Skype for Business drives digital transformation
By Ron Markezich as written on blogs.office.com
Office 365 is a universal toolkit for collaboration with more than 85 million monthly active users, designed to address the unique workstyle of every group. Through integration with Outlook for email, SharePoint for intelligent content management, Yammer for networking across the organization, and Microsoft Teams for high-velocity, chat-based teamwork—Skype for Business is the backbone for enterprise voice and video meetings in Office 365.
As communication and collaboration become increasingly vital to the way work gets done, customers are turning to Skype for Business in Office 365 for all of their conferencing and calling needs. People around the globe conduct over one billion meetings per year on the Skype network, and usage of Skype for Business Online has doubled in the last year.
Today, as the annual unified communications industry conference Enterprise Connect kicks off in Orlando, we’re pleased to announce several new enhancements and partner solutions for Skype for Business in Office 365, which advance our goal of putting communication at the heart of productivity with Skype:
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Availability of Auto Attendant and Call Queues, two new calling features in Skype for Business Cloud PBX.
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Preview of the new Skype for Business Call Analytics dashboard, which provides IT admins with greater visibility to identify and address call issues.
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New meeting room solutions from our partners, including Polycom RealConnect for Office 365, which enables customers to connect existing video conferencing devices to Skype for Business Online meetings; and the new Crestron SR for Skype Room Systems, which seamlessly integrates with the Crestron control and AV systems.
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Availability of Enghouse Interactive’s TouchPoint Attendant, the first attendant console for Skype for Business Online.
“Skype for Business Online is becoming part of our DNA.”
—Menakshi Sehwani, regional IT business partner for J. Walter Thompson Europe
A complete, enterprise-grade communications solution
This week, we’re releasing Auto Attendant and Call Queues, two new advanced calling features in Skype for Business Cloud PBX. Auto Attendant provides an automated system to answer and route inbound calls using dial pad inputs and speech recognition. Call Queues enable incoming calls to be routed to the next available live attendant in the order they are received.
This continues the rapid innovation over the past six months we have released into the service including:
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iOS CallKit integration.
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Skype for Business client for Mac.
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Expanding PSTN Conferencing to more than 90 countries with dial-out to 180 countries.
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Extending PSTN Calling to France, Spain and the UK, with preview currently available in Netherlands.
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Enabling thousands of customers with hybrid deployments.
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Skype for Business Server Cloud Connector edition to connect their on-premises telephony assets to our cloud voice solution.