The new features of Skype for Business CU-3

One of my customers has installed the lastest CU for Skype for Business. The CU-3 or the June 2016 cumulative update. It can be found here.

This update contains some new features that will make Skype for Business more interesting. I will go through all the new stuff that comes in this package.

1. Offline messaging, can't say have been waiting for this. But it's here now. This works like this:
Some one sends you a message when you are Offline, well the system will collect these and give you an allert the time you get back online.  Like the pictures below. More about it here

 2. Busy on Busy is a new feature also. This is something that we in Nordic countries has used for ages thanks to Competella and their Routing Agent. Microsoft has since June 2016 this feature but it has some limited features if you look at it instead of the Routing Agent from Competella.
How this is configured, well Randy Chapman has a well written blog about this. Read all about this here.

3. Video based Screen Sharing (VbSS), the thing about this is to get these pro cons:

1. Make screen-sharing (up to 5%) more reliable compared to RDP alone.
2. Make the session setup and video experience faster compared to RDP alone (setup in half the time, with a 6:1 improvement in frames-per-second).
3. Works much better than RDP in low bandwidth conditions, even when sharing high motion content, such as 3-D graphics.

You have to do some changes to make this works. There are some commands to make policy changes that has to be run. Read all about it here. My customer who installed this update has not tried this yet, but when it's done I will sure come back on it here.

The last feature that is added is the multiple emergency numbers in Skype for Business. I am not sure how often this feature will be used in the Nordic countries where I mostly work. But you can read all about how to configure it here.

Thats all for today. Hope you found this one interesting. I will come back soon with some more news about Skype for Business.

TIme is running out, it's time to upgrade to Skype for Busniess

Summer is over and I got an email from Microsoft Support regarding some customer of mine who is still running Lync 2010. The email goes like this:

"After doing more research and tests I have confirmed that both Lync Server 2010 and Lync Server 2013 issue self-signed certificate with SHA-1 algorithm to Lync clients in the meantime both Skype for Business Server 2015 and Skype for Business online issue self-signed certificate with SHA-2 algorithm to their clients.

After doing plenty of research we cannot change Hash algorithm of the self-signed certificate issued by Lync Server 2010 and Lync Server 2013 so we’d like to suggest you perform the upgrade to Skype for Business Server 2015 before January 1, 2017. "

After doing some google search I found this one from November 2014,SHA-1 client issue as it say that clients does not have to do anything but this is an technical issue.

And since also Lync 2010 is out of mainstream support well now it's the time to plan for your upgrade.

KEMP Certified

For about a month ago I become KEMP Certified Salesperson. I had to take this since my first goal was to become KCE (Kemp Certified Engineer).
Well today I passed the test and are now KEMP Certified Engineer.

The next certification is the KCP (KEMP Certified Professional).