Skype for Business

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Amongst folks in the PBX industry, the most common criticism of Skype is that it’s not a great business tool.  People cite the lack of common business features — queues, call transfer capability, and so on — as evidence.  Fascinatingly, Skype for Business ignores this criticism, and instead focuses on consolidated billing.  Smart move!  Increasingly, we’re seeing Skype use in all kinds of organizations, with the current feature set.  As a replacement for conference calls, for instance, it’s superb.

The Skype for Business dashboard allows an administrator to manage multiple Skype accounts, and consolidate all of the bills under one organizational umbrella.  Sign-up is free.  For organizations where Skype is already present to some degree, this is a no-brainer.

Most interesting of all are the strategy implications.  The grass-roots marketing campaign waged by Skype must be paying dividends, else why build a tool for IT managers?

Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.