Item: Skype for Business, now part of Microsoft Teams
Rating: 8
Author: Andrey Perepelitsyn

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Skype for business was used as an instant messaging and audio conferencing tool across the entire organization. It was a great tool for collaboration within geographically distributed teams, users were able to text or call each other whenever they needed without using phone lines, which were a bit expensive for international calls.

Pros and Cons

Good IM tool
Good web conferencing
Has web application for conferencing with people outside your organization

Sound quality could be better
VDI integration was not very smooth, IM worked fine but voice was very ugly
Having linux desktop client could also be good

Return on Investment

International calls were not needed with Skype for Business
Work of teams became more quick
Meetings were moved to Skype for Business

Alternatives Considered

Slack

Slack has a bit higher sound quality on calls but does not have a very comfortable GUI and not very good notification sounds. On the other hand, you can connect several accounts to Slack client, as for Skype for Business you can connect only one account and run only one instance of a client on your PC.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Azure, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Server, Zoom, WebEx Meetings, GoToMeeting

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need to send a short message to your organization which contains some business sensitive information or some business critical files you can do it securely within your enterprise network. So it won`t be transferred across public internet, minimizing the risk of any information leak. Also, you can have an entire team in conference quickly even if people are working from different countries

Just a good tool for collaboration

Overall Satisfaction with Skype for Business