The Skype team has been hard at work recently delivering new features to make sharing and collaborating across apps easier than ever. We’ve been working with them to bring Skype to OneDrive, and you can now log in to Skype directly at OneDrive.com. This will make it easier for you to stay connected by sending an instant message or having a video call while sharing a new photo album that you just created or while working together on a document. Your chat history will even stay connected to your document, so you always have what you need to stay productive. Learn more about all of the recent updates from the Skype Blog and head over to your OneDrive to check it out for yourself.
Today, June 8th, is National Best Friend's Day! Best friends help keep us sane with lots of laughter, endless conversation, and even a shoulder to cry on when we need one. Being far away from your best friend can be tough on any friendship. But, as we've all heard, distance makes the heart grow fonder. This year, use Yammer to easily contact your best friend on the national holiday to celebrate their awesomeness.
Yammer is easily accessible from Office 365. Every Office 365 users with a Yammer license is able to use the service from the Office 365 app launcher. If both you and your BFF have Office 365, just click on the portal grid and select Yammer to let the reuniting of friendship begin.
Don't work in the same company? No problem. Recently, Yammer added external groups to allow you to communicate with people outside of your own company. Just click on External Groups on the left hand column to add users.
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Use the chat feature to instantly message your friend to say, "I miss you!", or "Happy National Best Friends Day!", or attach an old picture of the two of you to let them know they're on your mind today. With Yammer, you can instantly turn any chat into a Skype call. So if typing to a computer isn't enough bonding for you, enjoy instant communication with a video call on Skype.
If you want to send over some pictures, videos, or other files, Yammer can do that. Yammer has immediate access to your OneDrive, so you can find all your documents in one place and share them with ease. Show them your new home or office or even a new outfit you want a best friend's opinion on. As your best friend, you could never share too much.
Too busy to Skype right now? Pencil them in for later. With Yammer, you can quickly schedule meetings with your Outlook calendar. Now you won't have to remind yourself to call your friends back because Outlook will give you a reminder for whenever you schedule that phone call.
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Yammer is the perfect way to keep in touch with old friends, especially on National Best Friend's Day. Don't let this holiday go unnoticed; give your bestie the attention they deserve (and maybe a little more).
"We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world, and the best we can find in our travels is a best friend" - Robert Louis Stevenson
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By Kelly Cronin, Marketing Intern
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We are excited to announce the start of the Skype for Business Mac Public Preview. Commercial customers can request an invite to test the Mac client at www.SkypePreview.com. We’ll start by issuing invites to IT administrators to download the client and gradually expand the preview to everyone in the coming weeks.
The preview will release in three cumulative stages leading to public availability, planned for the third quarter of 2016. Today’s initial release lets you see and join your meetings. Let’s take a look at the functionality rolling out today and what’s coming in the future.
Preview phase one—Once you sign in, you’ll see your meetings for today and tomorrow, based on your Outlook calendar, displayed in the Skype for Business client.
View your meetings schedule.
Join any meeting with just one click and enjoy full screen video, content viewing, in-meeting chat and the ability to invite others to the meeting.
View your video meeting in full screen.
Preview phase two—We’ll be adding instant messaging, presence and contacts in the next preview release coming in early summer. You can continue to use Lync for Mac 2011 side-by-side with Skype for Mac Preview, giving you continued access to messaging and voice features.
Previewphase three—We will add telephony and related features later in the summer.
What to expect at the Skype for Business Preview site
To get started, IT administrators can sign up their organization by visiting the Skype for Business Preview site. Each day, we will issue invitations to IT administrators, with the goal of extending invitations to everyone in the coming weeks. Once an IT administrator downloads the preview client, they can manage its distribution to end users within their organization.
To learn more and see the new experiences in action, watch this demonstration of the Skype for Business Mac Public Preview.
In April 2015 a dozen global educators had a Skype call with refugees in the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. The camp houses 179,000 refugees and 55% are children. It has 30 schools, each containing 20 classrooms. We set up a project in which teachers from around the world would teach the Kakuma students using Skype.
During a second call, I taught a group of 10 Kakuma teachers how to install and use Skype. We soon discovered that the schools had very little resources: textbooks were only available at a ratio of 1:10; there were no computers and no power supply. An outreach assistant brought his computer to the class he was teaching and 150 students looked onto the small screen. This made me decide to send them my own laptop with the help of a colleague educator who brought it to the camp himself.
I created a website for Project Kakuma set up with crowd funding, as well as a game called “Jump to Kakuma” which is available on Windows 8, 10 and iOS. All returns from the game are invested in textbooks and devices for the camp. Two months ago I had enough funding to send a laptop, a projector and a sound system.
We are now conducting classes every week through three to five Skype calls. During the calls a global teacher teaches science, math, art, etc. to the student refugees. These past two months the students have had lessons taught by teachers from the USA, Brazil, New Zealand, Belgium, Austria, Portugal, Denmark, India, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Israel and many other countries.
During our 2-day Skype-a-Thon back in December, we managed to connect with Kakuma from all over the world. Our 24 Skype calls resulted in an astonishing 137,833 virtual miles—the equivalent of 5 times the circumference of the earth. Check out our Sway presentation to find out more.
Some fun facts about Project Kakuma:
Mette, a Danish teacher, lets two of her students teach the Kakuma students from time to time.
The project was broadcasted by the Portuguese television and published in Belgian, Portuguese and Danish newspapers.
Joao, a Portuguese teacher, invited a local band to play during a Skype session while he taught the students about art. He builds apps and is currently working on a game called “Water Heroes” of which all returns will go to refugee camps to build water wells.
Those who aren’t able to conduct live calls with Kakuma due to time zone issues record Skype video messages.
Vineeta, an Indian teacher, taught the Kakuma students how to create robot cars and sent some to the refugees.
Why is it so important to do all we can to educate these students? The Kakuma refugees are not able to leave the camp. Through Skype calls, we are unlocking their world. We show that we care and increase their level of education, which then leads to greater chances of a new life away from the camp.
We are currently serving five schools with the help of three outreach assistants. The schools are able to host one call each day until April 2016. If you are an educator and you or your classroom would like to have a call with them, you can schedule it on the Microsoft Educator Community.
This project was created through the collaboration of motivated teachers from all over the world. Without the hard work of Kelli (US), Lena (Denmark), Paula (Finland), Koen (Belgium), Joao (Portugal), Kurt (Austria), Ovi (Spain), and many others, there would be no Project Kakuma.
Big help from a small town. Pennsylvania educator and Skype Master Teacher Michael Soskil was honored as one of 10 finalists for the Global Teacher Prize for his contributions to global citizenship. Through a Skype call with a sister school in a small Kenyan village in Africa, Soskil’s students learned of the village’s unsanitary water conditions that prevented students from going to school. Soskil’s class partnered with students in Kansas and Greece over Skype to help solve the problem and find solutions to provide clean drinking water, not only for the school, but also for many of the families in the village.
Many of us use Skype and Skype for Business in the office every day, but make sure you stay connected on the holidays! Do you know how to add contacts on Skype for Business?
Skype for Business contacts represent the people you know, do business with, and communicate with. If you’re just getting started with S4B or you need to expand your circles, you can add people to your contacts list, whether they’re in your organization or outside of it (with some limits, based on your administrator’s settings).
On December 10, 2015, Skype Translator started including Brazilian Portuguese as one of its seven spoken languages offered for speech-to-speech translation.
With Brazilian Portuguese as one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, today’s news is yet another step in Skype’s mission to help people connect through conversation simply and easily, regardless of where you are in the world, and what language you speak.
Just one year ago, Skype released Skype Translator with Spanish and English for people using Windows 8.1. Now, Skype Translator is available on Skype for Windows Desktop and in the following seven spoken languages: Chinese Mandarin, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and now Brazilian Portuguese. Skype Translator also offers over 50 IM languages in text-to-text translation.
In the past year, since Skype CVP, Gurdeep Pall, announced the public preview of Skype Translator, we’ve opened a new chapter in communication and enabled millions of people to connect globally. We continue to be tremendously grateful to our partners at Microsoft Research who have worked tirelessly to improve the technology’s accuracy and have played a key role in releasing new languages.
For those who have not yet taken advantage of Skype Translator, it is this dropdown in the latest version of the desktop app.
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