OT: Skype for Business Basic

Trying to interface with a customer using Skype for Business Basic.

Since Skype is now a Micro$hit application, any advice on cautions, installation traps, etc? ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Reply to
Jim Thompson
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I suggest Zoom. IMO it is much better and the basic one-to-one edition is free (so far).

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Even the more luxurious packages where you can have lots of remote participants are low in cost, in the $15-20/mo range. The weirdest scenario I had was where one of the "participants" was an oscilloscope and it worked well.

The big losers in all this are the airlines. The number of biz flights last year was a first for me: Zero. Next up at the losing end are the automotive guys. Number of miles driven in my car the whole (!) year

2016: 757mi. Ok, plus 4000mi on my bicycles, including for business.
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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

That is like saying you suggest LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office for document editing or Thunderbird instead of Outlook for mail.

Nice suggestion for someone who can think, but it will not affect someone who already has chosen "Skype for Business Basic". They are in the "nobody has ever been fired for choosing IBM" category.

And when it is a customer, chances are that he has to live with it.

Reply to
Rob

Not an option, client's choice. ...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Reply to
Jim Thompson

Jim is self-employed like I am. We can usually choose which software we use, especially when the client doesn't have to pay an extra fee for it. Of course, when a client insists on using [insert online meeting software here] you may have to oblige.

What I also found is that many of the online conf systems aren't very cleverly designed for low BW situations and then things fall apart. It was never a problem to email the client, "Hey, let's just use my account, here is the link".

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

Then you have to. Many universities have it so it probably isn't all that bad though I never liked Skype much. You and your client might want to be careful with chat exchanges ...

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

You are entering in a world of pain.

We have been forced to install it inside our organization. Initially it just didn't allow to add external contacts (outside from your organization/domain). After some weeks of complaining, we obtained the possibility to add external contacts, but only for the text chats. Some months have passed, and we are still in this condition: no audio, no video, no file transfers with external contacts.

I didn't check, but our IT guy says that this is a common issue and MS "is working on it".

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Reply to
dalai lamah

Unless, of course, you need to interoperate with a large corporation that is hooked on M$. As much as I dislike Outlook, if you don't use it to set up a meeting, there is a high probability that I'll forget to attend. I'm not the moron who decided on Office-360 but that's what we're stuck with.

Reply to
krw

Copy the invitation link (from the meeting invite) to IE and launch the installer / application from there. (To use the web client version.)

It should auto-detect your audio configuration / devices. There's a "gear" menu to change settings.

Don't know about cautions; it generally works for me as it's supposed to. Apply the usual paranoia.

Tim

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Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
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Reply to
Tim Williams

Are you going to be using the web version at: or the installable program? The web version is work in progress and is missing some useful features. Or maybe the Skype for Business Web App (Skype Meeting), which I haven't tried yet:

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Of course there are plenty calendaring applications to use, but the problem is that outlook users will just book a meeting and "invite the participants" which will then send a special mail message that is not (completely) standards-compliant and thus will not be displayable on other mail clients. At first glance the message parts appear to be "standard" (VCALENDAR appointment, HTML message), but the mime encoding is broken.

So, when you setup your meeting using outlook, and others that don't use outlook receive the mail message, they will just get gibberish on the screen and while it is possible to extract the message text by looking through the HTML codes, it is very hard to find the actual date and time of the appointment when that is not repeated in the text.

That kind of forces you into using outlook as well when you have lots of contacts that send you invitations like this, and you don't want to be the one that continually has to mail back "please send me your invitation as a mail message including all details".

Very clever M$ strategy...

Reply to
Rob

Story of Office365.... claims of online versions but unusable in practice.

Reply to
Rob

Skype was a clever peer-to-peer system that did not send message and av data via the central system, but once M$ obtained it they have completely overthrown it and now everything flows through their servers.

Could be expected given the nationalities involved.

Reply to
Rob

Skype is fine,don't know about 'business' Skype. Why not just plain Skype ? Plain old Skype installs and runs with no issues...You can use it to leave a video message if that suits...

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Reply to
TTman

They used to call it "Lync". I don't know if any Skype codebase is actually integrated with it (yet?).

Tim

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Seven Transistor Labs, LLC 
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Reply to
Tim Williams

I have that problem sometimes. My solution: I send the ghibberish back and tell the sender that I can't read it. Every single time.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

It also means lots of missed opportunity for them. I don't use it for business and none of my clients does.

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Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/
Reply to
Joerg

Precisely. To me, meetings aren't important enough to jump through hoops to attend. If it's not in my calendar, it doesn't happen.

Reply to
krw

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