Forum Discussion
New Skype for Business on Mac Insider build available (16.13.168)
We're excited to release new Insider builds (both Slow and Fast). The release has a lot of improvements that you've been asking for, so we really would like to have you try it and give us feedback. If you find a bug, please report the issue using Help\Report an Issue. Here's what's new in this release:
Status from your Outlook calendar
Skype for Business will automatically update your status to indicate when you are in a meeting or busy based on your Outlook calendar. You can turn this off by clearing Update my status based on my calendar information in General page of Preferences dialog box.
Manage people in your meetings and calls
When in a meeting or call, you can easily mute someone's microphone, make them a presenter or attendee, or remove them from the meeting. In the People list, select the user and then select the More Options (…) button.
Know when you are offline
You'll see a notification at the top of the window when you aren't connected to the Skype for Business server, and the buttons to start conversations and join meetings will be disabled.
See your missed IM messages
When you miss an IM conversation, you can see the message text in the chat window even if your organization has disabled automatic archiving of IM messages.
Monitor the quality of your audio and video calls
If you are on macOS Sierra or later, your admin can monitor the Quality of Service (QoS) of your audio and video calls to keep your service running smoothly.
Improvements
- Fixed an issue that prevented a user from seeing a security desk notification when they dial 911
- Fixed an issue where IM messages were not displayed in the order in which they were sent
- Improved the performance of opening chat conversations
- Changed the position of notifications so they do not cover action buttons when you leave a call or meeting
- Improved the performance of displaying the Devices window
- Improved the visibility of Next Slide and Previous Slide buttons when sharing a PowerPoint file in a meeting
- Fixed issues around sending IMs when a presenter enables or disables all IM in a meeting
- Fixed an issue with how HTTP proxy passwords were stored
- Fixed an issue that caused users with an Alternate ID to be prompted to sign in multiple times.
24 Replies
Hi Phillip,
I run a DevOps team. We meet on SfB - 1x Mac Brisbane (myself), 5x PCs (Mumbai), 1x PC (Sydney). We're finding desktop sharing performance with SfB bordering on unusable. As a distributed team, desktop sharing is essential for our team to work together - we design, review and share skills through desktop sharing.
We benchmarked SfB yesterday, and benchmarked WebEx for a comparison:
Time to initiate a screen share: SfB - 14 secs, WebEx - 4 secs
Lag: SfB - 8 secs, WebEx - 1 sec
Resolution/Clarity: SfB - good, WebEx - good
Frame rate: SfB - jerky (~1 fps), WebEx - smooth (>5 fps)
Aside from my interest in getting SfB desktop sharing working well for my team/department/company, our business is providing IT for 1000 companies, including national & international networks and unified comms, including SfB. We're keen to get our SfB implementation tuned to provide good performance, as a reference implementation for our customers.
Thanks for info on QoS for SfB Mac. I'll ensure that EnableQoS is switched on in our servers to help audio and video. From the info you supplied above, it won't help desktop sharing, as the Mac client doesn't apply QoS tags (DSCP marking) to desktop sharing packets.
A couple of questions:
- How can I lobby y'all to add QoS / DSCP marking for desktop sharing to Mac? It is useful to QoS for video, but having a screen share update quickly and smoothly is actually much more useful to us than having great video.
- I understand video based screen sharing (VbSS) is planned for SfB Mac. That would be really helpful - I understand we can expect a 6x improvement in frame rate. I'm finding with the current RDP-based screen sharing my MacBook Pro 13" 2016 heaves - even the keyboard is slow to respond, unlike screen sharing in Skype Personal, WebEx, Google Remote Desktop, Team Viewer, VNC, SplashView, etc. which don't noticeably impact my Mac's responsiveness. I'm hoping with VbSS, the SfB Mac developers will offload the video encode to the H.264 encoding silicon built into modern CPUs. Is there any timeframe for delivering VbSS?
- If Desktop Sharing is the priority, should I give up on SfB Mac until VbSS comes, and use a Windows 10 VM with SfB for Windows in the meantime? (A bit inconvenient.)
- Does Microsoft have any SfB team members who could work with us to bring our SfB desktop sharing numbers down into the range of WebEx?
Cheers,
-Tas.
- I am personally confused by this. How does Skype take 14 seconds to initiate a screen share? I agree the VbSS will be helpful as well as marking the traffic but I am not experiencing this so I'm curious on where the 14 seconds come from. We also found out with the latest Mac client our packets are being marked except for application sharing.
Hi Brian,
I'm not sure why it takes 14 seconds - it's not my area of expertise. That's part of why I posted above.
Until someone who knows SfB performance factors chimes in, here are some guessed-at possibilities:
- There are 7 people on the call, which could add to the desktop sharing setup time.
- The 7 people are in two continents, with a 170ms ping latency on the dedicated network link in between. If the desktop sharing setup protocol is chatty (i.e. a lot of network round trips), those round trips could add up to a significant delay.
- There's a mix of VbSS-capable and RDP-only capable clients on the call. There may be some time needed to negotiate what screen sharing protocol to use.
- Some other screen sharing platforms run a test on the network to determine available bandwidth, which adds to the setup time - don't know if SfB does this.
- There may be some time to negotiate frame rate. Don't know if SfB does this.
- If there's any transcoding of desktop sharing streams - I don't know if SfB does this - e.g. from VbSS to RDP - this could add to the setup time.
- My MacBook Pro 13" 2016 becomes very laggy when running SfB screen sharing. It could be that the RDP-based screen sharing on the SfB Mac client is inefficient, and contributes to the setup time.
Cheers,
-Tas.
Hello, Tasman:
Support for VbSS will be coming to SfB server 2015 customers in our next cumulative update, planned for Q2, 2018. When VbSS is available, you should see a significant improvement in performance for screen sharing, although do note that VbSS does require higher bandwidth, so customers can experience issues initially if their network capacity is not tuned for that. I can pass on your request for QoS support for screen sharing to the teams that own that support. For assistance with your performance issues, I would recommend working through Microsoft support for that.
Phil.
Thanks Phillip - that's really helpful.
QoS for screen sharing is pretty important for us. International network links are expensive, so they tend to be more contended than national links. Be able to put desktop sharing traffic at a similar or higher priority than video traffic on our international and inter-city links will likely be necessary to get good desktop sharing performance.
How would I check whether my request for QoS on desktop sharing for SfB Mac has been accepted/scheduled/ETA/completed? That way, I'll know whether to hang on for QoS implementation, or bite the bullet, and build a Windows 10 VM to run SfB Windows.
Again, thanks for your help. It's really great to know VbSS is coming calendar Q2.
Can you expand on
"Monitor the quality of your audio and video calls If you are on macOS Sierra or later, your admin can monitor the Quality of Service (QoS) of your audio and video calls to keep your service running smoothly." What does this mean?
I take it this is purely reporting on how the various media streams are marked for QOS?
Where is the data exposed? Is this via get-csusersession as I can't see anything in "Dimensions and measures available in Call Quality Dashboard"
While this data will be very useful, I am sure you have heard before if the client could mark for QOS..
- AlistairKeay1 - This is referencing QOS data through Skype for Business server/service, as for clients on Windows. Be sure that you have enabled QOS for non-Windows platforms as documented in this article: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj204750(v=ocs.15).aspx
Phil.Thanks for the reply. Two follow up items
1. Are you saying if Set-CsMediaConfiguration -EnableQoS $True, the MAC client will mark.
The actual DSCP value coming from Set-CsUCPhoneConfiguration -VoiceDiffServTag 46
2. As far as I was aware with SFB Online, the ability to change EnableQoS setting isn't possible. Certainly set-CSmediaconfigration is an on premise only command. Any advice for online deployments?
Regards
Does the calendar / presence status sync work with on-prem Exchange or only for Exchange / SfB Online customers? I just tested it by adding a meeting to my calendar (Outlook 15.40) but my Skype status does not switch to 'busy' or 'in a meeting'....
The calendar status is independent of the Exchange version. The feature is implemented in the app itself, using the calendar data that we download to display on the Meetings tab. If you add a meeting, there may be a delay before the app updates the internal cache. Check to see if the new meeting is showing up on the Meetings tab. If so, your status should update based on the following logic:
Are other people in meeting?
Free/Busy State in calendar
Set status to:
Yes
Busy
In a Meeting
No
Busy
Busy
Yes or No
Tentative
(no change to status)
If you see that calendar item is in the Meetings tab and free/busy state is not Tentative, but you don't see your status update, please file a bug by clicking Help\Report an Issue.
Thanks,
Phil.
- Yup, this works. Great that we now finally have this feature!
Has this update been pulled?
When I check for updates with fast-insider it says no updates available (I'm on 16.12.63). When I check with slow-insider I get 16.12.64.
Erik Hendrixand Phillip Garding on insider Fast i don't get any build either, but when i switch to slow, there is a 16.13.169 available.
Best regards
Jörg
- Yep, this morning still nothing on Fast Channel. But I was able to get it from the Slow Channel.
