New Skype for Business on Mac Insider build available (16.13.168)

[Phillip Garding]

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.

[#2]

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.

[#3]

@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

[#4]

I am not seeing it on either channel slow or fast. What gives?

[#5]

Yep, this morning still nothing on Fast Channel. But I was able to get it from the Slow Channel.

[#6]

Our apologies; we are having some technical difficulties with the release.  Please stand by while we get this sorted out.  I'll repost here when it is available everywhere.

Phil.

[#7]

Hi, everyone:

You should now be seeing the update available in both Fast and Slow Insider channels. It turns out that there was a propagation delay in our publishing service, so it just took a longer than usual for the update to get through the pipeline.

We look forward to hearing your feedback on these new features!

Phil

[#8]

Still early days, but the "See your missed IM messages" right now seems to be working really well. Before I often would get the message that company policy prevents from it being seen. So far haven't had that yet. Which is excellent as now when someone IMs me and I missed it I do not have to ask them to resend it.

Also seems to be a lot better in keeping the conversation within a window. Haven't had it happen yet that when I'm IMing with someone it suddenly then appears as a new conversation. 

Question now is, as the issue for missed IM messages is now being worked upon. Can we then also see in the near future tabbed support for this?

Thanks.

[#9]

I'm glad to hear that your initial experience has been good! There shouldn't be anything in this release to affect the split conversation problem. The primary cause of that is when you are chatting with someone on Windows client and they close the window and open a new window later. Perhaps you've just been lucky and not hit that condition. Our plan is to put that in insider builds in the new year.

For tabbed support, we are discussing this, but we don't have a design now and it isn't committed.

Thanks for your feedback!

Phil.

[#10]

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'....

[#11]

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.

[#12]

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..

[#13]

Yup, this works. Great that we now finally have this feature!

[#14]

@Alistair Keay - 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.

[#15]

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

[#16]

Let me research this and get back to you.

Phil.

[#17]

@Alistair Keay - Sorry for the delay in responding.  I've had various discussions with our engineering team to get the full picture on the QoS support.  Here is the full story, with links to documentation:

On-premises customers need to enable QoS marking for Mac and other non-Windows platforms by setting the EnableQoS property as documented here in these topics:

• Plan network requirements for Skype for Business 2015
• Enabling QoS in Lync Server 2013 for devices that are not based on Windows

Online customers should already have this property enabled automatically, so no action is needed to enable marking.

When the app installed and EnableQoS property enabled (as needed), audio and video network traffic will be marked with the DSCP values documented here: ExpressRoute and QoS in Skype for Business Online.  Note that only voice and video traffic are marked from Mac apps, and the DSCP values are not customizable.

[#18]

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:

1. 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.
2. 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?
3. 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.)
4. 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.

[#19]

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.

[#20]

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.