Skype for Business Phone Integration & Other Promises That Were Made The service has a number of collaboration features, allowing co-workers to make and record audio & video calls amongst themselves, instant message with presence and file transfers, and has lofty goals for meeting the needs of 'all your conversations'. It is included in Microsoft's 'Office 365' - an online subscription service which also includes Office applications and file storage. Skype for Business was officially released in September 2015, though the Mac OSX client remains as 'Lync for Mac 2011' for now. Microsoft announced in 2014 that Lync would be rebranded/replaced with Skype for Business the following year. You may also be familiar with Lync, Microsoft's business-focused communication software made available in 2011.

You may be familiar with Skype, the freemium instant message and video chat service for consumers that was bought by eBay in 2009 and later sold to Microsoft in 2011. In this post, I've tried to summarize what was proposed, what is currently available, and whether or not I think Skype can be a viable option for a business' PBX needs.

As a business VoIP provider, staying on top of the latest technologies is important to us. It's also important to businesses who want to use them. So when I decided to research the question, Can Skype for Business replace my PBX? (in other words, are they a competitor of ours?), I figured I'd publish my findings.įinding concrete information about the service and its role in the business VoIP landscape has been unexpectedly difficult.

Skype for business phones