Item: Skype for Business, now part of Microsoft Teams
Rating: 5
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Skype for Business is used as our internal instant messaging, meeting hosting, screensharing, conferencing, and room reservation tool. It is used across a global organization of 10,000+ employees in different business units. It's addressing the business problem of pulling together employees from different teams, instant communication, and screen sharing for people to understand what others are seeing.

Pros and Cons

Notifications - It is clear when you have a message on Skype.
Org Charts - It's easy to view a person's organization in the company directly in Skype.
Contact Information - It's an easy way to find someone's email, phone number, etc.

Slow Screen Sharing in Meetings - There is often a lag on what the presenter is showing and what is showing up on the conference room screen or the screens of the remote audience.
Outdated Experience - Compared to other conferencing tools like GoToWebinar, Zoom, BlueJeans, etc., Skype is behind. There is not much you can do on a conference other than screen share. It's hard to control the audience, and there always seems to be an issue.
External Users - Skype is very difficult to use with external users. We almost always have to use another tool when we want to screen share with outside parties.

Return on Investment

Negative - Employees spend too much time dealing with lagging screen sharing in conference rooms and with remote users.
Positive - Employees are able to get answers to quick questions that impact the business.

Usability

The basics of Skype are easy to use (i.e. sending an IM, adding a Skype meeting to a meeting, presenting your desktop). However, Skype is just too far behind competitors in terms of functionality. It is very basic, and doesn't offer the same functionality as other tools like multiple audience types, organizers vs. presenters, Q&A, Polling, etc.

Support Rating

Support for Skype is handled internally, but I have not heard of complaints from external support needed from our global information technology team.

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Teams, Slack and GoToMeeting

Skype for Business was selected because it was a legacy tool in our organization. It will be replaced with Microsoft Teams in the next year or so. This is a welcomed change. Teams is much more current, engaging, and offers more capabilities and intonations with other O365 tools. I'm not sure how Teams stacks up for large conferences, but it has got to be better than Skype. I think GoToMeeting provides an awesome user experience for large conferences with multiple audience types and panelists. I think Slack provides a Teams like experience as well, but has less integration with other O365 apps.

Other Software Used

GoToMeeting, Microsoft Office 365, Workfront

Likelihood to Recommend

Skype could be well suited for a small business that needs basic chat and light screensharing capabilities. In my opinion, it is not appropriate for a large enterprise like the organization I am part of. With the screensharing lags in meetings it decreases productivity due to constant interruptions. It's always better to call in with Skype vs. using your computer for audio, but I think times are changing and computer audio will be more and more prevalent. Other competitors do this so well and Skype is behind the pack.

Skype for Business is Behind the Pack

Overall Satisfaction with Skype for Business (formerly Lync)