Enhanced Experience for Meetings Hosted on Skype for Business On-premises

In a recent blog post, I shared the enhanced meeting experience for meetings hosted on Skype for Business Online.

As promised, we did include the same improvements for our on-premises customers. The recently released May 2017 update for Skype for Business Server 2015, delivers the same enhanced meeting experience as an Optional feature that you must enable.

These improvements include:

• Simplified meeting-join experience with a single-click join capability for Internet Explorer.
• Join audio conference via PSTN call back.
• Always fresh client.
• Optimized screen real-estate for content sharing and collaboration.

See all the details on the new and enhanced features here: Enhancing Skype for Business Online Meetings for external participants.

Enable Improved Meeting experience for on-premises deployments

1. First, upgrade your pools with the latest Skype for Business cumulative update, version 9319.281 (May 2017) or later has this new capability.

2. Run this command to enable the new meeting experience:

   Set-CsWebServiceConfiguration -MeetingUxUseCdn $True

3.  As with any change, you should test this change first. You can scope the change to a single site or to an individual webserver (pool) by creating or modifying a CsWebServiceConfiguration by specifying one of the following Identity parameters:

    

   -identity site:Redmond  or,

   -identity:service:webserver:atl-cs-001.litwareinc.com

4. You may recycle the IIS on the Front-End servers through iisreset -noforce to make sure the changed configuration is effective immediately. This is not strictly required, but it speeds up the process.

5. New clients connecting to a meeting will now leverage the Microsoft Content Delivery Network (CDN) to get the latest join experience including the new Skype Meetings App.

   NOTE: Make sure that your clients connect to the Internet to retrieve the resources from the CDN network. Please consider this if your Internet access is restricted or requires additional authentication.

6. A fallback to the locally hosted Skype for Business Web App experience is triggered if the connection to CDN doesn't succeed within 6 seconds. The JoinLauncherCdnTimeout can be adjusted if needed. To do this, use the following cmdlet to configure the timeout to 10 seconds:

   Set-CsWebServiceConfiguration -JoinLauncherCdnTimeout (New-TimeSpan -Seconds 10)

Help us to further improve the experience 

Using the CDN based distribution, enables us to ship improvements, updates and fixes much faster to users. You don't have to deploy the next cumulative update to all your Front-End pools for updates to the meeting join experience. Skype Meeting Apps are available, but updates are automatically delivered to your end users by the CDN-based distribution.

A lot of these improvements and fixes are based on telemetry data. You can continue and help us improve the experience by enabling the submission of telemetry data. This data helps us identify reasons for failed meeting joins so that we can improve your meeting experiences.

Telemetry data submission is turned off for this feature by default, so I encourage you to enable by setting this option:

Set-CsWebServiceConfiguration -MeetingUxEnableTelemetry $True

NOTE: Information sent to Microsoft is in strict compliance with Skype for Business data collection practices.

And that's all what you really must do to deliver an enhanced experience to your users.

References

• Plan for Web downloadable clients
• Deploy Web downloadable clients in Skype for Business Server 2015