Sharon Sumner writes:
As Microsoft partners, Business Cloud Integration has been on the E5 preview for some time now testing the business readiness of the Skype for Business service, and it's already pretty good. Voice quality and call quality is comparable to the consumer Skype experience, and the ability to call anyone - even without knowing their Skype address - via the dial pad means that we quickly replaced our VOIP provider entirely.
There are of course some features missing, and as with all new services, there is a lot to add. First it was a local number for Cambridge in the UK - initially they only had London, now many many more UK cities are live.
Then it was found that setting up forwarding to mobiles was a little clunky, although after a few issues that has now been resolved. There are rules to help you forward calls to the right teams, and there is the nifty out of the box functionality of being able to simple drag a colleague into a call - all awesome stuff.
The missing pieces however are still missing, until today... At Microsoft's Ignite conference this week they officially previewed the new call routing features we can expect soon, as well as the call logging, troubleshooting and reporting dashboards.
So, what's new?
Call Assistant - A multilingual call assistant experience added via the Skype for Business dashboard.
(Image removed)In the demo a user quickly and simply set up an auto attendant for their Paris office in the native language. Immediately afterwards a second user placed a call through to the Paris office, receiving an automated welcome and call routing service in fluent French. For those companies using Skype for Business as their main VOIP provider, this is a highly valuable new feature.
Dashboarding in Skype for Business - As with all the Office 365 products, the reporting capability in Skype for Business exceeds expectations. The demo at Ignite showcased the combination of in depth, detailed reporting and a clear and simple user experience. Microsoft reiterated their stance from their previous Ignite sessions of focusing on inspiring IT teams to become the biggest advocates for the move to Skype for Business, rather than the biggest obstacle. The Active Directory linked service in Skype for Business firmly places IT as the central point of control, offering clear monitoring and reporting, with reports that are easy to access and drill down into for in depth analysis:
(Image removed)Voice quality visualisations:
(Image removed)Per user stats:
(Image removed)Per call diagnosis:
(Image removed)Click the link below to see the live demo and a more in depth look at the features discussed above:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0Wvc6qYnuQ
These features first need to filter through the preview community, and it looks like this is due to start in October, so watch this space and I'll let you know how the reality of the features plays out!
I asked Anthony, our Cloud Development Lead, for his thoughts on the impact of these features going live...
"S4B auto attendant and Skype for Business deep integration with Office 365 will put pressure on all VoIP providers. The 60 million Office 365 commercial customers can now enjoy direct integration of PSTN voice, which presents a loss of 1.2 Billion voice customers to incumbent telecom providers, while Microsoft continue to integrate business critical services and practices. "
As a business process automation and user engagement specialist, a big part of what I do concerns the creation of simple systems to boost team efficiency. This means that in my eyes, having a voice platform that is directly linked to your document management, email and collaboration portal/intranet is an absolute no brainer. Being able to dial out from the same communications tool you are using to communicate effectively with internal dial users is a great time saver and is definitely the way forward. Having said that however, an organisation can't transition all their users without all the requisite features, and Skype for Business still has several missing in comparison to other VOIP and traditional phone systems.
These new features are clearly a step forward however, and work is evidently being done by Microsoft to continually improve. The ongoing development of features, and the simplicity of Office 365 integration into business productivity tools continues.