With Skype, Microsoft's messaging strategy looks coherent at last (almost) In 2015 we compared, after many years' experience, Microsoft strategy to "a heavily armed octopus trying to shoot itself in the head". But relatively speaking, there's one product category where its hard work is beginning to appear coherent – at least compared to the competition. After a year in beta and several false starts, …
"it won't see much adoption in the business space."
Really? We just replaced 5,000 Blackberrys with Windows Phones due to the far better security than Android / IOS and the better Skype client.... The Enterprise is the one area where Windows Phone is doing quite well!
"We dropped a purchase of 3,000 windows phones due to the utter lack of support and focus from MS."
How much support do you need from the phone manufacturer? Very little - Especially when you consider the cost of the device - The client I mentioned in my comment above would factory reset phones with a problem, if that didnt work they handed you a new phone and recycled the old one - on a pure cost basis it was cheaper to just hand over a new phone that costs (~£50-£100) rather than have the employee without a phone/have support staff trying to arrange repair with the supplier.
Ok, MS might not be offering much in the way of support for these devices - but how much do you need, its a capable phone with SMS and a great email client pretty much all boxes ticked, as a bonus for a business phone at least you know your staff wont be off playing candy crush or installing malware ridden fart apps.
I'd be interested - what did you opt to replace them with?
Really? It's no different to any other Microshaft product in business - target the shiny-shiny lovers, the non-IT people and the why-would-we-use-anything-that's-not-M$ IT people - and they'll swallow the marketing bollocks and deploy it anyway.
To implement a more business focused strategy they need to add some more differentiation, skype-for-business-but-using-it-from-home, skye-at-work-but-not-for-business, skype-for-idiots, skype-for-discussing-problems-with-skype
All these will have to be registered to a single Office365 account but you can't have two different ones installed on the same machine at the same time. Obviously they can't call contacts on one of the others.
Logins will prompt you if this is a microsoft personal or work email address, which one you have to click will vary on a daily basis. Any support requests will require you to have either a hotmail or outlook.com address or both, or neither.
I currently have Cisco's Jabber on my computer and it works with the Cisco IP phone on my desk in what Cisco calls Unified Communications.
The Jabber client on Windows (they have yet to get it working on my MacBook Pro) feels like an afterthought. It has a bulky UI that doesn't use space well and a fairly intrusive multi window interface including the toolbar for my phone that hovers around the screen. Except for the occasional enjoyment of knocking my handset on the floor I'm unsure why I have a desk phone at all when a soft phone on my computer would serve just as well.
It seems to me no one has put much effort into Unified Communications and that would be a great place for Microsoft to position Skype for Business. However, I'm not seeing them put a lot of effort to unseat Cisco's IP phone dominance.
We are looking to replace our PABX this year. The main feature the replacement must have is a decent softphone with integration into our contact lists in our ERP solution.
We want to get rid of as many phones as possible - some areas need physical phones, but wherever possible, we want to switch to wireless headsets.
We also did this at my previous employer, using the Swyx solution, which worked very well.
"With Skype, Microsoft's messaging strategy looks coherent at last (almost)"
And without it life returns to normal.
Finally dumped the unreliable turd. As my PFY pointed out, the only bit of software that we used that was flakey was owned by M$
It's become awful since they wrapped their tentacles round it and I'm glad to see the back of it.
Note... if you want to register a business email address and it blocks you with .co. uk or .com and refers you to the pay site you can still use things like .eu but you now get some stupid imposed handle.
So long, and all that stuff
Yep fell foul of that .co.uk thing.
I have my own personal .co.uk domain. Had it for more than 15 years and wanted to use it with my Skype now that I've retired. Nope not possible so I had to use my daughters old .me.uk address instead (she's legged it to NZ so a .uk address is not really useful to her).
So my new Skype name is her name.
MS are a complete bunch of Twonks to think that only businesses use .co.uk.
Needless to say, that address now gets a load of spam emails. Mammary enhancements seem to be the current favourite.
Not because I've found something massively better, but because why would I want to offer my personal communications to a huge irresponsible corporate entity. it's cronies, and it's puppet masters.
I can take all of those risks with someone else who just may care a little bit more, and even if they don't what I really want is the choice, and supporting one of the big monopolistic dinosaurs is one sure way of adding yet another brick to the wall the monopolist's want to build to limit choice to what suits them.
Can someone outline the realistic alternatives? Now browsers have WebRTC wasn't this supposed to make browser-based video calling a reality - but it seems there are a zillion apps in this space too.
I just want one that works, and that everyone else is on.
Obligatory xkcds:
https://xkcd.com/1810/
https://xkcd.com/1782/
https://xkcd.com/1254/
Currently Ring < https://ring.cx/ > looks very promising, but I've only played around with it. I would like to adopt it for daily use, but for the sake of non-IT literate family members whose systems I help keep up and running, and who are scattered around the world, I'm using Teamviewer, which isn't necessarily any better than Skype, either technically or ethically, but it works and combines the two services which I really need: the VOIP and remote access.
Clearly other options are available. :-)
We still have staff asking to install the consumer version of Skype, as they feel that they need it to connect to other Skype users.
If someone sends a contact request to a Skype user, it appears to take about 10 minutes to process - which is both weird & frustrating to users.
Teams is pretty good - it's very early days, but I like the fact that you can keep it really simple (by staying in the interface) or going much deeper, by accessing the SharePoint team site and making it much more complex (but I don't know why a 'Team' user would do that).
For well a couple YEARS now, Skype for Mac has lacked previous versions' menu to access Mac Contacts multiple numbers. You can only dial the first number for any contact. There is a workaround where opening the contact's profile reveals all their numbers, but this is stupid, pointlessly difficult, and anti-user.
Skype for all platforms has also done away with personal voicemail greetings, because hey - that's not something anyone ever uses, especially in business. Oh wait...
Trying to SMS using Skype has never ever worked for me, whether I associate my cell number for replies, or not. It just throws my balance into the void, without even bothering to report that it never worked.
And yesterday I received an important call, and 30 seconds into it Skype forcibly ended the call the by signing me out because I'm using an older version without the missing and broken features of the latest versions.
It's like Skype _wants_ me to abandon their increasingly awful anti-user service...
How on Earth can The Register claim MS's Skype strategy is "coherent"?!? It is in fact an utter disaster!
Microsoft might be getting its strategy together but in the meantime the market has moved on. The consumer market (and some businesses) have settled on things like WhatsApp and Telegram for messaging with the argument being it's "good enough" and it's what everyone else is using and they don't care much about their data. Personally I use Signal which is great on the phone and has a usable browser client.
Google has dicked around a lot but Hangouts is rock solid and the new whiteboard is a good add-on for video conferences. Allo just looks like a messenger, in reality it's a customer service AI beta. Look beneath the flurry of releases and you'll see that they tried to see what worked and rolled into their other products.
I have to use Skype for Business with one of my customers. Works fine for me but my customers have so much trouble with it that they now always dial in and, even though they're on VoIP phones, the system is more stable. Can't see anyone who doesn't already have this going with it.
Given the inherent coherency of Skype and the inherent coherency of Lync/Skype for Business, I doubt you could mash them together to get anything even approaching coherency.
Lync shoves conversations into another program (Outlook), loses a packet and starts inserting panicky messages into the conversation about your message may not have been delivered and look up error code 0, and forgets groups as quickly as they're made. Skype is, well, Skype.
don't give them too much credit just yet.
the Skype UI is a mess, and the add-on things (like SkypeIn, calling minutes) is so convoluted and overpriced it really looks like they're trying to be a traditional carrier vs the potential to create a useful global platform
Skype for business is faring a little better in recent months, especially with the new macOS client, but still has some crazy UI/UX decisions around the interface and how conversations are (mis-)handled
and please, for the love of $DEITY$ would someone explain why I need two clients with a significant amount of overlap... Outlook can manage to talk to Exchange, IMAP, POP3 etc, Trillium could talk to every IM protocol going etc, but we still have to have a 1:1 relationship with client:chat persona :(
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