Is it bad to add groups with lots of contacts to Skype?

[wroot]

We are migrating from a local communication platform based on jabber to using SfB. In the older system we had all the employees in the roster along with internal short phone numbers and many users found it useful. Now SfB comes with an empty contacts list and users ask how can they add everyone. But i was told before that adding lots of contacts is not a recommended way. I wonder is there any technological drawback, like Skype client slowdowns, slower status updates, etc. We have ~180 users. It is fairly easy to search by department name and add everyone by adding groups (comes from Exchange). They even dinamically update when users leave the group or new ones are added. So what will happen if all our users add 50-100 contacts to their Skype this way? Or maybe we will be fine? I have tried to check CSPolicy and it shows nothing besides the number of max contacts. So not sure if there is any limits of contacts/followers in the Online version.

[#2]

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/nexthop/2010/06/06/limiting-the-number-of-contacts-a-user-can-ha...

Before you begin, you should note that there already is a limit on the number of contacts your users can have: it’s 250.

Get-CsUserServicesConfiguration

 
If you look at the value of the MaxContacts property we should see something like this:

 
MaxContacts:         250

[#3 · Accepted solution]

Out of the box the contact list is limited to 250 users but can be expanded up to 1,000.
It's more so a recommendation that you'd add everyone in your company to the contact list as they can be easily found by typing in their name, however it's quite common that people do add their colleagues to the contact list for ease of access later.
Having 200+ people on your contact list won't impact anything - that's what I've had for years with no issue.

[#4]

Take a look at this article:
http://www.skypeadmin.com/2015/04/13/pre-populate-contacts-lync-skype/

[#5]

Thanks for your replies. It is always weird for me that i get notifications when i reply on some other thread, but for my own new thread i also have to subscribe to get emails about new replies..

I have seen that blog post, but aside of a threatening title i haven't found there anything about real impact of adding lots of contacts. As someone here mentioned, they haven't noticed anything bad after adding lots of contacts. I guess i will have to roll with this and allow our users to add lots of contacts with groups.

We are using Skype for Business Online. It doesn't recognize Get-CsUserServicesConfiguration cmdlet (it was probably only for Lync). As i've said i have tried Get-CSClientPolicy and there is an entry 'MaximumNumberOfContacts" which has an empty value. So i wasn't sure what limit SfB Online has.

[#6]

If you check the documentation for New-CSClientPolicy, you can see that the limit can be set to 1000 contacts:

Indicates the maximum number of contacts a user is allowed to have. The maximum contacts can be set to any integer value between 0 and 1000, inclusive. When set to 0, that prevents the user from having any contacts.

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg425949.aspx

[#7]

**bleep**. Still not getting email notifications from this thread. Though i'm getting from another older thread that i have commented months ago.

That document is for Skype for Business Server, which i guess is for on-premises variant. Not sure i should try to tinker with the Online variant this way. We will try with the default settings for now.

[#8]

It is not possible to run the command "New-CsClientPolicy" with the switch -MaximumNumberOfContacts for Skype for Business Online.

There is no official documentation as well which mentions the contact limit for Skype for Business Online.

If there is one, please let us know :)

[#9]

Hi,

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/skype/new-csclientpolicy?view=skype-ps

This one should apply to SfB Online as well.

[#10]

In the article it mentions that it is applicable for SFB Online but as a matter of fact it doesn't. There might be some switches in the below article which works for SFB online but "-MaximumNumberOfContacts" ain't the one.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/skype/new-csclientpolicy?view=skype-ps