Improving service quality in Skype for Business

As written on Microsoft.com in 2016. Click here for information on moving from Skype for Business to Teams. 

When Microsoft IT deployed Skype for Business 2015 to support our highly mobile global user base, our goal was to provide the best user experience in the industry. We learned valuable lessons about hardware requirements, managing our complex network, accommodating diverse and remote clients, and running a unified communications platform in a hybrid cloud environment. We also helped develop a Call Quality Dashboard to help other organizations optimize the user experience.

Microsoft is a leader in unified communications—where voice, instant messaging, and conferencing converge to help employees communicate and collaborate effectively from anywhere. In 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype and integrated it into our Lync unified communications solution to create Skype for Business. Skype for Business has a design inspired by Skype and the security, compliance, and control of Lync.

In 2013, Microsoft IT planned to deploy a pre-release version of Skype for Business to the Microsoft global user base. Feedback from these users would help the product team improve the product before public release. To get Skype for Business to work well for our internal users, though, we would need to manage a complex environment. Unified communications is a real-time service that’s sensitive to change, client-to-client or server health anomalies, network latency, packet loss, and jitter.

Also, we knew that our hardware would be insufficient to support peak usage. We knew this because when we upgraded from Lync 2010 to Lync 2013, users experienced poor call quality, dropped calls, and bad connections. In 2014, we had 10 major incidents when as many as 1,000 Lync users were unable to make calls, join meetings, or were disconnected during a call. We determined that the problem was outdated hardware. The Lync 2013 architecture requires more robust hardware than Lync 2010, but we were still running the old servers. Skype for Business has the same architecture as Lync 2013, so without a hardware upgrade, the user experience would be poor, no matter what else we did.

Together with the product team, we launched the Get to Green program in March 2014, with “green” being the desired state of the service as shown in our metrics. Our goal was to make the end-to-end Skype for Business user experience the best in the industry. In addition to upgrading hardware, we needed to address issues arising from incompatible client drivers and hardware and a variety of networking environments. Also, more and more of our users were connecting to Skype for Business using personal devices and personal wireless networks that we don’t manage. We would need to find ways to improve the way our service performs on these unmanaged devices and external networks.

Creating a plan for great service quality

We got together with the product team to plan the Get to Green program. Our goal was to improve the user experience so there would be fewer dropped calls and better voice and video quality. To succeed, we would need to assess the environment and identify areas of opportunity to improve the service.

We would measure our success by using the Global Employee Satisfaction Survey and the Poor Call Rate (PCR). The employee satisfaction survey is administered bi-annually to a cross-section of employees that represent all roles and regions. It gathers their opinions about Microsoft IT services and resources, including their unified communications user experiences. PCR is an objective measure of call quality, based on a mean opinion score (MOS) for packet loss, jitter, concealment ratio, and round-trip times.

Defining problem areas

To plan improvements that would have the most impact, we assessed the service environment and identified the following areas that affect the user experience the most.

• Our server hardware was outdated. When we upgraded from Lync 2010 to Lync 2013, we used existing hardware. This created problems because Lync 2013 had a new architecture that ran all of the services on each server, rather than running each service on its own server. The old hardware didn’t have sufficient CPU or memory to handle peak load with the new architecture, so users experienced dropped connections and poor service quality. Also, we were running Windows Server 2008 R2, which did not have the performance advantages of Windows Server 2012.
• Our network environment is complex, and use is changing. Our unified communications service runs on multiple networks, such as PSTN, wireless, and the Microsoft corporate network. Our networks were designed to support mostly hard-wired connections, but users increasingly connect to our unified communications service by using Wi-Fi networks.
• We had incompatible client versions, drivers, and hardware. Clients using the service include Windows-based PCs, Android and iOS clients, and a variety of mobile devices. Some of these devices had drivers, versions, and hardware that were incompatible with Skype for Business. Also, we had the further issue that users’ personal (BYOD) devices were unmanaged.
• We have a limited ability to manage remote scenarios. Because Skype for Business is an access-anywhere technology, we only can manage it to the edge of our infrastructure. Yet 50 percent of our users are outside of our data centers. In these cases, we cannot control the environment, but only influence user behavior.
• We have a mixed environment. At Microsoft, Skype for Business runs on-premises, in the cloud, and on hybrid infrastructure, as shown in Figure 1. On-premises infrastructure creates IT management and support overhead and requires that we use telecommunications providers for voice service. This overhead and complexity doesn’t support our need for great quality and reliability. Also in the on-premises environment, we share infrastructure with other services and can’t manage end-to-end service health. Changes made by other services often affect our service quality.

Identifying areas of opportunity

To improve the user experience, we focused our efforts on improving these areas:

• Upgrading server hardware and creating redundancy.
• Improving network performance, particularly Wi-Fi in our buildings.
• Doing a better job managing a wide variety of devices.
• Educating users about the best practices and devices to use with Skype for Business.
• Creating a user feedback loop, so we can quickly identify and correct issues.
• Eventually moving all of our users to the cloud.

Focusing on the remote user experience

We decided to focus on improving service quality for our most challenging group of users, field sales people. Out of all our users, they’re the most dependent on the Skype for Business service. They don’t have the benefit of our stable corporate network, so their calls are often affected by network anomalies. Field sales users are often not in corporate offices and they rely heavily on unified communications to do their work. They often connect over external wireless networks of variable quality, and are the most affected by quality and reliability issues. We knew that once we got the service working well for them, all of our users would benefit.

The following two tables show the roles that are most affected by service quality, and the percentage of field sales people that are affected by poor PCR, respectively.

Optimizing Skype for Business

Over a period of several months, we made improvements to the server and network infrastructure, client devices, and user support. We’ve also continued migrating more of our user base to the cloud. While we still have a way to go, early results show that our approach is working, and the user experience is improving.

Increasing server capacity and redundancy

For the on-premises deployment of Skype for Business, a key area that we needed to address was server reliability and availability. To improve reliability and availability, we needed to increase server capacity and introduce redundancy to support the Skype for Business architecture. The old hardware we were using had been designed for Lync 2010, which had a distributed architecture where a capability or service runs on a separate server. To increase scalability, the Lync 2013 architecture allows multiple services to run on a single server or across server farms. Capacity can then be increased by adding servers. This architecture boosts the need for server performance, though. More CPU and memory is required to serve peak loads. For redundancy, we would need to add servers.

Skype for Business uses the same architecture as Lync 2013. To increase reliability and performance, we deployed more robust hardware to meet the new requirements. Also, to take advantage of its threading improvements over Microsoft Windows Server 2008, we decided to run the infrastructure on Windows Server 2012 R2 instead. Upgrading to Windows Server 2012 R2 yielded the added benefits of Windows Fabric, which Skype for Business makes extensive use of.

While still running Lync 2013, we upgraded all of our hardware to support the new consolidated architecture, where multiple services run on the same server. We first set up the new hardware infrastructure and then migrated our Lync 2013 servers over to it. This increased server capacity and network bandwidth to support optimal performance at peak load. It eliminated single points of failure and created redundancy to make the service highly available. Once Lync 2013 was up and running on the new hardware, we were able to do an in-place upgrade to Skype for Business.

To do this migration, we started with the backend servers and user pools, and then migrated the front-end servers. We migrated groups of users in a phased manner so that we could monitor and correct issues as we went along. When all users were migrated, we decommissioned the old hardware. After the servers were upgraded, we upgraded the Lync clients to Skype for Business clients.

Improving networking

We needed to ensure that the network could support peak load, which meant upgrading our data center circuits. We also made appropriate firewall settings, provided better DNS infrastructure, and enabled end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) on the network to prioritize voice and video traffic.

We also needed to account for changes in the way users access unified communications. With Lync 2010, most of our users had hard-wired connections. By the time we were ready to deploy Skype for Business, most of them used wireless connections. The wireless infrastructure in our buildings was creating a huge bottleneck that we had to fix.

We’ve improved our networks and upgraded our unified communications devices to gain better performance and call quality, as follows:

• To increase the available bandwidth for Skype for Business in our data centers, we moved to dedicated 10 GBps bandwidth through all edge and core routing and network hardware.
• We enabled network QoS, and configured it to give priority to voice traffic first and video traffic second.
• We opened the appropriate ports to provide optimal performance.
• To increase bandwidth and throughput, we upgraded our building Wi-Fi networks globally from 802.11n to the 802.11ac standard and configured them to preferentially select the 5.0 GHz radio band over the 2.4 GHz band. All Microsoft IT-approved devices support the new standard and are slowly replacing incompatible devices.
• We upgraded all of our managed clients to Microsoft Windows 10, which has improved Wi-Fi drivers.

For details on network planning approaches for Lync Server and Skype for Business Server 2015, see Network Planning, Monitoring, and Troubleshooting with Lync Server.

Improving device management

We developed a Skype for Business tool called the Call Quality Dashboard to help us track down call quality issues. Some of these issues are caused by devices that have incompatible drivers and hardware. The dashboard lets us drill down and identify exactly which devices are causing problems, even personal, unmanaged, devices. We can then work with the users to correct the issues. We’re now able to manage all of our devices better. The Call Quality Dashboard is discussed in more detail later, in Monitoring service health.

Moving to the cloud

We’re gradually moving our users to the cloud-based Office 365 Enterprise E5 service, which includes Skype for Business. By 2017, we plan to move 90 percent of our users to this service (keeping some users on-premises so we can continue to support our on-premises server product). This will resolve many of our current reliability and availability issues. It will also reduce the cost of supporting unified communications.

• • Reliability gains. Our on-premises environment is shared with other systems. Some of our reliability problems are caused by changes made for other network-based services and technologies that affect our Skype for Business and Lync servers. Changes to networking, routing, ACLs, hardware, load balancing, firewall, GPO, and Active Directory changes can all affect the service. Having our service entirely in the dedicated cloud environment managed by Azure will eliminate these issues.
  • Cost savings. Moving to the cloud eliminates the need to support servers in a data center or to support networking. Plus, no in-house expertise is needed to manage this complex infrastructure. The E5 service provides PSTN conferencing and voice calling, so we will eliminate the cost of telecommunications service providers.

We’re migrating our users in steps. Within the United States, we’ve moved almost all of our users to the Office 365 Enterprise E5 service. To support our customers outside the United States, we still use the Skype for Business 2015 on premises solution. This is because, until recently, Office 365 Enterprise E5 was available only in North America. Now the service is expanding globally, and we plan to move all of our international users to it by 2017. We’ll do this in stages as the service becomes available in different parts of the world. As we gradually migrate our international users, we’ll be able to eliminate the on-premises infrastructure in other countries/regions and data centers.

In the meantime, some of our users are hosted on a cloud server, but still have on-premises voice service provided by a telecommunications company. Ultimately, when we move everyone to Office 365 Enterprise E5, we will no longer need the external telecommunications provider, but will receive all of our communications services through Office 365 Enterprise E5.

Creating a feedback loop with users

Telemetry doesn’t tell the entire story. We also collect and prioritize user feedback to reveal blind spots and drive improvements to the product and service. The Global Employee Satisfaction Survey—our main mechanism for listening to users—tells us where we need to improve. In addition, we’ve created an internal SharePoint site called Skype@Microsoft (shown in Figure 3) that gives users ways to send us feedback and requests. It’s the starting point for everything to do with using Skype for Business: community engagement, information, self-service tools, and alerts.

We also gather data from a questionnaire that pops up when a user finishes a Skype call. It lets us know about call quality issues. We view the data in our Call Quality Dashboard, described later.

Helping users help themselves

We depend on our users to make good technology choices. Using the right kinds of devices, peripherals, and Wi-Fi networks with Skype for Business improves their experience. Our Skype@Microsoft SharePoint site gives users help on using Skype for Business, including guidance on technology selection and self-service tools to help them assess how well their client is working. We recommend that they select from a list of peripheral devices that we certified for Skype for Business. The certification process ensures that the devices work well. For the list, see Phones and devices for Skype for Business. We also provide instructional videos.

For our field sales sellers, our most challenging user group, we’ve also developed an outreach program that includes training on tools, tips, and best practices to get the best Skype for Business user experience. These are summarized in the following figure.

Monitoring service health

We use a number of tools to continuously monitor service health, so that we can correct issues that might interfere with a good user experience.

Call Quality Dashboard

To help us diagnose network infrastructure issues affecting call quality, we developed the Call Quality Dashboard, which is included with Skype for Business Server 2015. For each phone call, it shows the type of call (wired or wireless, internal or external) and provides a measure of call quality. It uses PCR as a key performance indicator and rates calls from 1 to 4 based on packet loss and jitter. We also developed the Call Quality Methodology to use with the dashboard data. It provides a step-by-step approach to improving call quality. This has helped us to speed up our investigations and quickly resolve issues.

Using the dashboard, Microsoft IT managers drill down into the metrics—even to the individual call—to ensure that we’re delivering the best user experience at each location or building. We look at the following information:

• Service health. For both wired and Wi-Fi network infrastructure—both internal and external—we look at PCR to see how healthy the service is. For server-to-client or client-to-client call streams, it provides MOS score for packet loss, jitter, ratio conceal, and round-trip times.
• Client health. For each client device, we look at information about hardware, settings, client version, wireless driver, and peripheral devices, such as headsets and speakerphones. It also shows us whether a particular device complies with our current standards.

We use this data along with the Call Quality Methodology to drive improvements across Microsoft, and so far have reduced PCR from 8 percent to less than 2 percent. We’re training IT managers to use the tools to drive improvements in their buildings by correcting issues with underperforming devices, incompatible drivers and client versions, and insufficient network bandwidth.

Performing site investigations

Our IT site managers perform site investigations by drilling down into Call Quality Dashboard data to uncover the source of issues. Once they know the source, they can remediate it. The following screen capture shows a top-level view of the data for one of our buildings. The yellow trend lines in the graphs represent the PCR rates on wired and Wi-Fi networks and by day of week. In this case, they’re all trending down, which means the service is getting healthier. The red sections in the graphs represent calls with a PCR that’s higher than the target desirable state. We drill down for more detail, such as the type of calls involved, the network device drivers being used, the wireless hotspot in use, the wireless channel, and so forth. The user ratings that we capture on call quality are also included in the dashboard.

System Center Operations Manager

We use the management pack for Skype for Business Server 2015 to monitor our servers and get alerts on issues, such as when Skype for Business processes exceed a defined performance threshold.

Key Health Indicators

We use the following Key Health Indicator (KHI) performance counters to get metrics about server health: CPU and memory utilization, and TCP transmit time. Along with other resources, you can download the KHI Guide that outlines the methodology that we use to measure KHIs on servers and our environment.

Network tools

We use tools such as the policy assurance manager tool in HP Network Automation to ensure that routers and switches in the data centers are running a compliant configuration and to ensure QoS is enabled end to end. We can also determine where we need to provide additional capacity to achieve availability and reliability for the network and server infrastructure. We use another internal tool to ensure all the network devices are running the gold code and that they’re meeting our capacity and compliance standards.

We also use tools such as Unify Square PowerMon to measure quality during synthetic transactions. We set up probes and test accounts in data centers.

Measuring success

While we’re continually improving, we’re already seeing improvements in the user experience and also enjoying cost benefits:

• The PCR was reduced to 1.73 percent from 8 percent, mostly due to network improvements and improved Windows 10 Wi-Fi drivers.
• The Global Employee Satisfaction Survey—our main mechanism for listening to users—showed double-digit improvements in user satisfaction. Users have already reported improvements in availability, reliability, and performance. We’ve turned a corner in terms of understanding the key satisfaction drivers for users, and for the last two quarters we’ve made gains in driving service improvement.
• We have double-digit increases in employee satisfaction, with an average 18-point increase in user satisfaction across audio, video, IM, meetings, and sharing.
• We’re saving about $132,000 per day by reducing the cost of using the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and third-party conferencing services, thanks to migrating our users to the Enterprise Voice features of Skype for Business.
• With more than 127,000 of our users enabled for Enterprise Voice, we’ve been able to decommission 70 percent of our old PBX equipment, saving more than $4.03 million over the last six years.
• Over time, we expect savings to increase. As we move more users to Skype for Business in the cloud, our datacenter infrastructure needs will decrease, and we will eliminate the cost of telephone carriers completely, which will reduce overall costs significantly.
• We’re also looking forward to further improvements from new Skype for Business features in coming months, like Keynote for Enterprise Connect, translation services, and better conferencing solutions.

Best practices for a great user experience

Use these best practices to improve the user experience with Skype for Business in your organization.

Provide sufficient capacity and bandwidth

Make sure that server capacity and network bandwidth support optimal performance at peak load. Use redundant systems to make sure that the service is highly available. Enable networking QoS, and open the recommended ports for optimal performance. To ensure your infrastructure supports the best possible service, be sure to follow the capacity planning guidelines for Skype for Business.

Put the right tools in your toolbox

Acquire and set up the tools discussed in this paper so you can monitor and manage Skype for Business service quality.

Move to the cloud

To gain performance and feature benefits, plan to move your Skype for Business users to the cloud—Office 365 Enterprise E5. Not only will it cost less, but it will increase your unified communications capabilities. Also, users like the Skype for Business client. Our Microsoft users are much happier with it.

If you haven’t already deployed a unified communications service, you can start offering a 100-percent, cloud-based service through Office 365 Enterprise E5. Not only will you avoid needing to support the infrastructure, but you’ll no longer have to pay telecommunications providers for telephone services. Rather, your users can connect to the Internet using Skype for Business, and Microsoft Azure will route telephone calls for them. This can represent a large savings for your organizations.

Listen to your users

Take these steps to ensure a great user experience:

• Understand use cases. Build personas and scenarios. Understand a “day in the life” of each group of users.
• Listen to your users. Create dedicated listening systems.
• Collect and prioritize feedback and use it to improve your service.

Help your users get good results

Make sure that users are empowered with tools and training to get the best possible Skype for Business experience. There are many situations that users can manage better than IT can. Help your users help themselves by giving them guidance and the right tools. Provide real-time notification of incidents and self-service workarounds. Make information on best practices easy to find.

Ensure client health before a meeting starts

Provide tools to ensure that the client is as healthy as possible before a user joins a meeting.

Use the recommended home router and best practices guide

For remote users, provide guidance for selecting and configuring a home router. Have a list of recommended Wi Fi routers. Use diagnostic tools to make sure the home Wi-Fi network is performing well.

Use approved headsets and peripherals

Recommend Skype-certified headsets and peripherals to ensure the best possible experience for your meetings. The certification process ensures that peripherals work well.

About Managed Solution

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Case Study: Dr. Oetker

As written on whymicrosoft.com

Consumers know Dr. Oetker as their favorite baking goods, cereals, and pizza brand. The German food company is rapidly expanding and is using Skype for Business to bring employees in 40 countries closer together. Using Skype for Business, employees develop products, interview job candidates, and provide tech support more efficiently and often without time-consuming travel. The software works well with the other Microsoft tools staff use every day, and conversations are more secure within the corporate IT infrastructure.

Dr. Oetker is a household name in Germany and is fast becoming one in 40 other countries. In business since 1891, Dr. Oetker ranks among the leading branded goods companies in the German food industry, with its baking powder, cake mixes, frozen pizzas, cereals, and snacks as well as dairy products. It is headquartered in Bielefeld, Germany, and employs more than 11,000 people.

Needed: one tool for everything

As the company expanded globally, Dr. Oetker shored up its technology tools for communicating and collaborating. “The Dr. Oetker brand prides itself on quality, and achieving consistent levels of quality when manufacturing products all over the world is impossible without tight communications among global teams,” says Frank Pickert , Senior Executive Manager IT Services at Dr. Oetker.

“The company had standardized on Microsoft Lync Server 2013 as its technology lingua franca, but that software was limited to communications within the company and with partners that also used it. The human resources (HR) staff members could not use Lync Server 2013 to interview job candidates, so they ended up using third-party web-based conferencing products that were outside the governance of the IT department.”

“We had to pay for multiple tools, employees had to learn different tools for internal and external communications, and we didn’t have control over the conversations that happened on these unsanctioned tools,” says Christian Plitt, IT Manager, Infrastructure and Shop Floor Solutions at Dr. Oetker. “We wanted one tool for everything.”

A tool that everyone knows

Dr. Oetker found that one tool in Skype for Business Server 2015, the successor to Lync Server 2013. “We really like Skype for Business because of its full integration with the Skype consumer product and the ability to search for contacts in that product,” says Kathrin Worner, IT Specialist, Infrastructure and Shop Floor Solutions at Dr. Oetker. “Our employees and outside partners immediately knew how to use it, and this was not the case with other tools that required a big investment in user change management.”

“By using Skype for Business, we can bring colleagues together who would probably not otherwise meet.… This is very useful in helping people feel like they’re part of the same organization.”

-Christian Plitt, Dr. Oetker, IT Manager, Infrastructure and Shop Floor Solutions

Also, Skype for Business is under the control of Plitt’s team, unlike the other collaboration solutions that employees had been using. “With Skype for Business, our data resides on our servers,” Plitt says. “It’s critical that we keep conversations about strategy, pricing, new products, and other topics confidential.”

To date, about 200 employees at Dr. Oetker already use the Skype for Business client, and the company plans to roll it out to all 3,000 employees who are currently licensed for Lync Server 2013. “Skype for Business use is spreading by word of mouth,” Worner says. “We’ve received very enthusiastic feedback. It’s become an indispensable part of daily communication for the teams that use it.”

Better collaboration across global teams

Here’s a sampling of how various Dr. Oetker teams are using and benefitting from Skype for Business:

• Human resources. The HR department uses Skype for Business to conduct video interviews with job candidates. Previously, these interviews were performed as regular phone calls, and the addition of video has been significant. “It’s very important that our HR staff members see the candidates to get a better sense of each person’s demeanor,” says Plitt. “It’s a big advantage for candidates, too, to see who’s on the other side. Loyalty and long-term relationships are a core part of our culture, and this starts at the beginning, with hiring. With video interviews using Skype for Business, we can set the appropriate tone with prospective employees.”

• Product development. Dr. Oetker has cross-geographical teams all over the world in product development, marketing, customer support, IT, and other areas. These teams use Skype for Business to work together more efficiently. For example, although product development teams can’t use Skype for Business to taste products, they can collaborate more closely when manufacturing the same product in different countries using regional ingredients. The marketing team at headquarters can see pizza boxes and other packaging that different regional teams propose and make sure that they comply with corporate branding standards. “With Skype for Business, we increase knowledge transfer across the company, from person to person and team to team,” says Pickert.

• IT. The company’s IT Services team works worldwide, providing technical support wherever there are Dr. Oetker employees. Communication and collaboration is key for this team so that it can provide good, consistent IT support for employees. Recently, this team needed to connect a new pizza plant in Canada to the corporate network and had three months during a cold Canadian winter to set up the necessary IT infrastructure and train the local staff. “We ordinarily would have had to fly team members to Canada for several weeks, but instead we used Skype for Business video calls to handle most of the prep work remotely, which minimized the time that the team had to be away from their families,” Pickert says.

• Executive staff. Dr. Oetker executives have fully embraced Skype for Business and now use it to stay in closer touch with their far-flung staffs. “Our executives use Skype at home, so having Skype for Business at work is a big advantage for them,” Worner says.

Plitt is excited about the role that Skype for Business will play in mobile scenarios, such as supporting the company’s hundreds of sales representatives. By outfitting all salespeople with a camera-equipped laptop or tablet PC, Dr. Oetker could help them react faster during the sales process. They could quickly place video calls with corporate support teams to resolve sales blockers or even show supermarket product placement to marketing colleagues to optimize merchandising.

Video is particularly valuable in an internationally operating company, because meeting participants can see facial expressions and reactions of other participants, which helps bridge cultural differences. “By using Skype for Business, we can bring colleagues together who would probably not otherwise meet,” Plitt says. “For example, it’s very difficult for employees in less developed or more remote parts of the world to fly to Germany for meetings. With Skype for Business, they can participate in international meetings and meet their colleagues, and this is also very useful in helping people feel like they’re part of the same organization.”

Dr. Oetker even foresees using Skype for Business with consumers. “At baking fairs and other events, or from their homes, consumers could meet a Dr. Oetker baking expert over video chat and ask questions,” Plitt says. “Skype for Business opens up new communication channels with our customers.”

Consistent interface

In addition to the ease-of-use advantages that Skype for Business offers, Dr. Oetker appreciates the fact that Skype for Business works so closely with the other Microsoft desktop tools that employees use every day. “Microsoft is one of our two strategic software partners,” Plitt says. “We use Microsoft Office and SharePoint Server, and all our desktop computers run the Windows 7 operating system. When we upgrade to Windows 10 and the latest version of Office, Skype for Business will be part of that whole picture and help our employees be more productive. It’s of enormous value to our employees to have consistency across desktop tools and be able to switch quickly and easily from one to another.”

Pickert adds: “As we continue to grow internationally, we’ll use Skype for Business to make it faster and smoother to integrate new employees and offices into the business. Because it’s so easy to set up communications with new employees, we can make them part of the company right away. This helps the business be more agile and responsive to local customers and markets.”

Less time-sapping travel

While Dr. Oetker cannot estimate Skype for Business–related travel savings at this early stage, the company does have a new policy: before purchasing an airplane ticket, all employees should ask themselves, “Could I use Skype for Business for this meeting instead?”

“Communicating using desktop tools saves our people a lot of time, which is more valuable than the actual travel costs,” Plitt says. “Travel kills a lot of productivity, and we can recoup those hours by taking widespread advantage of Skype for Business.”

As Skype for Business use expands across the company through grassroots adoption, the Dr. Oetker IT staff is already eager for upcoming features. “One of the reasons we chose Skype for Business is the fact that Microsoft is innovating in ways that no one else can match,” Plitt says. “A good example is the Skype Translator technology currently in beta testing with consumers. This has the potential to completely change the communications landscape, especially for companies like ours with colleagues in 40 countries.”

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By Sarah Perez as written on techcrunch.com

Get ready for Yammer, Microsoft announced today – and it’s not kidding. Microsoft said this afternoon it will begin to activate Yammer for all its eligible Office 365 business customers starting today, in what’s a major push for the enterprise social networking service. The rollout will come in waves, beginning with those customers who have a business subscription, and fewer than 150 licenses, including one for Yammer.

The second phase of the rollout on March 1st will expand Yammer to larger business customers, who have fewer than 5,000 licenses, but excluding those with education subscription.

The final phase, or Wave 3, starts on April 1, and will include those education subscriptions, as well as all remaining customers.

The end result of this push is that every Office 365 users with a Yammer license will be able to use the service from the Office 365 app launcher, as well as start Yammer conversations from within SharePoint, Office 365 Video Portal, and soon, Delve and Skype Broadcast as well.

Effectively, it’s elevating the product to become more of a fully-fledged member of Microsoft’s suite of tools aimed at businesses.

By being baked into Microsoft’s existing products and services, Yammer will become more useful than when it was a standalone product ahead of Microsoft’s 2012 acquisition. For example, Yammer will be hooked into the Office 365 Groups service in the first half of this year, which will let customers do things like turning Yammer conversations into Skype calls, schedule meetings with Outlook calendar, access files in OneDrive, create tasks in Planner, from within Yammer’s groups.

Yammer has fallen out of the limelight since Microsoft bought the company for $1.2 billion several years ago. Not much had been said about the service since. And it’s fair to say that many wondered if Microsoft ever intended to do much of anything with it, beyond making it available for those who wanted it.

But in recent months, Yammer has seen new competitors arise. Currently, its biggest competition is Slack, which Microsoft also recently had to acknowledge the importance of, in its own way – the company introduced Skype integration last month, that is. And Facebook has been ramping up its efforts with its business-focused Facebook for Work, which could pose a challenge to Yammer in the future when it becomes publicly available.

For now, however, Yammer still has a shot at grabbing a foothold thanks to Microsoft’s big push to its Office 365 commercial customers.

With the rollout, Yammer will be switched on by default, though Microsoft says that admins will be able to dial that back, if need be, noting that “if you are not ready to fully adopt Yammer in your organization, you can un-assign Yammer licenses for those who should not access Yammer from Office 365.”

Well, seems like it would just be easier to go live on Yammer than have to go around turning it off for people, doesn’t it?

More details on the Yammer integration is available here.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

What is a Skype Meeting Broadcast?

As written on office.com

Skype Meeting Broadcast is a new component of Skype for Business. As part of Office 365 and Skype for Business Online, Skype Meeting Broadcast lets you produce, host, and broadcast meetings to large online audiences.

How Skype Meeting Broadcast works

You can schedule a Skype Meeting Broadcast for up to 10,000 attendees. You use the Skype Meeting Broadcast scheduling and management portal to schedule a meeting.

You use the familiar meeting experience within Skype for Business to produce a professional, engaging event for their audience. And, attendees can join from anywhere on any device, and engage in the meeting.

Skype Meeting Broadcast roles

There are several roles required for producing a Skype Meeting Broadcast. These include:

• Organizer. Creates the meeting request and invites attendees. Reviews meeting reports.

• Producer. Manages the meeting sources (live presentations, dial-in presentations, audio, video, and PowerPoint decks), records the event, and posts the recording to Office 365 Video.

  Note: Using an embedded video in a PowerPoint presentation is currently not supported in Skype Meeting Broadcast.

• Event team member. Participates in the meeting by presenting live or dialing in from a remote location.

• Attendee. Watches the event online.

System requirements

System requirements for a Skype Meeting Broadcast

• Browser (attendees) - Internet Explorer 11, Chrome, Firefox, OSX Safari, iOS 8 or later, Android (KitKat)

• Client - Skype for Business client for Windows (producer, presenter)

  • For Skype for Business 2015 clients, you must have the September Update, build 15.0.4747 or later

  • For Skype for Business 2016 clients, you must be using Click-to-Run, build 16.0.4227 or later. (MSI installations only support the presenter role. Producers can join through a different client, as explained in this knowledge base article.

  Lync for Mac 2011 (presenter only). See this knowledge base article for more information.

  Find your client version information in Skype for Business by clicking Help > About Skype for Business.

• Users - On-premises and online

• License - You will need one of the following licenses:

• Skype for Business Online Standalone Plan 2 (or 3).

• Office 365 Business Premium

• Enterprise E1, E3, E4 or E5 - which contains the Skype for Business Online Standalone Plan 2 license.

• Authentication - On-premises customers must have established an online tenant. You should configure directory sync to make user accounts and DL memberships available to the Skype for Business Azure Active Directory in order to enable user authentication and meeting authorization using group membership.

  Skype Meeting Broadcast producers cannot be enabled for modern authentication.

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What is PSTN calling?

As written on support.office.com

Cloud PBX with PSTN calling lets you connect your organization to the Public Switched Telephony Network (PSTN) and provides your users with a primary phone number in Skype for Business so they make and receive phone calls.

Users assigned phone numbers in Skype for Business Online can make and receive phone calls using Skype for Business IP phones, PCs and mobile devices. And, in case of emergencies, users can call 911 for help. To see how emergency calling works, see What are emergency locations and addresses?.

To get these phone numbers for your users, you can search for and reserve phone numbers from Office 365 or you can transfer your existing phone numbers from another service provider or carrier. See Getting phone numbers for your users and Transfer phone numbers over to Skype for Business Online for how to start getting phone numbers for your users.

For PSTN calling, users can be assigned subscription-based plans for local (US domestic) calling only or local (US domestic) and international calling. See, Skype for Business Online licensing overview for details on licensing with PSTN calling.

IMPORTANT: At this time, PSTN calling is only available to organizations that have an Office 365 billing address that is based in the U.S.

Setting up PSTN calling for your users

IMPORTANT: For you to see the Voice option in the left navigation in the Skype for Business admin center, you must purchase at least one Enterprise E5 or Cloud PBX license and a voice calling plan.

Setting up PSTN calling is easy. There are five simple steps:

1. Purchase and assign an Enterprise E1, Enterprise E3, or Enterprise E5 license to your users. See, Assign or unassign licenses for Office 365 for business to assign your Office 365 licenses.IMPORTANT: You can use Skype for Business Online Standalone Plan 2 instead of an E1, E3, or E5 license but you can't use Skype for Business Online Standalone Plan 3.

   If you want to learn more about Skype for Business Online licensing, see Skype for Business Online licensing overview.

2. Purchase and assign Skype for Business Online licenses to your users. See, Skype for Business Online licensing overview for more details on Skype for Business Online licensing options.If you are using an:

   • Enterprise E5 license for your users, you need to only purchase and assign a PSTN voice calling plan. Cloud PBX is included in the Enterprise E5 license.

   • Enterprise E1 or Enterprise E3 license for your users, you will need to purchase and assign a Skype for Business Cloud PBX add-on and then assign a PSTN voice calling plan to your users.

     • See, Assign or unassign a PSTN voice calling plan license for a user to assign a PSTN voice calling plan. See, Voice calling plans for Office 365 Enterprise E5 for more details on voice calling plans.

     • See, Assign or unassign a Cloud PBX license for a user to assign a Cloud PBX license.

3. Get your phone numbersYou get the phone numbers for your users by either getting new phone numbers from Office 365 or use the phone numbers that you already have from your phone service provider or carrier.

   To get phone numbers for your users, see:

   • Getting phone numbers for your users

   • Port your existing phone numbers for your organization

4. Add emergency addresses and locations for your organizationBefore you can assign a phone numbers to users, you must have created at least one emergency address and if you need to, add an emergency location or locations. Emergency locations are associated to an emergency address to give a more exact location of a user within a building. See Add or remove an emergency address for your organization and Add or remove an emergency location for your organization to get details for adding emergency address and locations.

5. Assign a phone numbers to your usersThe last step is to assign phone numbers to users. While assigning a phone number to a user, you must associate an emergency address. See Assign, change or remove a phone number for a user to get details on assigning a phone number to a user.

What else do you need to know?

• If you are going to use the existing phone numbers your already have, you will need to create a "port order". If you have 999 or fewer phone numbers, you can use the New Local Number Port Order wizard in the Skype for Business admin center. See Transfer phone numbers over to Skype for Business Online to get the details on transferring those phone numbers. If you have more than 999 phone numbers that you need to transfer, you will need submit a service request to get all of these phone numbers moved over to Office 365. See, Manually submit a port order request for details on doing this.

• You can't transfer toll-free numbers or phone numbers used for data such as those phone numbers that are associated with a DSL line.

• An emergency address is often referred to as a civic address, street address, or a physical address. It is the street or civic address of a place of business for your organization.

• Emergency locations aren't validated, only emergency addresses are.

• CAUTION:

  • 911 Calling terms and conditions

  • Skype for Business Online: 911 Calling disclaimer label

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Managing courtroom video

by Sergio Ortega Cruz as written on enterprise.microsoft.com

In many places around the world, legal systems are turning to video footage to record trials and other court proceedings for record-keeping purposes. Moreover, many judges are allowing witnesses to testify via teleconference to create a more inclusive justice system.

Take Cook County Circuit Court in Illinois, for example. The court recently allowed a man bedridden from a stroke to testify via Skype. The man was seeking the extension of a protection order against his estranged wife, but felt too weak to get out of bed.

Likewise, the Ontario Superior Court recently allowed a witness from Denmark to testify via Skype in a child custody case. “Skype is now in HD and has an internal automatic checking system,” explains Family Lawyer Phil, who persuaded the judge to allow the testimony. “You can see people in the courtroom and they can see you. This is clearly the way of the future.”

As video conferencing in the courtroom becomes mainstream, it is improving courtroom efficiency in a variety of ways. It’s expediting the issuance of search warrants. It’s speeding up arraignments, pre-trial conferences, and other court hearings. It’s allowing foreign and out-of-state witnesses to testify while avoiding the cost of travel. And it’s reducing the cost of transporting prisoners to the courtroom.

Yet as courtrooms increasingly turn to video technology to improve their proceedings, managing this new way of doing things can quickly turn into an administrative burden. Video-conferencing technology can be unreliable. Video storage can be expensive. And accessing the exact content needed can involve hundreds of hours sifting through vast amounts of video footage.

The good news is that Microsoft provides the advanced technology needed to help judicial systems overcome all these hurdles. Consider the following:
•Capturing video: Increasingly, legal systems are turning to Skype for Business for reliable, high-quality video conferencing. Skype for Business protects conversations through strong authentication and encryption features. It offers built-in compliance for strict security requirements such as the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) standard in some U.S. versions. And it can be used even in situations in which the person appearing remotely is not on Skype for Business. All that person needs is a phone or Internet connection.
•Storing video: Microsoft Azure Storage offers the durability and scalability to store large amounts of video footage at low cost. Data stored within Azure Storage is automatically replicated to guard against hardware failure. And in situations where justice systems prefer to keep their video files on-premises, Azure Storage can be used as a backup to ensure a judicial system’s video footage is always available.
•Managing video: Microsoft Azure Media Services enables legal professionals to access the exact video content they need through Azure Media Indexer, a feature that uses state-of-the-art machine learning to convert spoken language in video files into a searchable text format. Thanks to this feature, legal professionals can conduct keyword searches for specific comments that were made during the conversation and obtain the exact time those words were spoken, making it easy to find those moments in the video.

As judicial systems incorporate video technology into their courtrooms, Microsoft is leading the way, helping them to reliably capture, store, and manage all this data. To learn more about our state-of-the-art solutions for the public safety arena, please see our State & Local Government webpage.

Note takers rejoice! Take notes directly from a #Skype4B conversation by pressing Ctrl + N to open #OneNote. Conversation participants are automatically linked in the note for your reference.

More information on Skype for Business (Formerly Lync).

The tech giant is pushing Skype for Business, now part of Office 365, as an alternative to separate services for video or audio conferences.

As Written by: Heather Clancy on fortune.com

The line that separates Microsoft’s cloud collaboration suite, Office 365, from its corporate communications services, marketed under Skype for Business, is getting blurrier.

On Dec. 1 the tech giant will officially unleash new conferencing, meeting, and cloud telephony options for Office 365 that are meant to consolidate and replace the separate services many businesses use to host audio and/or video conferences.

“Most of our customers have more than one of these [services], they’re putting a lot of money into them, but aren’t satisfied,” said John Case, corporate vice president for Microsoft Office. “This turns Office 365 into a modern communications platform.”

For example, the new capabilities will allow companies to set up and initiate all-hands meetings for up to 10,000 attendees—that can be attended via Web browser or mobile device—in a matter of minutes, Case told Fortune. Additionally, any questions that arise during the large broadcast can be submitted via the company’s Yammer messaging application.

The new services aren’t exclusionary: Teams can also create conferences that connect with traditional phones using the public switched telephone network (PSTN). “You can dial in from pretty much anywhere,” Case said. Meanwhile, Microsoft MSFT 0.81% is also pushing Skype for Business as nothing less than a replacement for existing corporate private branch exchange (PBX) systems—and it’s offering “Fast Track” funding to help businesses make the switch. The Office 365 pricing plan, which includes all of the above features, costs $35 per user per month, plus another $24 per user for international and domestic calling plans, according to a Microsoft pricing sheet.

Competitors Facebook FB 0.87% and Google GOOG -0.61% have also busy adding video-calling features to their platforms in recent years—to compete with both Skype and Apple’s FaceTime app—but Microsoft has been far more aggressive about embedding these options into its existing business applications. Over the coming months, you can expect Microsoft to forge relationships that embed conferencing and calling features into applications from other software companies.

For example, in the future, customer service agents using software from call-center company Genesys may be able to initiate support or telemarketing conversations by simply clicking on contact information within a customer’s record. Right now, that same person might be forced to jump back and forth between several systems to track the conversation and make changes, Case said.

The consumer-grade Skype service boasts almost 300 million registered users. Microsoft bought the company in May 2011 for $8.5 billion, and promptly began merging the cloud-delivered communications service with its existing Lync communications products.