4 ms·

Skype for business is absolutely excellent though. We run it as the sole phone service for more than 10.000 employees and it’s the best we’ve ever had software

Skype for business is absolutely excellent though. We run it as the sole phone service for more than 10.000 employees and it’s the best we’ve ever had software wise. Further than that I can find, chat with or call my counterparts from our neighboring municipalities as though they were from our own. We also frequently use it for video meetings on our Microsoft surface (or whatever that 80” touch screen thing is called) and it works like a charm. Private or normal Skype is one of the worst apps I’ve tried in 2018 though. I wonder if it’s because they tore out the peer-to-peer stuff that made Skype great in the oldendays and replaced it with azure.

pidg 8y ago
Absolutely! I was reading these replies and thinking nothing made sense. Didn't realise there were companies trying to use consumer Skype for their corporate calls. We have SfB handling everything at work - including PSTN - and it works fabulously all the time.
- sangnoir 8y ago
  > I was reading these replies and thinking nothing made sense. You can blame Microsoft for the confusion since they renamed Lync to SfB in order to leech off the (non-enterprise) Skype brand. I wonder if they will rename SfB again should the "Skype" become more toxic.
  - woobar 8y ago
    The next name for their corporate product is MS Teams.
- ntsplnkv2 8y ago
  This has not been my experience with SfB From "robot voice" to poor sound quality to randomly dropped calls, to screen shares not working, have been a daily occurrence for me.
  - badpun 8y ago
    Add random crashes, windows not refreshing until you restart the app, app being slow as hell in general or my personal favorite - the "feature" that if you unmute your microphone within first couple seconds of joining the call, you're dropped from it (it's 100% repeatable across the whole company I work in).
packet_nerd 8y ago
> Skype for business is absolutely excellent though. I beg to differ on this.. we use Skype for business and have heard nothing but complaints. One personal beef I have with it is IM messages don't sync between devices. I start a chat with someone on my workstation then when I leave my desk and try to see it on my phone it's unavailable. Or same issue when switching between an RDP and local session.
- sebtoast 8y ago
  If you enabled it (it is by default I believe), the conversations are stored in Outlook. It sucks... but you can still get to them if you have access to Outlook.
  - telchar 8y ago
    When you say "you" here, do you mean "you" or the BOFH somewhere who controls the Exchange server? I stopped opening Lync at work because, among other issues, it wouldn't save conversations and I couldn't figure out how to make it do so.
    - Sylamore 8y ago
      Most versions of Lync/Skype for Business allow you to keep conversation history locally in Outlook. It's under Skype for Business> tools> options> Personal> check whether you have ticked “save IM conversations in my email Conversation History folder”. It can be disabled by the SfB admins though. Newer versions do support server side logging to your Outlook mailbox too but it must be configured by the SfB and Exchange admins.
  - erikb 8y ago
    Doesn't work ~50% of the time though.
- beebmam 8y ago
  I've not once had a problem with Skype for Business and I've been using it since it was released
karpodiem 8y ago
SfB was really bad upon initial release but it's gotten pretty good. No complaints.
flukus 8y ago
I must be using a different skype for business then, ours can't even handle copy and paste from the chat window. It will regularly lose messages or send them to the wrong group. Sometimes you'll get a new message notification but the actual message will arrive several second later. It takes several seconds to close the chat window if there are a few conversations open. And that's just the issues we have trying to send text, don't get me started on the video and audio.
- sixothree 8y ago
  I am completely unable to view my message history. And worse I have a missed message notification that refuses to go away. Somewhere along the line I missed a message but there's nothing there to see.... What a piece of garbage.
- sixothree 8y ago
  Oh and whoever decided that Win+F4 is an appropriate shortcut key for Mute Microphone can go fly a freaking kite. Seriously. On what planet is this ever acceptable. It seems like a sophomore joke.
jngreenlee 8y ago
Totally disagree. I work with HPE (went to Skype around 18 mo ago?) and other large OEMs/software publishers, and collaborating from OUTSIDE the four walls of the Skype-implementing organization has gotten atrocious. Imagine driving on 101 and need to join a call...but you realize it's Skype, so there's not a one-click call-in...you hope that the app will open but first the url opens a webpage...then you authorize opening in the app called "Business", then you try to spell your name...ugh
- lokedhs 8y ago
  Also, when clicking on their "web client", you immediately get a cab file (windows installer file) download request. I'm on Linux. What am I supposed to do with that file? It's like the SfB team still lives in the "everybody uses Windows" mindset of the 90's. The only alternative on Linux is tel.red, which works, but only for an incredibly loose definition of the word "work". I've never used a buggier piece of software.
  - AlphaSite 8y ago
    oes Zoom support linux?
darklajid 8y ago
Skype for business is shit. It filters content. I cannot paste an error to a colleague, because it's "too large". If I first write a meaningless "Hi" instead, I can paste the text just fine. Settings revert a lot. It's damn slow for remote sessions. Barely usable, really. File transfers don't work most of the time (and are slow). Phone service? Call quality is really really bad. The mobile app (Android at least) eats battery like candy, fails to send messages and is crashing a lot. Lync/Skype for Business is a daily pain to suffer here.
Digital-Citizen 8y ago
I've tried Skype for Business and found it lacking. Skype for Business (now years into availability) doesn't handle screen control across the only two OSes it purports to "support" (MacOS and Windows). I think interactive drawing is also not supported everywhere. From what I'm told, the Skype for Business back-end is not enterprise-ready, by which I mean the back-end is written to assume that one user or one set of users has admin control over all the lines set up in the system. So one user or set of users remains in charge of all of the telephony details (role-based accounts, response groups, etc.). A proper enterprise-ready program allows the admin capabilities to be limited to groups of users and delegate functionality to those groups for certain lines. This arrangement lets you have multiple simultaneous admins edit different non-conflicting details (such as setup for two different response groups) simultaneously with no problems. This means large organizations with lots of somewhat independent groups have to set up work queues where someone in each group files a request for the Skype for Business admin(s) to work on requests (e.g. Please make 123-555-1234 a response group set up in the following way...). This slows down an admin in any of those groups considerably as those admins wait for their work requests to be fulfilled or further questions to be sent back in response. Also some of the limits in Skype for Business strike me as silly: one of them concerns response groups (a Skype for Business term for how inbound calls are routed to a series of receptionists called "agents" in Skype for Business parlance). If you want a response group where some of the agents are allowed to decide whether they want to receive the calls (known as a "formal login" response group in Skype for Business parlance), and other users are required to receive the calls (an "informal login") you can't have both of these kinds of agents in the same response group. You have to set it up so that, say, the informal login agents get the call first and (if they don't take the call after a few seconds) the call is passed to the formal login agents. From what I'm told, Skype for Business doesn't handle nested directory service groups properly when those groups contain sets of agents (which I understand Skype for Business treats as distribution lists when one uses Microsoft's directory server Active Directory). If that's so, this means that organizations that keep tidy directory service hierarchies can't reuse their groups efficiently.
distances 8y ago
> Skype for business is absolutely excellent though. We run it as the sole phone service for more than 10.000 employees and it’s the best we’ve ever had software wise. The company I was working for had Skype for Business, and the video calls were such a disaster that people would secretly use Hangouts for every meeting that didn't have higher-ups participating.

pidg 8y ago

Absolutely! I was reading these replies and thinking nothing made sense. Didn't realise there were companies trying to use consumer Skype for their corporate calls. We have SfB handling everything at work - including PSTN - and it works fabulously all the time.

sangnoir 8y ago
> I was reading these replies and thinking nothing made sense. You can blame Microsoft for the confusion since they renamed Lync to SfB in order to leech off the (non-enterprise) Skype brand. I wonder if they will rename SfB again should the "Skype" become more toxic.
- woobar 8y ago
  The next name for their corporate product is MS Teams.
ntsplnkv2 8y ago
This has not been my experience with SfB From "robot voice" to poor sound quality to randomly dropped calls, to screen shares not working, have been a daily occurrence for me.
- badpun 8y ago
  Add random crashes, windows not refreshing until you restart the app, app being slow as hell in general or my personal favorite - the "feature" that if you unmute your microphone within first couple seconds of joining the call, you're dropped from it (it's 100% repeatable across the whole company I work in).

packet_nerd 8y ago

> Skype for business is absolutely excellent though. I beg to differ on this.. we use Skype for business and have heard nothing but complaints. One personal beef I have with it is IM messages don't sync between devices. I start a chat with someone on my workstation then when I leave my desk and try to see it on my phone it's unavailable. Or same issue when switching between an RDP and local session.

sebtoast 8y ago
If you enabled it (it is by default I believe), the conversations are stored in Outlook. It sucks... but you can still get to them if you have access to Outlook.
- telchar 8y ago
  When you say "you" here, do you mean "you" or the BOFH somewhere who controls the Exchange server? I stopped opening Lync at work because, among other issues, it wouldn't save conversations and I couldn't figure out how to make it do so.
  - Sylamore 8y ago
    Most versions of Lync/Skype for Business allow you to keep conversation history locally in Outlook. It's under Skype for Business> tools> options> Personal> check whether you have ticked “save IM conversations in my email Conversation History folder”. It can be disabled by the SfB admins though. Newer versions do support server side logging to your Outlook mailbox too but it must be configured by the SfB and Exchange admins.
- erikb 8y ago
  Doesn't work ~50% of the time though.
beebmam 8y ago
I've not once had a problem with Skype for Business and I've been using it since it was released

karpodiem 8y ago

SfB was really bad upon initial release but it's gotten pretty good. No complaints.

flukus 8y ago

I must be using a different skype for business then, ours can't even handle copy and paste from the chat window. It will regularly lose messages or send them to the wrong group. Sometimes you'll get a new message notification but the actual message will arrive several second later. It takes several seconds to close the chat window if there are a few conversations open. And that's just the issues we have trying to send text, don't get me started on the video and audio.

sixothree 8y ago
I am completely unable to view my message history. And worse I have a missed message notification that refuses to go away. Somewhere along the line I missed a message but there's nothing there to see.... What a piece of garbage.
sixothree 8y ago
Oh and whoever decided that Win+F4 is an appropriate shortcut key for Mute Microphone can go fly a freaking kite. Seriously. On what planet is this ever acceptable. It seems like a sophomore joke.

jngreenlee 8y ago

Totally disagree. I work with HPE (went to Skype around 18 mo ago?) and other large OEMs/software publishers, and collaborating from OUTSIDE the four walls of the Skype-implementing organization has gotten atrocious. Imagine driving on 101 and need to join a call...but you realize it's Skype, so there's not a one-click call-in...you hope that the app will open but first the url opens a webpage...then you authorize opening in the app called "Business", then you try to spell your name...ugh

lokedhs 8y ago
Also, when clicking on their "web client", you immediately get a cab file (windows installer file) download request. I'm on Linux. What am I supposed to do with that file? It's like the SfB team still lives in the "everybody uses Windows" mindset of the 90's. The only alternative on Linux is tel.red, which works, but only for an incredibly loose definition of the word "work". I've never used a buggier piece of software.
- AlphaSite 8y ago
  oes Zoom support linux?

darklajid 8y ago

Skype for business is shit. It filters content. I cannot paste an error to a colleague, because it's "too large". If I first write a meaningless "Hi" instead, I can paste the text just fine. Settings revert a lot. It's damn slow for remote sessions. Barely usable, really. File transfers don't work most of the time (and are slow). Phone service? Call quality is really really bad. The mobile app (Android at least) eats battery like candy, fails to send messages and is crashing a lot. Lync/Skype for Business is a daily pain to suffer here.

Digital-Citizen 8y ago

I've tried Skype for Business and found it lacking. Skype for Business (now years into availability) doesn't handle screen control across the only two OSes it purports to "support" (MacOS and Windows). I think interactive drawing is also not supported everywhere. From what I'm told, the Skype for Business back-end is not enterprise-ready, by which I mean the back-end is written to assume that one user or one set of users has admin control over all the lines set up in the system. So one user or set of users remains in charge of all of the telephony details (role-based accounts, response groups, etc.). A proper enterprise-ready program allows the admin capabilities to be limited to groups of users and delegate functionality to those groups for certain lines. This arrangement lets you have multiple simultaneous admins edit different non-conflicting details (such as setup for two different response groups) simultaneously with no problems. This means large organizations with lots of somewhat independent groups have to set up work queues where someone in each group files a request for the Skype for Business admin(s) to work on requests (e.g. Please make 123-555-1234 a response group set up in the following way...). This slows down an admin in any of those groups considerably as those admins wait for their work requests to be fulfilled or further questions to be sent back in response. Also some of the limits in Skype for Business strike me as silly: one of them concerns response groups (a Skype for Business term for how inbound calls are routed to a series of receptionists called "agents" in Skype for Business parlance). If you want a response group where some of the agents are allowed to decide whether they want to receive the calls (known as a "formal login" response group in Skype for Business parlance), and other users are required to receive the calls (an "informal login") you can't have both of these kinds of agents in the same response group. You have to set it up so that, say, the informal login agents get the call first and (if they don't take the call after a few seconds) the call is passed to the formal login agents. From what I'm told, Skype for Business doesn't handle nested directory service groups properly when those groups contain sets of agents (which I understand Skype for Business treats as distribution lists when one uses Microsoft's directory server Active Directory). If that's so, this means that organizations that keep tidy directory service hierarchies can't reuse their groups efficiently.

distances 8y ago

> Skype for business is absolutely excellent though. We run it as the sole phone service for more than 10.000 employees and it’s the best we’ve ever had software wise. The company I was working for had Skype for Business, and the video calls were such a disaster that people would secretly use Hangouts for every meeting that didn't have higher-ups participating.