More icons appear allowing you to make a call, share your screen, or send a file. Double click on your colleague’s icon and up comes the conversation window. Managers can check on the idle time of their employees as SFB shows a timestamp for how long someone has been away from their computer.įrom there go about your usual use case.
Your contacts each have a picture, availability status, and video capability indication. It defaults to Contacts, which means most of the time you’ll be looking at your contact list when the app is open. These determine what you see in the body of the application. Below that sit four icons across the menu – Contacts, Conversations, Meetings, Settings. Your name falls at the top along with your picture, availability status (available, away, do not disturb, etc.), and a personal message for your contacts to see if you choose to write one. The application tucks toward the side of your screen, and goes for the tall and skinny look. Additional features build from that basic premise. Last but not least, Microsoft has already announced that Teams will be replacing SFB and when sunset occurs, it isn't clear.Īt its core, SFB allows you to select another SFB user from a contact list and from there, start an instant message conversation, make a call (video if you have that capability), or share your screen. It offers a variety of plan options at attractive prices, though making sense of that spider web proves difficult (see here). It seamlessly integrates with Outlook from where you can create Skype meetings and populate your contact list. Any business using the Microsoft ecosystem, particularly small businesses, should take a look at SFB. It serves as a lightweight collaboration tool. It’s an important distinction to make since SFB should not be viewed as a phone replacement or VOIP Service. Please note this is a separate product from Skype for consumers. If you’ve ever used Microsoft Lync, then you’re in luck – Lync was rebranded to Skype for Business in 2015, refining Lync’s core functionalities ever since. Restarting it is now really easy.Skype for Business (SFB) is a business-focused app that allows you to instant message, phone and video call, screen share, host and record meetings, and generally collaborate with your colleagues. One of the best new features is the automatic call recovery - drop a call and it’s put in pause.
If you’ve paid for Skype minutes, you can call your Facebook friends, and if they’re also signed in to Skype Portable you can call them for free. This is a pretty big thing, as not only does it give you your news feed in the app - anyone can do that - but adds call and SMS buttons to any of your friends who share their contact numbers. The other major development in Skype Portable is Facebook integration. There was also one nice detail, and that's the ability to see your own video image built-in on your contact's video, and the option to take a snapshot of your own image. Video sometimes appeared a bit pixelated, but nothing we couldn't really deal with.
The sound quality in Skype Portable during our testing was perfect: loud and clear. The new interface in Skype Portable is transformed when you make a call, getting rid of all the clutter, so you just see the video images, and controls. This means Skype Portable has been made wider so that video fits in perfectly with your written chat, your contact list and a toolbar to manage conversation. The program's interface has been completely redesigned with video conferences on mind. These video calls are precisely the main focus on Skype Portable's latest version.