Skype for business

[Theldron]

Hi all,

 

Still working on getting skype setup for staff to use in school for messaging, but was wondering if there is a central admin tool for this? So that I can centralise the client setup without having to go to each one.

 

If you have Skype for business in your school would be interested in how you set it up?

 

Cheers

Sean

[psydii]

S4B will be superseded by Microsoft Teams.

 

(Teams is essentially the new S4B client, enhanced with persistent chat previously only available from on-prem Lync, integration with Office365 Groups, and OneDrive. It is till lacking feature parity with S4B client, but each month features are being ported across)

 

Should just be a case of deploying the msi and then getting the teacher to log on. + the killer use case to convince the teacher to use it.

 

It has just gained Classroom/Education specific tools too, which might pique their interest.

[nickbro]

Teams may not replace sfb for the pbx. We will see though

[john]

S4B will be superseded by Microsoft Teams.

 

Do you have a source for that statement? From UC Expo the other month and talking to Microsoft that was very much not mentioned as the two products are quite different markets. Teams is MS's version of Slack yes that has comms in it but it will integrate and utilise S4B was what MS were saying at the time.

[3s-gtech]

I don't visit each client with our S4B, though if I need to add S4B to an existing install of Office 2016 I have to do that on the client machine (though I could just remove Office and replace it with our 'staff' install). Everything else I need is done by GPO.

[ellsandell]

I suspect Teams will use S4B for its backend comms. (Same as you can configure products like Cisco Jabber to use backend S4B or S4B to use Jabber)

[psydii]

S4B is the back-end for much of Teams.

 

I half suspect that on non-windows platforms the two clients share their code base.

 

 

 

I'm expecting Teams gets all of the S4B functionality, but for those who only want chat/voice collaboration, S4B client will remain.

 

 

This allows both to be true and satisfy the cases below:

 

If you use Teams why should you have to use another client just for PSTN/PBX calling?

 

Likewise if you only use S4B for Chat/PSTN/PBX why should you have to take Teams.

 

I would be very surprised if any official statements or actions by MS contradict this dual client future. I believe that perhaps there was a time when it was considered that Teams would replace S4B, but they have rowed back on that in the last few months.