Technology Musings

So....the news we've been expecting for a long time has finally been announced - Skype for Business Online is being retired in July 2021. Not a huge surprise, we all knew it would happen at some stage, but two years away should be long enough for any business using Skype for Business Online to be able to get their migration to Microsoft Teams planned and executed. If you want to know about the options for migrating to Microsoft Teams, the migration routes are explained here . It's important to note though that Skype for Business Server (the on-premises version) is not affected by this announcement. What else has been announced? There are some other snippets in the Microsoft announcement: Dynamic E911: this is a big deal for US-based organisations, and is an improvement over what is currently offered within Skype Online. In the US, if you call the emergency services, your call needs to be routed to one of over 6,000 Public Safety Answering Points, or PSAPs, depending

When you start a Teams meeting, you may be used to the fact that users from outside of your company wait in a virtual 'lobby', and need to be manually 'admitted' by someone before they join the meeting. It used to be the case that this behaviour could not be changed (so external users would always wait in the lobby) but  the meeting organiser can now change this . However, Microsoft have advised that shortly (from the end of August 2019), they will be changing the default behaviour so that external users will not wait in the lobby. If your organisation is familiar with the lobby behaviour and expects this, you may need to take action now to make sure that this continues to be the case. What do I need to do? If you have created your own custom Teams meeting policies and all your users have one of these policies, then you have nothing to worry about. However, if you have not customised your policies, your Teams Meeting policy admin page might look like this,

The other week, I was looking into using Teams as a phone system for a potential small business customer - and spotted a major problem. But it's not a technical one, it's a licensing (or commercial) one: if you're licensed with one of the Small Business Plans (for less than 300 users), you cannot add a Phone System licence. To be able to add a Phone System licence, you need to have at least an 'E3' licence, which really surprised me. I spent a little while trying to tabulate the relevant features of a number of different licence plans, and produced this table to help try to compare and understand the options. Some points: I've not listed every single product and feature, just what I thought the ones which would be most relevant to a small business customer. I've translated the 'features' into actual 'products' to make it easier for techies to understand. All pricing is standard, with no discounts applied, as of July 2019 in GBP