Microsoft Announces New Features for Skype for Business and Office 365

Microsoft has started off the Ignite Conference in Atlanta, Georgia with new announcements for Skype for Business and Office 365. The upcoming innovations, in addition to new Yammer integration with Office 365 groups, are designed to improve the collaboration experience, and to provide IT professionals with the means to provide a more modern communication experience.

First and foremost, Mac users will now be able to use Skype for Business. Microsoft announced a new Skype for Business client, built using Swift, the modern Mac programming language. In addition, the iPhone versions of Skype for Business will be receiving new enhancements, which will allow Skype calls to work the same way as phone calls via the Apple CallKit framework.

Furthermore, Microsoft announced that Skype Meeting Broadcast will be seeing new real-time transcription and translation. Skype Meeting Broadcast, as the name suggests, allows users to host and broadcast meetings to online audiences, so by adding closed captioning for presentations in several different languages (currently English, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, and German, with more languages planned for future updates), it should allow viewers in multiple countries to take in the presentation in the language they're most comfortable with.

Accompanying the new language options are more geographic expansions for Office 365's PSTN Conferencing. This extends Office 365 audio conferencing to multiple new countries, including Australia, Costa Rica, Egypt, and Russia. France and Spain will also be seeing previews of PSTN Calling soon, while Skype for Business Cloud PBX is now available worldwide.

Skype for Business online meetings will also start offering dynamic conference IDs, providing each meeting a unique ID, along with enhanced security and better transitions between multiple meetings in a row.

Microsoft also announced plans to begin launching previews of Organizational Auto Attendant for call treatment and Call Queues for queuing and routing of inbound calls. Users can configure them in the Office 365 admin console or through Windows PowerShell, and are useful for migrating office to Cloud PBX for voice. Another upcoming preview is Skype for Business Advanced Analytics, which will allow customers to manage their communications with a complete view of the Skype for Business online environment.

Yet another announcement comes with the launch of Skype Operations Framework (SOF), which adds an end-to-end planning, deployment, and operations methodology and tool set for Skype for Business. Microsoft has announced a Cloud Migration release, designed to extend SOF and help customers migrate from their on-premises deployments to Skype for Business Online.

Last but not least, Microsoft has announced Yammer integration with Office 365 Groups. Yammer is a social network designed for work that can connect teams across organizations through social media. By adding it to Office 365 Groups, Microsoft is enabling more social collaboration, including access to SharePoint sites and document repositories, a shared OneNote notebook, and task management via Planner.

According to Blair Pleasant of UCStrategies, "Microsoft did a good job of delivering on many of its roadmap promises that it made earlier in the year, and it's nice to see Skype for Business making headway and becoming a more global offering. Microsoft has also fulfilled one of its earlier promises in delivering Skype Room Systems (formerly Project Rigel) and working with ecosystem partners such as Logitech, Polycom, and Creston to develop video systems for this, such as Logitech's SmartDock."

She added:, "As a Mac and iPhone user, I was very pleased to hear about the ability for Skype for Business to finally do a better job of supporting Macs, as it's been a very frustrating user experience. However, one thing many of us were hoping to hear about is a new team messaging solution to compete with Slack, but so far there hasn't been mention of this."

These are but the first unified communications-related announcements from Microsoft, with more to come as the Ignite Conference continues. For more information, visit www.microsoft.com.