The other day, our Support team deployed a new Skype for Business Server for one of our mid-market customers. Initial setup went smoothly…they had an existing Office 365 account, which they wanted to integrate. We set them up on a Hybrid configuration. It went well. Very well. Now, if you’ve worked in IT for longer than 2 hours, you know what’s coming next. Something has to go wrong. Fortunately, the ‘something wrong’ wasn’t catastrophic. We had no server crash, no hardware failure, no huge configuration snarl. No, we got the “small but annoying” issue. The digital equivalent of a fly buzzing ..read more

Some of you no doubt saw that the blog was down for a while. I won’t bore you with details…suffice to say we had to rebuild it fresh. Even that we had to delay a while. Customers come first, which meant we had to let this blog sit a while in order to take care of customers’ IT needs. Now that the blog’s live again and I’m able to resume posting, I want to ask two questions. First: This year saw a huge adoption boost for Teams. Skype for Business Online’s sunset arrives in July. As such, Teams takes center stage. I will continue to blog about Skype for Business, as we still have Server 2019. At ..read more

Hello everyone! Chris here, with a quick we’re-not-dead post. I don’t need to explain just how crazy these past few months have been. We experienced a surge in customers needing help setting up remote work systems (and securing them!). We’re still embroiled in the effort, which is why this blog went quiet. I hope to resume regular posting by the end of summer. In the meantime, I hope everyone is doing as well as possible, and that all our businesses will bounce back. If you’d like to share any frustrations you’ve had with Skype4B or Teams in the past few months, please comment below. The post ..read more

Time for a new hardware review! This time we have an impressive little device – a new 4K USB camera from Poly (formerly Polycom/Plantronics). Ben at Poly came out to demo some new hardware for us. He showed us two of Poly’s newer systems: the Studio X30 and Studio X50. I’ll do a separate post on those. This one’s focused on another hardware item we saw in the same demo. Ben brought along a new camera: the EagleEye Cube USB camera. I asked Ben if he’d lend me an EagleEye for review. He agreed, handing over his demo unit. This is the EagleEye description from its overview & specs page: The ..read more

Entry #7 in the “How it Fits” series is…the PSTN Gateway! Like the Reverse Proxy, a PSTN Gateway isn’t a dedicated Server Role in Skype for Business. However, that doesn’t mean it’s optional. In fact, it’s critical if you want to use Enterprise Voice. Without one of these three options – PSTN Gateway, IP-PBX, or SIP Trunk – you can’t call out of the office. Nor can anyone calling you reach you. I don’t let anyone pass unless they have a PSTN Gateway. Or a treat. Photo by Szymon Fischer on Unsplash. This post will explain why, and how to deploy a PSTN gateway for your Skype for Busi ..read more

I’ve blogged about Skype for Business all this time, and almost never touched on keyboard shortcuts! Shame on me. As with most tech learning, this came up out of necessity. I wanted to learn two things in particular…shortcuts to: Accept conversation invites right away, and Change my Presence status. Why two very simple processes? Due to a weird, inconsistent issue. Some months back I began experiencing a strange delay when clicking “Accept” for conversation invites. I could click and click on the notification, but “Accept” just wouldn’t work for several seconds (up to 15!). Only if I waited ..read more

Hello readers! We interrupt your holiday-shopping, end-of-year-system-checks madness for the final Skype for Business Insider post of 2019. You may have noticed that posting frequency went down this year. That’s due to the indefatigable demon we know as “Lack of Time.” This demon plagued me pretty much every day. I apologize for the frequency drop. Don’t worry though—I can explain! 2019 Year in Review 2019 was a pretty good year for PlanetMagpie. Our Texas office is growing, we completed several new websites (and have 3 more in the works), and we added several new Support customers. We expan ..read more

You’ve heard the phrase, “an overabundance of choice?” We’ve reached that point for video conferencing solutions. After I did the Video Interop Server post, I looked around a little more at video conferencing solutions. I found an enormous selection out there: Zoom, MegaMeeting, Join.me, Google Meet, MeetMonk, GoToMeeting, Vox.io, WebEx, WhatsApp, and so on… Okay, it’s Tuesday. That means we’re using Google for today’s meeting, right? Photo by Rachel Danner on Unsplash. We don’t need this many. Which compelled me to blog about the topic…because it can cause a serious problem ..read more

Hello “Insiders!” I know I haven’t posted much lately. Went on a short vacation, and we’re now in the middle of 5 (yes, five!) website builds running at the same time I’m also working on a couple big posts. The Time Lords willing, I’ll have them up before the end of the year. In the meantime, let’s talk retirement. No, not that kind. Software retirement. Well, I guess it applies to some developers… Photo by Elena Saharova on Unsplash.Skype for Business (Online) Retiring in 2 Years If you haven’t heard, MS will retire Skype for Business (Online) July 31, 2021. After that, it’s Teams ..read more

If your organization has decided to move off its Skype for Business Server deployment to Teams, you’ll hit an in-between period. A time when some users are on Skype4B, and some have moved to Teams. Can they still communicate with one another during this period? It’s possible…but it’ll take some extra configuration. Let’s talk about what you’ll need to do. How to Make Skype for Business and Teams Talk to One Another Before any Skype4B user can talk to a Teams user, the disparate systems have to talk to one another. Therefore, you’ll need to setup communications between your Skype for Business S ..read more