Meeting rooms and working patterns come in all shapes and sizes in the modern office of today, which presents a set of questions that will dictate the requirements, equipment and set-up of your Skype for Business deployment. Installing Skype for Business endpoints is most likely to be the simplest way forward, but it is worth considering the following before doing so.

The Challenges

• Who currently uses the service?
• How do your service users currently join meetings?
• Is your service being used globally, from offices, homes and on the go?
• Do you already have meeting rooms with equipment installed?

Who uses the service and how they use the service is very important, the workflows, quality and reliability should all be maintained to ensure ubiquitous usage and to help drive the company forward.

Senior employees and executives will likely use the service differently from other employees, using a different method of arriving in a meeting, and expecting high quality video and audio in the boardroom for their meetings. Most employees however will probably be happy to schedule their own meetings, and connect through Outlook or through a single link to connect via Skype for Business from a desktop, from their home, from a mobile device or from a room system. The quality in these meetings might not be required to be as high, but availability and reliability are more likely to be important to the users. There are many choices and as the service owner you should be giving consideration to all of them.

The Opportunities

• Familiarity of workflow
• Ability to connect from device of the user’s choice
• Skype for Business endpoints can be deployed as endpoints in rooms

For the majority of employees, Skype for Business is a great collaboration solution to deploy. Familiar Microsoft workflows and the ability to connect from any device, from any location quickly and easily should negate the requirement for expensive training.

Skype for Business endpoints can be deployed in any room, allowing users to use the room as a Skype for Business contact within contact list.

This is fine if everyone in the company wants to use Skype for Business in all the rooms, and if you have not already invested in endpoints that were not originally designed for Skype for Business in your meeting rooms.