(or Enabling mobility with Skype for business)
Presented by Praveen Maloo
(who spoke continuously for 1 hour+ in a poised, controlled manner, good job!)
The integration with Outlook is better with join straight from the Outlook calendar, and access to the calendar from Skype for business. To get presence in Outlook is being worked on.
It is possible to upload and present a Power point file with the Office Web Apps server in a meeting.
The integration with the phone hardware / OS is improved when it comes to contacts and dialing. Before an ongoing Skype for business call or meeting were cut in the event of an incoming native (PSTN) call. This is now fixed. When in a Skype for business call, the user will get an option to answer or ignore the PSTN call; even send to voicemail and hold the current call is there. This will be available soon for iOS 10 devices.
The join button in Outlook, available now.
Another one of the issues with putting a phone in a phone is solved.
The login experience is improved with some more help texts at the login screen. If the username is entered in an incorrect format, the application will let you know immediately and not wait for you to enter the password and then fail the login.
The join experience is better with the application understanding where the meeting is being hosted, in your system or in a federated one.
Push notifications with the possibility to communicate messages to the lock screen, will be available in Office 365 first and then come to the on-prem software. Also, push notifications will show up even if you have not actually used the app for a long time. Presence during meetings have been inconsistent in the past but should now work better with push notifications in place. There is tenant level and user level settings to turn push notifications on or off. Sometimes when logging in to the mobile client old toasts appear from hours ago, and this is also fixed with push notifications.
15-20% less battery is consumed now after improvements, compared to earlier.
Transcription and translation of meetings will be in the mobile clients.
Siri support through Apple's Sirikit integration is coming.
Video based Screen Sharing (VbSS) will improve the meeting experience on mobile clients. With Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) sharing maybe 3-4 Frames Per Second (FPS) could be reached over TCP. With VbSS 15 FPS can be reached over UDP, making the sharing run much smoother. In reality a VbSS session will use more bandwidth than the RDP version (so there is a fallback mechanism) but counted frame-by-frame VbSS is actually using less bandwidth than RDP. So, the clients will try to optimize the viewing experience depending on the network conditions.
The so called "
Modern Authentication" is supported.
It is possible to use Smart cards with the certificate based authentication.
There is Single Sign on support on the mobile, e.g. sign in to outlook and this authentication will be valid in Skype for business, Sharepoint, etc.
Intune adds manageability to mobile devices, for example force the version of iOS to be used or disable screen capture. (now it is possible to take a photo of a phone with another phone - be careful out there...)
Then the session went on with a nice demo, featuring: Creating a meeting in Outlook, joining a meeting from the outlook calendar, answering (joining meeting) from the lock screen, presenting content from iCloud or OneDrive, an incoming PSTN call during meeting were declined.
Downloads for
all the mobile clients can be found here.
Many Questions and answers came last in the session.
A question about security and the local cache was answered with Intune that can assign a password for opening the Skype for business client. Screen sharing from the mobile client is currently not possible. Persistent chat, Conversations, Call back, VbSS, Multi Factor Authentication, sending SMS from contact cards and calling home to Sweden over a bad WiFi network were discussed.
