Thursday, October 15, 2015

Skype for Business for iOS released

This week, Microsoft announced the availability of the Skype for Business client as an update to the existing Lync 2013 client in the app store.

There has been a lot of feedback on social media regarding some of the changes and the issues being found so I have decided to try and collect some and post workarounds here.

  1. I updated my apps, but I don't see Skype for Business.  Yes, for some reason it's named "Business" - not sure if this is a nod to the Microsoft Garage apps of "Invite" and "Send" but it has made for some humor in app sorting.
  2. Dial pad preloads all numbers with +1 in the US.  If you go to the dial pad, it will prefill the e164 prefix for your region as determined by your device's regional settings.  If I change my location to the UK, this is +44.  However this is something many admins don't like.  We tend to account for our users dialing patterns in our dial plans and by adding these in the client we now have to instruct users to expect or remove this.  It's generally just an unwelcome change in behavior.
  3. Crashing on joining meetings.  Many users reporting this.  If you click the icon on the left or the text of your "upcoming meetings" the client crashes.  Workaround - click the icon on the RIGHT of the meeting and it works!  Not sure if this is a UI bug, but had many reports of crashing on joining.
If you or your organization is not able to use MDM or advise your users to not upgrade until some of these issues are addressed.  Another option might be to block the S4B iOS client using a client version policy.  Below are the User Agents in use:

UCWA/6.0.0.0 iPhoneLync/6.0.1445.0000
UCWA/6.0.0.0 iPadLync/6.0.1445.0000

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