A look at what's next for Skype for Business

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Introduction and Office integration

Skype for Business is the new name for the new version of what used to be Lync, Microsoft's unified communications software and service – but changing the name was only the beginning, BJ Haberkorn, the director of Skype for Business, told TechRadar.

In Windows what users see with the Skype for Business Client is much more like what people are already used to with the consumer Skype service. The idea is "to make Skype for Business really easy to adopt" and Haberkorn explains that you get "everything that was in Lync with a UI inspired by Skype – everyone from my four-year old daughter to my seventy-five year old mother knows how to use Skype."

Call monitor

That includes a 'call monitor' view that appears when you switch to another application to do some work, with a thumbnail video window and controls to hang up the call. That's in the Windows client now; Android and iOS clients for Skype for Business will be available by this autumn, with Skype for Business for the Mac coming by the end of 2015.

Haberkorn emphasises that along with Skype-style features like being able to find Skype users by searching for their name and location, so it's easy to add them to your address book and make a video call to them, you still get all the features from Lync.

That means you can still share your desktop (or a single program that you're running), or upload and present a PowerPoint file. Working with those files is getting easier because you will be able to attach the documents to the meeting – including Word and PDF files that you want to share, even if you're not presenting them as a slideshow.

They'll be stored in OneDrive for Business with permissions that mean everyone in the meeting will be able to open them, edit them and save them back in the same place, and they'll be easier to find because they'll be on the sharing menu in the Skype for Business app. The idea is to reduce the time you usually waste at the beginning of a meeting making sure everyone has access to the files you want to talk about.

Office integration

And with the next version of Office (including Office Online), you'll be able to link co-authoring of a document to a Skype for Business meeting. Office Online will have a Skype button so you can start a chat from the document, or you can start a co-authoring session from the Skype for Business client where you're already having a conversation. When you choose a file to work with, it doesn't just open on your computer – it opens on screen for everyone who's in the meeting, and again OneDrive will take care of getting the permissions set up, so everyone can edit it.

That's for remote meetings – when you have people in the same room and maybe some calling in as well, Microsoft's Surface Hub has Skype for Business built in as well as OneNote for writing notes on a digital whiteboard. And there are new hardware devices that turn existing conference rooms into 'Skype for Business rooms' (the new name for Lync for Business rooms) from partners like Polycom and Cisco.

"There are something like 50 million meeting rooms in organisations around the world," Haberkorn points out. "Something like a million of those have something like a formal meeting room system, the other 49 million rooms have projectors, they have big TV displays on the wall.

"The Polycom Roundtable 1000 is a small computer with a speaker and a camera that you attach to a monitor – it's got a Polycom USB speakerphone. It connects to existing projectors and TV screens to bring the 50 million conference rooms with those things into the modern virtual world. Plug in power and HDMI and two USB devices, and now you've enabled this as a Skype for Business room."

Unified communications in the cloud

This summer Microsoft will launch the Skype for Business broadcast meetings feature that the company used to broadcast the Ignite conference keynote (and it's used for CEO Satya Nadella's monthly Q&A sessions internally).

Those are standard Skype for Business meetings that run in a reserved area of Office 365, that you can add extra video feeds to – either local or remote presenters, including the AV output from a studio or auditorium if you have one. You can also extend the meeting with engagement tools like Bing Pulse or question and answer sessions.

Instead of the 250 people you can get in a Lync meeting on Office 365 (or the 1,000 you can get if you buy some beefy servers that you only use for a few meetings a year), broadcast meetings let you invite up to 10,000 people, with the media encoding and distribution handled by Azure Media Services and the Azure CDN.

You can restrict that to just the people you invite, to anyone on your Office 365 tenant or make it open access for anyone who has the URL, so you can use it for webinars and customer events. Attendees can watch the meeting in any browser, including on smartphones and iPads. And at the end of the event you get a recording you can put straight onto your Office 365 video portal, along with details about the meeting like how many people attended, all of which you can analyse later.

Broadcast meetings will work if you have Skype for Business on your own servers, but they only run on Office 365 – Microsoft isn't ready to talk about pricing but it's likely you'll need to have something like an Office 365 E3 tenant.

Enterprise voice features

Also coming on Office 365 are enterprise voice features for PSTN voice calls and voice conferencing, which he calls "the features you need to eliminate PBX systems and PBX phones for your users, and the ability to call phone numbers worldwide, to make and receive phone calls."

The services will be available in preview in the US over the summer and fully available there by the end of the year. "We'll do this in the US first and expand outside to other countries after that," Haberkorn told us. He's keen to use the carrier partnerships that Skype already has to improve the number of countries that have local dial in numbers for Skype for Business meetings as well.

By the autumn you'll also be able to get an ExpressRoute connection to Office 365 (connecting your network directly to the Office 365 network through a telecoms provider like BT, the way you already can with Azure). Haberkorn says: "We'll be enhancing that for real-time media, because for real-time communications you want the ability to manage the experience end to end. For our carrier partners, we'll enable Quality of Service markings to go end to end for voice, for video, for sharing, which allows you to ensure a great experience."

Still cautious

Adding voice calls and conferences to Skype for Business on Office 365 fills a gap that's been missing from Microsoft's Office cloud since it first launched, although Haberkorn is cautious about how many on-premise Lync customers will move to the cloud because of it, at least in the short term.

"There are a lot of customers that are really excited about the potential over time of not using a server any more, letting us manage all of it. We think with the work we've done in Skype for Business server that we're making it really much easier to adopt the new version, with the same hardware profiles.

"We think most existing customers will choose to upgrade because they can do so very quickly and then plan their migration to the cloud over time after that, because we still have a little bit of work we have to do there before Office 365 has the complete scenarios of the server. But it's an exciting time because customers can really start to consider that."