Skype for Business bridges gap between chat client and voice/screenshare/video meetings
January 15, 2018
Skype for Business bridges gap between chat client and voice/screenshare/video meetings
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Skype for Business
Skype for Business is used at my organization to stay in touch with external vendors and clients. It is additionally used for company meetings, client meetings, and vendor meetings when having a reliable connection for voice and video conferencing is required. Additionally, I use it to stay in individual contact/be available to off-site teams. It is excellent for synchronous communication, both text and voice, and provides decent sound quality when used on a broadband connection.
- Synchronous communication: immediate, instant text chat and video chat.
- Group chat/meetings: easy to communicate with multiple people at once.
- Cross-platform: available on Mac, Windows, and on smartphones - great app support across all these platforms, making it straightforward to never miss a message.
- Automated available/busy time: some kind of integration to automatically snooze Skype (maybe integrated with Outlook calendar or something), or outside of business hours.
- Screen share can lag a little during larger calls or meetings.
- Skype for Business has made communication across multiple platforms and with many different teams easy, straightforward, and reliable.
- It has streamlined individual and departmental meetings and communication, internally and with external parties.
- Well-supported and accessible/easy to implement when working with or onboarding new vendors/clients; industry standard messaging client, with extensive support for setup and functionality.
Most people are familiar with Skype (having personally used it), and Skype for Business has an approachable learning curve. It's also functional across multiple platforms and well-supported for smartphones, which makes it an easy choice when onboarding new clients/vendors. It can be setup and run quickly, and works well with other software.
It competes directly with other video/voice conferencing software: screen share, voice chat, with multiple parties involved are all easily handled by other options. However, Skype's chat / text capability, and contact list storage, makes Skype for Business bridge the gap between chat programs (like Slack) and conferencing programs (like UberConference).
It competes directly with other video/voice conferencing software: screen share, voice chat, with multiple parties involved are all easily handled by other options. However, Skype's chat / text capability, and contact list storage, makes Skype for Business bridge the gap between chat programs (like Slack) and conferencing programs (like UberConference).