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We at DFID are rolling out Skype for Business as part of our Office 365 deployment.
Our tech team have set policies so that we can only IM or call others who are on SfB, not personal Skype. That might not be the right policy.
Do you use Skype for Business or Personal Skype in your organisation?
IOM uses Sype for Business
GAC does not use Skype. I doubt very much they’ve looked into SfB.
We use Skype personal at Open Data Services (when unable to connect via Google Hangouts, that is)
As I freelance consultant (and Mac owner) I use both, but I’ve had no end of problems connecting as an external party to enterprise Skype for Business calls - about one in five of those calls ends up being abandoned, with everyone switching over to regular Skype or Hangouts instead.
This is my user experience. With my added bonus of Skype on Ubuntu being largely broken.
As @rory_scott highlights we use Google hangouts (changed to Meet soon) much more. I might start to also look at Zoom
I am curious if those who use SfB use it strictly for small meetings or for webinars as well. Supposedly it supports 100s of users with stricter permissions (like you can’t unmute yourself without the moderator allowing it), though I’ve never been brave enough to try it in front of 100s of people.
I’m not sure about other platforms, but I know Zoom has a separate product for webinars. Previous organizations I’ve worked with have maintained separate conferencing platforms and (multiple) webinar platforms to cover all needs, and I think SfB might be trying to do too much in one tool by supporting both.
And w/r/t personal Skype, I don’t think we’ll ever be free of it given that it’s the conferencia franca for the development and humanitarian communities:-)
I find regular Skype pretty solid on both Linux (Ubuntu) and Android, and it’s the most commonly-used platform for meetings we have with other UN groups and with iNGOs.
Skype for Business is a different app that (at least in mobile) has a sloppy UI and low reliability. I’d recommend strongly against it.
Thanks to everyone for your shared experiences. It helps me to better articulate user needs for our setup here.