Forum Discussion
Multiple chats sessions with same contact in S4B window ?
Unfortunate that this journey has reached a dead-end. I need the functionality and am not particularly set on which software delivers it ... provided said software is within the MS family and my existing license structure. Therefore, does Teams solve this, and is the general advice, "sorry, S4B is never going to solve this as the core architecture is not built to do so, which we inherited, and are not going to rebuild from scratch because we've released Teams ... so start using Teams?"
Because, if that's so, and we can get that from Phil or another MS rep then I'll mark it as the best answer and move on with my life. Phillip Garding appreciate your efforts. What do you say we just finalize a solid answer here ... Move to Teams ?
There are several open questions on this thread, and I want to try to address them.
We acknowledge that people are frustrated with the experience of having conversations with a person show up as separate sessions. This is a usability problem for some users, and we invested time exploring a variety of ways to mitigate this in the client. To address the problem, we implemented the Grouped View in the Chats panel in order to bring all sessions with the same user together and simplify viewing and finding chats.
In Preferences, there is an option to Show single window for conversations with same user that sounds like it might affect the behavior of the chats list, but this actually does something else. This setting only applies when Show conversations in separate windows option is enabled, meaning chats are opened in a separate top-level window instead of shown in a panel of the main Skype for Business window. If both settings are enabled, and you have a chat window open with a user, any new messages from that user will be shown in the open chat window. (Before the 'single window' setting was implemented, you could have multiple open windows with the same user.) This is true even if those messages show up in the Chats list as a separate session. These are subtle concepts to explain, and we struggled to find wording for the checkbox in Preferences. Unfortunately, all choices had the potential to be misinterpreted.
The Chats list in Teams is organized around people and groups, so the duplication problem seen in Skype for Business is not an issue. Messaging in Teams is built on a completely different architecture than Skype for Business. Teams has a database for storing messages and does not rely on storing conversations in Exchange, so there is no session concept in Teams chat. Teams is an excellent and growing product. We encourage customers to adopt Teams as our next generation communication product, but many factors go into the decision of which communication product to deploy. For those customers who choose to continue using Skype for Business, we are committed to maintaining and improving Skype for Business for many years to come.
Phil.
- I honestly don't understand the bussiness sense here. Sure it might be easy for small companies to casually drop S4B and use teams but why not simply add this "feature" to S4B? People clearly want it. It makes design sense based on literally every single chat application people have been using since direct messaging started. There's even a tab LITERALLY called persistent chat in OPTIONS! And all it does really is let you choose the sound and priority of messages. How hard can it be to have one window for each user. Even if the original code wasn't designed for this, how hard is it to stitch the sessions together in a GUI with a line separating sessions.
This farce has lasted long enough. my company has been using S4B but will no longer if this isn't resolved, it makes absolutely no sense this concept of session based chats... who else does this? even in the commercial skype app they had the common sense of grouping chats by recipient.
. it's rendering use of this tool more painful than it is useful. not to mention the constant missed conversation emails I'm getting for chats that I am actively participating in.....
Note this change is in the latest update. We had to run update. Trying this today...could be a nice change.
Thanks!
In Preferences, there is an option to Show single window for conversations with same user that sounds like it might affect the behavior of the chats list, but this actually does something else. This setting only applies when Show conversations in separate windows option is enabled, meaning chats are opened in a separate top-level window instead of shown in a panel of the main Skype for Business window. If both settings are enabled, and you have a chat window open with a user, any new messages from that user will be shown in the open chat window.
I have that option unchecked and have a chat from yesterday with one person in 10 different windows!
