Skype for Business chat Client

Copper Contributor

At my company, we've recently moved off of Office Communicator for internal chat and onto Skype for Business. While I would like to say that the new software is a welcome one, it has been frustrating on several fronts. 

 

1) I'm regularly involved in very large chats with 20 or more participants and it's very difficult to see the list of participants in the chat thread. It requires going up to the divider line and pulling it down which then impedes upon the available window space for the actual chat. Office Communicator handled this much more efficiently where there was a separate pane for the participants on the side and it never interfered with the amount of available space for the chat.

 

2) There is a hyper link to click on "Particpants" and then that expands the window and changes to a button labeled "Invite More People". It would be nice to have an easy way to minimize and expand the participant list rather than one function changing into another one with no way of going back. 

 

3) The window to add more people to the chat is fixed widrh and not resizable. It would be nice to be able to make this larger to allow users to see more names. 

 

4) Office Communicator had a nice feature where you could create an email to all the chat participants. Skype for Business seems to have lost this feature. 

 

I'm sure there are others and I will likely poll my co-workers in the future and try to post some additional feedback. The above four (particularly the list of chat participants) are the ones that are most problematic having recently moved to Skype for Business. I hope there is someone from the Skype for Business Product Management team that reads these posts ocassionaly so these enhancements can be considered for a future release. Anything that can be done to improve usability for large, chat-intensive use cases would be appreciated! 

 

Thanks,

 

Joel

 

 

3 Replies
Re: #2, a colleague of mine correctly pointed out to me that at the top right of the window pane there is an 'X' which allows you to "close" the dialog and get back to the previous state. (Though having it as an 'X" implies to me that the window will be closed out completely so I think the usability could be improved here)

Totally agree with the Joel here - especially with the participants list. While the 'X' is nice to have, it only serves to point out a seriously awful design.

 

It is for some of these very same reasons why I, personally, will stick with Lync for as long as it's allowed to connect and will only use Skype for Business when I absolutely have to.

 

+1 for consistency.

Sorry, the "+1 for consistency" was related to a snarky comment that was removed about bad design being consitent with Office products.

 

I couldn't edit it out after posting, so may as well explain it.