Microsoft recently provided a preview of three of their new Skype for business services. Celebrated for making long distance relationships more manageable, Skype will soon take your professional meetings and collaborations to the next level.
Skype’s business evolution
“With these new services, we will bring traditional calling and conferencing into the new era of workplace communications, and also add an entirely new way of communicating at much higher scale with much greater flexibility over the Internet,” the company said.
The “business evolution of Skype” is an ongoing project at Microsoft.
For now, only customers with an Office 365 Enterprise account are allowed to try out some of the three services while they are still in the beta testing phase, according to On Windows.
Here’s a quick description of the three features.
Skype Meeting Broadcast
The feature includes the ability to broadcast meetings to as many as 10,000 people. The current platform supports up to 250 attendees at once. The Skype Meeting Broadcast service has been designed to host large virtual meetings like “Public Webinars” or internal “Town Hall” style meetings, according to a Zdnet report. This preview is available worldwide.
PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network) Conferencing
This feature allows users invited to a Skype for Business meeting to join the discussion by dialling-in using a landline or mobile phone. Basically, people will be able to join a meeting even without access to the Internet. PSTN Conferencing will also allow people to add others to a meeting by dialling out. This preview is available to Office 365 customers in the U.S. only at this time.
Cloud PBX with PSTN Calling
Available only in the U.S. this features provides users with the ability to “make and receive traditional phone calls” in their Skype for Business client. Users will also be able to manage these calls using hold, resume, forward and transfer. This preview is built on the proven enterprise voice technology available in Lync Server and Skype for Business Server. Later this year, Microsoft will ship Cloud PBX for customers worldwide; with a configuration option for customers to use existing on-premises phone lines for inbound and outbound calling.
Skype for Business fully launched in April 2015. Microsoft will reportedly begin to make the Cloud PBX with PSTN Calling widely available beginning this fall, while the other features are expected to be ready before the end of the year.
