Bear in mind that subscribing to Office can prove much more expensive over time than buying permanent software licenses.Įach of your users has immediate access to Skype for Business, but you’ll want to tweak Skype’s settings in the Office 365 Admin portal to ensure that everything works smoothly. Life online with Office 365Īs we’ve established, there are a number of different ways to run Skype for Business, but as the server-based options all involve a significant investment in both hardware and software licences, small and many medium enterprises will be best served by the version that comes bundled with all Office 365 subscriptions. There’s no internal document viewer, so the simple file manager instead opens files using your default external viewer. File sharing is also rather messier than we’d like. ![]() However, we’d have liked the confusing prompts for users to contact people by phone to be disabled by default, as a third-party service or additional hardware are required. It’s easy to go into voice, text, or video chat with a colleague, a good option for office communication. The client works well, and we were pleased with the video and call quality we achieved via both a local Skype for Business Server 2015 setup and Office 365. It’s easy to hand over the presenter role, and a shared whiteboard is available for brainstorming. This is handy if you need technical support, although when it comes to remote maintenance by an administrator, an RDP session is far more useful. You can also share mouse and keyboard control with a selected meeting attendee. You can give a PowerPoint presentation via Skype, or share your desktop, specific programs, or one of your monitors. Annoyingly, the latter option remains present even if you haven’t enabled telephony services.īuttons at the bottom of the window allow you to open a chat pane, turn on your video feed, end the session, and enable presentation features. Once launched, you’ll be placed in a chat session, from where you can invite other participants from your contact book or, if you’ve enabled telephony integration, by dialling their phone number. Your conversation window starts by letting you choose whether you want to use Skype for Business to handle your audio and video communication, whether you’d rather have it via the work phone number associated with your account – an option that requires full telephony provision - or whether you’d prefer to run a purely text-based meeting session. Skype for Business integrates with Outlook, allowing you to schedule Skype meetings in advance. Other tabs show your communication history and scheduled meetings. It’s better looking than either Skype or Lync, with a clean, fairly narrow window that by default displays your contact list. The client bears some resemblance to the old Lync client, and some to the personal Skype client, but it’s very much a new product. ![]() Client AnatomyĪlthough there are multiple ways to administer Skype for Business, the client-side experience remains consistent. Further subscription models are available for Skype for Business as a stand-alone product, starting at £1.30 per user. ![]() Microsoft Lync Server 2013 gets a free update to allow you to support the Skype for Business client, while Lync Server 2010 users will have to upgrade to the new Skype for Business Server 2015.Ī third alternative is available for all Office 365 for Business users, from the all-online Essentials version, priced at £3.10 per user, per month, through to the Premium version, with gives you a full desktop office suite at £7.80 per user, per month, all the way up to the Enterprise E4 edition. The roll-out of Microsoft Skype for Business is intended to be a complete revamp to the Lync communication service, although its availability immediately after release is limited, with the new server software available via MSDN, but not TechNet.
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