Do you use Skype for your business?
Skype For Business is known as one of the simplest ways to communicate with your business partners or with people outside your office. For companies, it is also an excellent way to hold meetings as well as conduct interviews.
You can easily understand the popularity of Skype with the recently held research, according to which, people across the globe spend more than 50 billion minutes per month in communicating with each other on Skype.
But do you know that Microsoft has just introduced a new Skype tool, which is strictly designed for businesses? It is known as ‘Skype For Business’. Earlier, it was called as Lync, but in 2015, Microsoft changed its name to Skype For Business.
Although it is not free for its consumers but is sure to fit into your business model because of its robust features. You get an easy access to online meetings, video calls, voice calls and IM with much-enhanced security and call authentication.
Here in this post, I have figured out some of its important features, which you might not be aware of, but before I switch to that part, I would like to tell you something about Skype For Business.
Skype For Business is a business friendly solution tool that helps you associate with 250 people at one particular time. It not only lets you integrate your office apps but also manages employee accounts with graded security. You can purchase it with other products of Office 365 suite in just $2 per month per user.
Let’s have a glance at some of the finest features of Skype For Business that will make your business operations smoother and flexible.
Skype For Business allows you to deliver a high-end resolution to more than one people. It has some versatile features such as slide transitions and embedded videos.
You can also view presentations in your mobile handset as it is integrated with standard software HTML 5 and JavaScript.
Skype For Business provides you an opportunity to conduct video, audio and web conferencing. You can plan your online meeting in advance or host in real time. Upto 250 people can join you in a meeting along with their devices.
You can also integrate Skype For Business with Outlook through its plugin. It is very easy to implement it. The administrator of the meeting can pick a topic and also decide who will take part in the meeting. You can also view the detailed information regarding the meeting on Outlook template.
Web Scheduler feature in Skype also allows you to schedule your business meetings. In this, you can get an overview regarding upcoming meetings, manage the timings of the meetings, remove already scheduled meetings and send invitations to various people to join a meeting.
With Content Sharing feature, you can also share Excel Sheets, PPT’s and your desktop screens.
Skype For Business provides interesting features for both the hosts and the participants. Anyone, who you want to be part of your business meeting can join and view Skype For Business through phone or via conferencing.
Now, you can fix your business priorities with the participants by using Polling feature. If you have to take a final call on some topic and you got tuck, The Polling feature helps you gather views of the participants in the group conversation as well.
The host has the option to hide or show the results of the poll. You can also take the viewers opinion over a broadcast.
Skype Meeting Broadcast feature lets you broadcast meeting content upto 10000 participants and also conduct webinars. Anytime you feel like, you can reduce the number of viewers as per your needs which makes it easy to deliver content to a large number of people.
Moreover, this tool also helps you send recorded video meetings to the Office 365 Video. The best part of this feature is that anyone can join a broadcast with the help of their device using a web browser or can watch it live on Microsoft Azure.
This is another fun-tastic feature that Skype For Business has to offer. The presenters can record several aspects of the meetings like video, audio, sharing sessions, handouts and much more. You can also set the resolution of the recording.
There is no need to authenticate a user to join the meeting. Anyone can participate in a meeting. If you do not have your account with hosts, there isn't any need to worry. You can join the meeting by signing in with guest account on an invite.
Microsoft’s PSTN conferencing solution is an added feature for mobile users. You can simply involve a person in your meeting by just dialing their phone number. This helps you join the meeting over the phone in case there is no internet connection.
With meeting Roaster and Controls, you can watch, who have joined the conference via phone or internet. You can even mute a noisy attendee.
For any sensitive and confidential information, you can use Meeting Lobby that can specify particular persons, who can join the groups.
With Meeting content retention, Skype For Business users can upload loads of business meetings in the form of PPT’s, Excel files, notes, etc. The retention period of meeting’s content depends on the type of meeting.
For one time, content could be retained for a maximum period of 15 days from the day the last person left the meeting. For meet now, content is retained for a maximum period of 8 hours.
So, these are some essential features of Skype For Business, and I am sure after reading this blog, you would better understand its importance to enhance your productivity and management.