opaque).
- StreamBright 8y ago
  Same here, Skype for Business is such a big overhead that people started to riot against it and we are going to replace it with something that works. "failed sending" is an every day issue, Mac client cannot record, mobile version drains battery like crazy, just to mention the top pain points.
- fhood 8y ago
  I can not agree with you more. Skype for business has is an unmitigated disaster of a piece of software and whatever team is in charge of it needs to be fired or relocated so that Microsoft can start over on it. Skype for business is so insultingly bad that it is pretty much the only piece of widely used software that I am willing to claim that given a month I could write something far better.
michrassena 8y ago
Skype for Business client and server both seem to work pretty well. What I find annoying is Microsoft conflating the branding between two very different products, a rebadged enterprise communications product (formerly Lync) and a commercial-consumer product. So when someone says they want to make a Skype call with a client, what do they mean? Sometimes it's Skype for Business and sometimes it's plain old Skype. It costs everyone time and money when this isn't communicated clearly and one end of the call expects to use Skype and the other end Skype for Business.
- occamrazor 8y ago
  In theory it is possible to make calls from Skype for Business and Skype for Consumers. In practice the UI for that is quite horrible and I could never successfully connect a call.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  Which does seem to be why Skype for Business is getting replaced with Teams, and why Teams is not Skype branded at all, it's just branded Microsoft Teams.
erikb 8y ago
Yes, Lync's call quality is better. But in return chat is awful, screensharing sometimes simply doesn't work, and it seems Lync Windows and Lync Mac where developed with two unrelated communication protocols in mind. And updating it can kill your whole computer.
vermontdevil 8y ago
Explains why everyone at IU uses Zoom nowadays for conference calls plus Slack for daily convo instead of Skype.
boxingdog 8y ago
That is not my experience with Skype for business before at one company we used Lync at that worked perfectly, then we moved to Skype and the problems began, from people not able to share their screens, bad sound quality, people getting dropped from the calls, etc. it was painful to use. At another company sending messages was a gamble, sometimes they were delivered and a lot of times just a "failed to send", so we had to resort to communicating by email, some coworkers created a slack channel and then in lest than a month the entire company was there.
xbrother 8y ago
We mostly switched to Zoom due the call quality.
jpfed 8y ago
Aside: I can't hear the name "Skype for Business" without thinking someone took a perfectly suitable chat client and attacked it with Kragle.
hocuspocus 8y ago
I used O365 and Skype for Business at my previous job, and we regularly fell back on consumer Skype with some of our remote developers (not that remote mind you, within Europe). Teams seemed to work better but was still very bare at the time. Then we got new C-level executives from Cisco, and the first thing they did was to initiate a migration to Cisco solutions. Their offering is super confusing to end users like me (WebEx, Spark, Jabber, ?) but it works reliably, in my experience.
m-p-3 8y ago
We switched to Gsuite. Hangouts Meet with an automatically provided dial-in phone number for those unable to join the meeting through data sercices works well.
avodonosov 8y ago
Except it often doesnt work
ctrlaltdestroy 8y ago
Really? I hate skype for business because I can't copy-paste any body of text to co-worker because it gives a dialog box saying "the message is too big to send".. I don't know a single IM app that does this. Apparently I'm in 1980s.

nkoren 8y ago

Unless you're not using Windows, in which case it functionally doesn't exist. Seriously. I have never successfully connected a single call with it. (Understood that the same criticism can be levelled at Facetime etc -- which I also don't use.)

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
toyg 8y ago
> I have never successfully connected a single call with it. I have (on mac), but then I have been treated to terrible call quality and an incredibly poor UI (half the time we need remote control, there is no option for it, for some reason).
djsumdog 8y ago
I use Linux as my native OS at my current shop and thought "Well they use Skype for Business and there's a new Skype for Linux client" .. but nope. Just as stated in this thread, it's a totally different protocol that's part of their Lync product. I ended up getting a license for Sky, a 3rd party commercial Skype for Business client for Linux. It's pretty decent for what it is, but I could have just installed a Windows VM, used VNC, shared the VNC session and gotten the same thing.
- sloxy 8y ago
  > but I could have just installed a Windows VM, used VNC, shared the VNC session and gotten the same thing I'm pretty sure there would be a noticeable(couple of seconds) lag between both incoming & outgoing audio to the VM making smooth flowing conversation near to impossible.
  - djsumdog 8y ago
    At my old job I had this setup for WebEx. I did voice over a standard phone, so only video went over x11vnc -> vnc client in Windows VM -> WebEx. It worked pretty well; way better than Sky (Linux Skype for Business client) which is just laggy as hell.
- g8oz 8y ago
  On Linux Google Meet using Chrome is really good in my experience.
- StringyBob 8y ago
  Used to be the case that if a mac or Linux user connected, the call quality degraded for everyone on the call. Don't know if improved... http://blog.schertz.name/2016/06/skype-for-business-vbss-update/ http://blog.schertz.name/2016/06/skype-for-business-vbss-upd...

stephenhuey 8y ago

I do not understand why a software company who has long made money in the enterprise with Office, SQL Server, etc cannot make an integrated chat program that works well in a corporate environment. This Lync Skype beast is so buggy and it doesn't even have code paste one tenth as decent as what Sametime had a decade ago, and MS makes TOOLS FOR DEVELOPERS! Do they not use Lync/Skype in-house? Dog-folding should make it better right away, unless MS employees just don't collaborate with each other?

wilde 8y ago
They use it internally. It’s equally shitty, but it makes enough money no one cares.
tzahola 8y ago
Dog-folding Microsoft Origami Club to the rescue!
abiox 8y ago
i think that at this level, what ultimately matters is that a) "it's Microsoft" and b) can the MS sales person/marketing materials convince some manager to sign off. business-wise, making things better is only worth pursuing insofar as it helps maintain or advance market position. hopefully they'll see it that way at some point.
ConceptJunkie 8y ago
Several years ago I worked with an ex-Microsofter who'd worked on the NT kernel and SQL Server. There were several times when I asked him why so-and-so was so awful, and his response was always that they didn't have the good people working on it, because they were all working on NT and SQL Server. My response was that as big as Microsoft is, they should have enough good people to go around. Really, I'm convinced it's not the average engineers in the trenches who make the products so horrible, but management and marketing's influence over management that causes everything to be a trainwreck.

gambiting 8y ago

I work at a large corporation where we use Skype For Business and I swear, this is probably the worst piece of software I have ever used. They can't get basic things right - I can send a message to my coworker right now, and it will appear in the list of messages on his machine somewhere in between past messages. For a while, we had someone who couldn't receive any attachments, skype would just say "failed sending" - we had an actual Level 3 tech support from MS remote over to his machine to find out the issue, it was some broken registry settings. Selecting and copying text is a lottery - sometimes it will copy exactly what you highlighted, sometimes it won't - which is bizzare for an IM program. And then there's the conferencing, oh my god the conferencing. If you are in a conference room and someone left another account logged in with skype open, then no other user on that pc can make/receive calls - the only way to fix it is to restart the machine. I honestly can't believe we're paying money for this thing.

0xfeba 8y ago
Yeah, I got the latest "Unified" version now with Win10 and it takes more clicks to do the same things now. Plus it keeps insisting on showing my profile photo over any new screenshare, and doesn't remember when I pop it out and minimize it. Buttons hide and show (but the background behind them is still opaque).
StreamBright 8y ago
Same here, Skype for Business is such a big overhead that people started to riot against it and we are going to replace it with something that works. "failed sending" is an every day issue, Mac client cannot record, mobile version drains battery like crazy, just to mention the top pain points.
fhood 8y ago
I can not agree with you more. Skype for business has is an unmitigated disaster of a piece of software and whatever team is in charge of it needs to be fired or relocated so that Microsoft can start over on it. Skype for business is so insultingly bad that it is pretty much the only piece of widely used software that I am willing to claim that given a month I could write something far better.

michrassena 8y ago

Skype for Business client and server both seem to work pretty well. What I find annoying is Microsoft conflating the branding between two very different products, a rebadged enterprise communications product (formerly Lync) and a commercial-consumer product. So when someone says they want to make a Skype call with a client, what do they mean? Sometimes it's Skype for Business and sometimes it's plain old Skype. It costs everyone time and money when this isn't communicated clearly and one end of the call expects to use Skype and the other end Skype for Business.

occamrazor 8y ago
In theory it is possible to make calls from Skype for Business and Skype for Consumers. In practice the UI for that is quite horrible and I could never successfully connect a call.
WorldMaker 8y ago
Which does seem to be why Skype for Business is getting replaced with Teams, and why Teams is not Skype branded at all, it's just branded Microsoft Teams.

erikb 8y ago

Yes, Lync's call quality is better. But in return chat is awful, screensharing sometimes simply doesn't work, and it seems Lync Windows and Lync Mac where developed with two unrelated communication protocols in mind. And updating it can kill your whole computer.

vermontdevil 8y ago

Explains why everyone at IU uses Zoom nowadays for conference calls plus Slack for daily convo instead of Skype.

boxingdog 8y ago

That is not my experience with Skype for business before at one company we used Lync at that worked perfectly, then we moved to Skype and the problems began, from people not able to share their screens, bad sound quality, people getting dropped from the calls, etc. it was painful to use. At another company sending messages was a gamble, sometimes they were delivered and a lot of times just a "failed to send", so we had to resort to communicating by email, some coworkers created a slack channel and then in lest than a month the entire company was there.

xbrother 8y ago

We mostly switched to Zoom due the call quality.

jpfed 8y ago

Aside: I can't hear the name "Skype for Business" without thinking someone took a perfectly suitable chat client and attacked it with Kragle.

hocuspocus 8y ago

I used O365 and Skype for Business at my previous job, and we regularly fell back on consumer Skype with some of our remote developers (not that remote mind you, within Europe). Teams seemed to work better but was still very bare at the time. Then we got new C-level executives from Cisco, and the first thing they did was to initiate a migration to Cisco solutions. Their offering is super confusing to end users like me (WebEx, Spark, Jabber, ?) but it works reliably, in my experience.

m-p-3 8y ago

We switched to Gsuite. Hangouts Meet with an automatically provided dial-in phone number for those unable to join the meeting through data sercices works well.

avodonosov 8y ago

Except it often doesnt work

ctrlaltdestroy 8y ago

Really? I hate skype for business because I can't copy-paste any body of text to co-worker because it gives a dialog box saying "the message is too big to send".. I don't know a single IM app that does this. Apparently I'm in 1980s.