I work at a large corporation where we use Skype For Business and I swear, this is probably the worst piece of software I have ever used. They can't get basic things right - I can send a message to my coworker right now, and it will appear in the list of messages on his machine somewhere in between past messages. For a while, we had someone who couldn't receive any attachments, skype would just say "failed sending" - we had an actual Level 3 tech support from MS remote over to his machine to find out the issue, it was some broken registry settings.
Selecting and copying text is a lottery - sometimes it will copy exactly what you highlighted, sometimes it won't - which is bizzare for an IM program. And then there's the conferencing, oh my god the conferencing. If you are in a conference room and someone left another account logged in with skype open, then no other user on that pc can make/receive calls - the only way to fix it is to restart the machine. I honestly can't believe we're paying money for this thing.
Skype for Business is actually being deprecated and replaced with Microsoft Teams[0].
Microsoft Teams is impressive that it actually manages to have a worse desktop client than Skype for Business, and the web site is barely any better. If people on O365 haven't used it, they should since Microsoft will force it on you sooner or later.
It is like Microsoft wanted to clone a bunch of popular services (e.g. Slack) and just mashed them all together without a care in the world, and to top it off had to make a bad UWP desktop application that needed touch support so they cut 90% of common features to fit in enough voidspace into the UI for touch.
I feel compelled reiterate to the world how astonishingly bad Teams is. We've been using it since its release and some days I'm convinced that there must be some internal management issue causing employees to deliberately sabotage the product.
Honestly I've found Teams to be preferential to Skype. The Screen Share features works heads over heels better than Skypes. Though It'd be 10x better with the standard Unicode Emoji set and having URLs to Online Meeting's like Skype.
I agree completely with your assessment. I used to gripe about SfB, but Teams is hilariously bad. Off the top of my head:
-200MB minimum memory usage whether you use the desktop app or in a browser. Usually much more
-Animated GIFs animate FOREVER with no way to turn them off, except by turning them off for everyone in your entire organization
-Attachments fail constantly
-Randomly takes over your SfB chats/calls
-Can't have more than 19 people in a chat channel at once
-Bots only work in the unintuitive, threaded "Teams" part that no one seems to grok, not the chat part that everyone actually uses
However I do like the ability to add random onenotes etc to channels, and to be fair it has been getting better, albeit slowly
Teams does something much better than SfB. It keeps IMs in sync between clients and devices. If I reply to an IM on my phone in SfB it stays on my phone. There's no way to get that conversation history onto my desktop client. Teams acts like you would expect and all clients get all the history.
Yes SfB's biggest problem is that it has skype in the name so people try to use it as an instant messenger.
It's ok for audio/video, but an abomination for instant messages - almost spitefully bad for text based communication due to the way it randomly redirects messages within a conversation to e.g. Outlook.
- Has their own poorly written markdown-WYSIWYG hibrid thing that often puts what i'm writing into some state where I need to clear out the whole message and start over.
- Butchers 2-factor auth on mobile and often puts you into a neverending authentication loop (sending tens of text messages if your second factor is setup like that)
- notifications that never clear unless you click on the channel, scroll to the "unread" message, and wait for a few seconds.
I can not agree with you more. Skype for business has is an unmitigated disaster of a piece of software and whatever team is in charge of it needs to be fired or relocated so that Microsoft can start over on it.
Skype for business is so insultingly bad that it is pretty much the only piece of widely used software that I am willing to claim that given a month I could write something far better.
Agreed. I've worked at two places now that have undergone the switch and it was worse in both cases. Not only the software being worse than its 2007 predecessor, but the upgrade itself broke all sorts of internal tools and functionality, thanks to unnecessary changes to the registry and SFB's desire to put add-ins in everything (IE, Outlook, Firefox, etc).
Yea, based on our experience with SfB I'm frankly a little gobsmacked there are any enterprise clients with an overwhelmingly positive take on their experience.
I mean, they tout GE, a company in the middle of an incredibly well documented and historically expensive failure of a transition to a "digital" company. Probably not the best example. You'll have millions of minutes spent in Skype to wave around when getting everyone actually able to hear and participate takes several minutes on top of every meeting and call.
Right now we've got Slack, WebEx, and SfB. SfB is by far, the worst experience of the 3. Big meetings are on WebEx, and pretty much everyone uses Slack for ad-hoc stuff now. SfB is just too damned painful.
The program has awful UI/UX, calls rarely work, connectivity is a dice-roll most days, copy/paste(this is 2018, come on) is hilariously bad, viewing any kind of cohesive chat history is a disaster.
It's pretty bad when a recently added feature(calls) to an Electron-based chat app already provides a better UX vs. a multi-year incumbent created expressly for the same purpose.
Another comment summed it up pretty well: "enterprise" software has become synonymous with "stopped trying".
Don't even get me started on Webex. It's better than SfB sure, but only just. On Windows it will turn off cleartype whenever you do a screenshare, so whatever effort you were putting in to make something look good goes straight out of the window.
If you really want to torture yourself, try SfB on macOS. "Kafkaesque" is an apt term for all the truly bizarre ways it abuses you.
My favorite recent thing - I'll hang up a call and randomly SfB will spawn about a dozen call quality survey windows for every call I've recently completed.
In our company, the SfB on Mac users have an issue where login variably takes between 5 and 30 minutes.
Conferences are hilariously late because of this.
Also, Mac screen sharing usually crashes after a few minutes.
Sometimes calls get dropped and reconnnect just fails immediately with some weird error code until you sign out and delete all user data and log in again (waiting minutes).
Chat history disabled.
How we miss GotoMeeting...
If Slack conferences were better we’d all delete SfB ASAP.
No way in hell we would use Teams.
There was an option of Slack vs Teams and we had a huge stampede into Slack, but still have to use SfB because that’s the only way we can make phone calls since our physical phones were removed, and Slack conferencing options are limited.
We use dedicated accounts for our conf room PCs. You invite the room to the meeting, join from that PC. Works well and avoids the problem you mention. People don’t use personal accounts on conference room pc. Also using that program to ‘freeze’ known good config of pc and reboot nightly helps ensure it’s always working the next day regardless of what people mess up during the day.
It's amazing how things MS got wrong with Skype for Business. For something that had so much potential, that piece of software on Mac's is so ridiculously bad. It's a shame too, I'd definitely pay and be happy to be locked into a really nice softphone technology with corp IM/directory all in one.
Same here, Skype for Business is such a big overhead that people started to riot against it and we are going to replace it with something that works. "failed sending" is an every day issue, Mac client cannot record, mobile version drains battery like crazy, just to mention the top pain points.
They're pushing skype for business in my workplace as well (larger corporation). We've been using zoom and the IT department keeps telling us to stop, but skype for business just doesn't work well: high memory usage (seen on multiple machines taking 20gb+ before having to be killed), lack of features (e.g. video conference recording), instability, general flakiness of software. It is truly bizarre all of the problems given how long the software has been around. The only thing I can believe is microsoft is not putting the resources needed into it. They will fail unless they change that quickly. Us engineers will pay for zoom out of our own pockets before using skype for business.
You know how to take Skype FOR BUSINESS and make it even less useful? Prevent chat history, corporate-wide. You know, so we can't be forced to divulge the transcripts by a court. (As a Fortune-250, what do they have to hide?) Are there a lot of companies that share this practice? Did IBM release a white paper called "Chat History Deemed Harmful," and all Fortune 500 CIO's stroked their chins, nodded their heads, and contracted them to come turn it off? Or are we special?
Yeah, I got the latest "Unified" version now with Win10 and it takes more clicks to do the same things now.
Plus it keeps insisting on showing my profile photo over any new screenshare, and doesn't remember when I pop it out and minimize it. Buttons hide and show (but the background behind them is still opaque).
