An integral part of my daily work that creates an integral headache
August 17, 2019
An integral part of my daily work that creates an integral headache
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Skype for Business (formerly Lync)
Skype for Business is used by my entire organization for web conferencing and intercompany chat and most people use it for voice calls instead of direct phone calls. We formerly used Cisco WebEx and Jabber for these applications.
- Saved chat history (Conversation History). This is a useful upgrade vs. our last tool (Jabber) where I'd have to manually save chats as HTML if I wanted to reference the information later.
- Integration with Outlook. It is convenient having a Skype meeting button built directly into scheduling which inserts the call-in info. I also appreciate that when meetings are scheduled his way, a "join meeting" button pops up in the Outlook meeting reminder. Also, nice that the saved Conversation History on my first point is searchable in Outlook.
- The emoji of a head banging against a brick wall. It often perfectly encapsulates my feelings about work, especially when Skype for Business is failing.
- The ability to record meetings is much better than when we used WebEx. It's built-in whereas with WebEx we had to have some special version to be able to capture the audio from the presenter AND the participants, which often meant the presenter would just have to repeat questions (waste of time). That was super annoying for someone like me who does a lot of remote training sessions, so this is a nice improvement over the previous tool.
- The stability of Skype for Business (SfB) is terrible. Every single colleague of mine complains about frequent skype problems. The problems are also quite varied, so it's more of a "flavor of the week" problem (or flavor of the day in particularly bad cases). A common ice breaker on a call is a quick anecdote about the latest skype problem someone has experienced. While it has gotten slightly better in the ~2 years we've had SfB, I still experience problems at least on a weekly basis.
- Video chat using webcam often completely bogs down my PC (which has hardware specs more than capable of handling it and a gigabit fiber internet connection) to the point where I cannot even use other programs. Example: my team was recently on a call where we were all on video and I was editing a PowerPoint in real-time during the call. It got to the point where I would type something in PowerPoint and after a several second delay, the text would slowly scroll out across the screen like the intro text on some 90s spy movie. Several days later, tried the same thing with the same result. I have complained to colleagues about this and they have reported similar experiences.
- The aforementioned benefit of Outlook integration sometimes becomes a con. Often the Skype meeting plugin will be running so slowly that Outlook will automatically disable it, and I have to manually re-enable the plugin to be able to schedule Skype meetings.
- On chat, I frequently get an error message paraphrased as "unable to deliver message to [recipient name]" so I'll try again. Half the time the recipient DID receive the message so I'm sending the message multiple times. But I cannot assume that when I get that message it is going through because the other half of the time it doesn't. SUPER annoying.
- The previous tool, Jabber, could display screen captures directly in Chat. SfB requires downloading the screen cap. Also, there's no screen cap tool. I know the Win+Shift+S shortcut in Windows 10 to grab a screencap, but many people aren't aware of that so they struggle with the lack of the button. It's a Microsoft tool, so maybe they should add a tooltip about how to screencap...
- Seems minor, but when screen sharing the "stop sharing" button is in a little banner at the top center of the screen that's hidden until you hover over with the cursor. Due to the placement, I and many others frequently click stop sharing when attempting to click something at the top of the screen, such as a browser tab.
- Overall, even while there are some great features, SfB has had a negative ROI for my business because of all the issues. It's really embarrassing to have constant screen share issues with having customer meetings. It's so bad that for some teams (e.g., tech support) we've had to get additional licenses to some OTHER tool so they can reliably screen share.
- Webex Meetings and Jabber