Great business IM for your organization
April 27, 2016

Great business IM for your organization

Tommy Boucher | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Skype for Business

We started using Skype for Business a while ago when it was called Office Communicator. Office Communicator was our main internal communication platform for instant messaging. We also implemented and deployed Lync 2010 with the enterprise voice functionality. For a couple of years we used Lync for half of our employee voice calls, and the whole company for the instant messaging and presence. When we migrated from Lync On-Premise to Lync Online/Skype for Business, we had to remove the voice capabilities, and users stopped using it progressively. Right now, we have less than 30 percent of the company that still uses Skype.
  • Presence - Since Skype started with Windows, you can know if someone is available, away, busy, in a meeting, etc.
  • Integration - Since Skype is part of the Microsoft Office suite, you will see availabilities of people all around the Microsoft suite.
  • Federation - You can IM or see presence of people from another company who configured the federation.
  • Instability - Skype for Business does not work on Mac. The client exists in a very old version of Lync, and is almost unusable.
  • File Transfer - The File transfer will not work all the time. We had a hard time trying to make it works.
  • Group chat - There is no chat room with the Skype for Business Online. The on-premise version has a persistent chat feature that is really not enough.
  • Persistence - Conversations will not sync across devices. You can have your history in Outlook, but you cannot use many clients at the same time without issues.
  • Mobility - The mobile version is not helping.
  • Free with Office 365 - Since you don't have to pay anymore for Skype while using Office 365, it is very easy to get your ROI. There is no real investment in time to manage or deploy. It's all part of the Office 365 process.
  • Slack and Chatter
Slack and Chatter have great adoption here, for many reasons, including the persistent chat and because it is so easy to deploy.

BUT, there is no real working Windows clients for those solutions, while Skype for Business is available on almost all platforms. Using a web browser that has an IM client is no fun at all. Skype will deployed from GPO or MDT and all your employees will appear in the status pages.
Slack, Remote Desktop Manager, Symantec Endpoint Protection, Symantec Enterprise Vault, Microsoft Exchange, Sophos Endpoint Protection, CrashPlan, Arcserve Backup, Compellent, Windows Server Failover Clustering, Windows Server, Google Drive, Google App Engine, Box, Dropbox, Fortinet FortiGate, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Hyper-V, DataCore Hyper-converged Virtual SAN, WordPress, TeamViewer
Since this is integrated will all Microsoft products, and synced with Active Directory, and free with Office 365, there is no good reason not to use Skype for Business. It will give you IM capabilities that people will like.

Skype for Business, now part of Microsoft Teams Feature Ratings

High quality audio
8
High quality video
8
Low bandwidth requirements
2
Desktop sharing
5
Whiteboards
5
Calendar integration
10
Meeting initiation
8
Integrates with social media
6
Record meetings / events
2
Live chat
10
Audience polling
6
User authentication
10
Participant roles & permissions
10
Confidential attendee list
10