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Skype for Business Blog
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Welcome to the Skype for Business Community!

Laurie Pottmeyer's avatar
Laurie Pottmeyer
Former Employee
Sep 02, 2016

Greetings & welcome to the Skype for Business Community!  We’re so glad you are here and excited to have this forum to collaborate and discuss all things Skype for Business.

 

I am a Program Manager here at Microsoft within the Skype for Business Engineering team and am the Skype for Business Community Manager.  My job is to make sure our customers and partners have a place to get answers to their questions and share information related to Skype for Business.  What’s truly exciting about our new community is the connection we are building between everyone who is so close (and those who aren’t yet but want to be) to the product.  The community brings together customers, partners, MVPs, and our own Skype for Business product and engineering teams in a single location.

 

We’ve created some spaces where we’d like for you to ask questions, answer others’ questions, and participate in discussion.  These spaces will be monitored on a regular basis by moderators across the Skype for Business organization.  These moderators will give a little introduction of themselves within the spaces they’re experts in. You’ll also have access to blogs we’ll be posting and keep updated, regularly (that’s how you found me, here!) You’ll get Tips & Tricks on deploying and using SfB, hear what other customers are doing with the product through our ‘Customer Connection’ blog, be the first to know what’s new with the product by viewing product updates, and view regular broadcasts from our product team.  We’re working on additional enhancements such as a calendar of events and posting additional resources for you.  If there are things you want to see as part of the community, I want to know; comment below.

 

Be an active participant in this community - it works best when we are all talking. In doing so, you’ll earn badges within the community.  Check them out by going to your profile and clicking ‘Achievements’!  I invite you to browse existing conversations and add your comments.  Start your own conversations. Speak up. Don’t be shy.

 

So, welcome - it’s so nice to have you join us.

 

Don’t be a stranger,
Laurie

Published Sep 02, 2016
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Skype for Business

24 Comments

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  • Robert Symmons's avatar
    Robert Symmons
    Brass Contributor
    Oct 16, 2017

    Hi Laurie, 

     

    I'm so glad I've come across this thread and I really hope this is still active! Please excuse my ignorance with Skype for Business, I'm very new to the service and I'm still getting my head around the mechanics of how it's suppoed to work and the terminology around it; made even more difficult now since Ignite. 

     

    I'd like to ask a question which I strongly believe is a standard requirement of most phone systems. Does Skype for Business support a central call package that can be distributed across mutliple users like a traditional phone system? I work for an NGO with roughly 100 end points. We use Office 365 E5 licensing so I understand Skype for Business "Phone System" and the subsequent licenses are available as part of that offering, but I've recently come to understand that if we want to offer Skype for Business as a solution to our users we'd need to purchase an equal number of call packages to users. This seems absurd and a complete failing on Microsoft's part if true. 

     

    I vaguely remember reading something about callling packages supposedly pooling but I've never seen anything to back this up, as an organisation we could probably get away with using 10-20k minutes per month. Is this a way of purchasing the required amount of call packages to meet our rough monthly quota and allowing all of our users to use up this singular pool (or combination of multiple plans)?

     

    Thanks,

    Rob

  • Laurie Pottmeyer's avatar
    Laurie Pottmeyer
    Former Employee
    Oct 18, 2016

    Hi Markus_Johansson - Thanks for your question.  There are other forums that are sponsored by the support organization that answer more support related questions and work to troubleshoot break/fix issues.  The conversations within the Skype for Business Community are not meant to be either a support resource - nor a location to log product feedback.  We have a support organization to handle support requests and we have www.skypefeedback.com to formally collect all SfB Product Feedback. 

     

    We'd like for this community to be a place where you can share your experiences of others, ask about others' experiences, share best practices, regularly hear from our engineering team, get the latest on Skype Preview, and hear about the latest product releases.  We are a community made up of IT Pros, Business Decision Makers, and non-technical users who share a love (and in most cases, a use) for Skype for Business.  We are Customers, Partners, MVPs, SfB Engineers, Product Teams, and some of us are just here because we are curious to learn from others. 

     

    We look forward to your questions and contributions within this community & thank you for being here!  Please let us know what types of things you'd like to hear more about. 

    Thanks Markus!

  • Markus_Johansson's avatar
    Markus_Johansson
    Iron Contributor
    Oct 11, 2016

    Hello Laurie 

    Great  to have the new techcommunity up and running. What is then the plan for all old technet forums ? Is there a need for booth ?

    Thanks

    /Markus

     

  • Adam Kuhn's avatar
    Adam Kuhn
    Copper Contributor
    Sep 04, 2016

    Is there more information available about the difficulty of Skype for Business communicating with Skype?  This is a current topic of conversation - in that everyone seems to agree that it doesn't work so well.  

     

    A good example of this would be a job interview where the Skype for business user interviews a prospective candidate who has a Skype consumer account.