Skype for Business Reviews

We were required to use this app and it was a tough beginning. A lot of my team members do not use the video and stick with the audio only. The more we use it, the better we all get at sharing screens and working from multiple devices. I will be excited to see how it continues to improve and work as some of us head back into the office. I personally love that I can go from my phone, to my tablet, to my laptop or my desktop fairly seamlessly. This has made life truly mobile.

The reason Skype gets one star is because it doesn't sync up with this app on one's computer. This is the simplest most basic piece of functionality a messaging app should do. If I send a message from my phone to a coworker, I should be able to see it on my computer. If I receive a message on my phone from a coworker, read it, then wish to respond via computer, the message USUALLY DOES NOT SHOW UP ON THE COMPUTER. Highly frustrating, Groupme has been doing this for years guys, literally years.

Edit: So I originally stated the syncing issue was my only qualm. I was sorely misguided. Skype has continued to disappoint repeatedly. I’m currently traveling internationally and simply unable to connect via WiFi (note groupme connects rapidly). It’s comical how bad Skype is and I laud the developers who created it for how little they cared. I desire to someday care so little about what I do and yet still have it published for thousands to use. It will be the greatest practica joke of my life.

I have written maybe 10 reviews total in my tenure as an Apple user. Skype holds first place for two reviews under my name.

Conversations from other devices logged into the same account do not sync efficiently, or at all really. The more I use this between devices there is almost no time when my phone and laptop and tablet load the same conversation history. Skype can’t be used in split screen or in a slide over window to view chats.
Notifications are unruly. With SFB closed on my iPad, not open in the background, and while working from this app on my laptop, I was sent a file over SFB and my phone went off alerting me of a this app for business “call” (which was the file being shared) and I continued on my computer. The notification did not end, and I had to manually reject the “call” from my phone. 3 hours later, after being off work I open my iPad and there’s a SFB incoming call; The notification for a shared file, with SFB closed entirely on my iPad, persisted with the screen off for 3+ hours and would have continued until my battery was completely drained.

I have been using Skype regularly for several years because my big business clients are subscribers. It works about half the time. Other times, it sends you through bug loops when signing in. It will stop working entirely for weeks on end. The clients that subscribe to it complain about it constantly. Of course, the problems are worst for apple products. We are a video production and 3D agency so everyone in our company has a high level of computer literacy. This is simply not an app that you can count on. I see that it now hasn’t had an update in 5 months. It’s clear that Microsoft has shifted their resources into Microsoft Teams which is currently a very good meeting platform. I am unwilling to make any investment in it though. After several different meeting platforms have been left to whither on the vine, I don’t trust Microsoft to provide continued support for anything they make.

The product owners for Skype must be incompetent, careless, or both. this app for business is unreliable, slow, confusing (does the crossed out mic that is gray mean mute is on? Oh wait, tap the button and now mute is on... no wait people can hear me... so mute is on when this button is off), annoying because if you are the meeting creator, Microsoft made the decision to unmute you by default when you join the meeting even though all it takes is one experience in a typical conference room to see how people often dial into a conference room phone first so then there is always awful feedback when the meeting creator joins... basically it’s like Microsoft has never even observed how people actually use this app and instead just insist it should be used their way and could care less. It’s exactly like every other Microsoft product so I’m not surprised, but this one is particularly bad.

Title says it all. This thing crashes, stops responding, signs me out and fails to deliver push notifications at least a few times every day. The User interface is extremely buggy, not to mention archaic, and the fact that I can’t see the content of missed conversations absolutely boggles my mind. The keyboard intermittently fails to pop up during conversations which means I have to force close Skype from my app switcher at least a half dozen times a day. The call quality is seldom satisfactory and it tends to disconnect randomly despite strong data reception. This thing is a nightmare!

Update: please fix the tendency of Skype to get suspended in the background. The whole point of having it on my phone is to receive push notifications for when someone pings me, not bombard me with a deluge of notifications when I open Skype .

For the basics, it works okay. Chat, audio, and video function sometimes. My issues with this app for Business reside more in the service itself than in Skype .

The single biggest problem is lack of support for multitasking on iPad. It would be so helpful to be able to have Outlook open with this app for Business next to it. Or to have video going and shrink the video chat down to look at another app. Your other Office Apps support this!

At the end of the day, I know that Microsoft is replacing this app for Business with Teams and I’m all for that! However, my company is slow to adopt new technologies like Teams on mass, especially when it is missing some features. I suspect that many companies are in similar situations. Could You please bring this app for Business up to par app-wise until the it is sunset?

I want to be doing other things on my phone other than stare at the this app screen. But if I leave the screen, it goes to inactive after only five minutes. I want it to stay active even if I'm on other apps. "Connected on your terms". Yeah, right. Talk about false advertising.

UPDATE!!!
It's a stupid workaround but it does work. And since the developers at this app ignore my comments and every one star review that I give it every time they ask... Here you go!

If you are ONLY logged into this app on your phone, you will time out after only five minutes. HOWEVER... If you are ALSO logged into this app on your PC, and don't have your PC to time out, you will remain "available" on your phone as long as you remain available on your PC!

Stupid? Yes. But I need to be mobile a lot of the time and people need to see me as available so they know they can chat with me. So, until this app fixes it, that's an option for me (and you)!

Beware, however... there are times when a message will go to my computer but not my phone... or vise versa. I don’t understand why MS bought this product if they continue to have no intention of making it better and simply ignore user complaints.

I have been using this app for business on my iPhone for more than 3 years and could always rely on it to attend meetings on the go. It makes me extremely productive at work. Although it only has basic calling and chat features as others have pointed out , those are all I ever needed on Skype . It rarely ever fails to connect and has a decent enough interface. Thanks to this app for simplifying business communication and collaboration all these years and I am looking forward to more improvements and privacy features. All the best to the development team 👍.

Ever since I started using the mobile app, it's completely unpredictable where my messages will be delivered to, and I frequently lose them entirely until they show up in my email as 'missed conversations'. Can't tell you how many times I've been sitting there chatting with someone and one of their messages randomly will never be delivered. The latest fun thing it's started doing is delivering me notifications for ever message...hours after I already received them on desktop. Of course it waits for a new message to show up, the. pops up a notice for *every* message I've received today before finally showing me the new one. Just nearly vibrated my phone off the desk with 13 simultaneous notifications for messages I received over the past 12 hours.

I work with a large design team. We’re all working from home due to Coronavirus. The performance, usability and integration of Skype with Outlook 365 is outstanding. During our design meetings I use my phone for this app while having my home desktop open to view our actual project work. My cellular connection is perfect - 5 bars. I think a lot of performance complaints posted in the comments here have to do with their poor WiFi or cellular bandwidth and not with this app.

I’m new to Skype, as is my workplace. And by new, I mean I’ve only been using it for a week. The syncing issue between what my computer sees and what my phone sees is a glaring flaw. That’s been mentioned though.

As for what else I’ve noticed, Skype is poorly optimized for the iPhone X, where the message box for sending an IM often doesn’t let you select it because it’s obstructed by the home button slider. And I’ve noticed that even after receiving a message, it is significantly delayed in the messages and history box.

But my biggest problem with Skype is why in the hell does jumping straight to the received message from a notification automatically put you in a message box without the message you’re responding to in the box, just in case you want to see what you’re responding to? Why is this basic feature (which has been around for years) totally useless?
Now let me be clear: I don’t mean replying within the notification. I mean when I select the notification and go to Skype with the sender’s name at the top of the screen, there is no message. And if you attempt to send a message in this chat box, you create a brand new thread.
What?! Did you try?

I canny fathom how this gets four stars. It’s utterly unreliable and useless. Frustratingly broken beyond acceptable.

The messages don’t sync between desktop and phone. They also show up whenever they feel like, they don’t show up in real time. It randomly says it can’t login to exchange!! Why the hell is it logging in to exchange? For calendar?? That’s a bad design. Keep the services for one app under one login.

I am surprised how bad developers are at Microsoft , how little they care about the apps they put out and how they get away with these crimes against their user base. This is not limited to this app of course. All MS apps are horrible and unusable and unstable. It’s awe inspiring how blatantly they publish these apps when they are worse than some school kid’s apps. Can’t believe my company pays for these crappy services.

The sound is good, the video is good.
I can pick up the office calls directly on my mobile.
It has one star because I found the software to be completely unreliable, I attend conference calls on my mobile and I can’t hear the meeting and nobody hears my voice (I have the microphone activated). I had a number of other problems but are too long to explain.
Deleting Skype and reinstalling resolves the issue. But deleting Skype and reinstalling it before every conference call is actually a pain in the neck.
It is hard to believe that Microsoft can’t get Skype to be somewhat reliable. I have to say that it was reliable for the first few months of 2018, towards the end of 2018 and all 2019 Skype has been working less than 50% of the time when I try to use it

Been using the product for some time in our corporate environment. We’ve had good luck with the tool and personally like it better than other products offering similar capabilities. A few times we have experienced an issue where everyone is on the this app call but only a couple individuals are able to hear each other. We haven’t spent the time to research the problem therefore really can’t 100% point the finger at the application. Overall I am very positive in regards to our company wide usage of it and happy with Skype in general.

1) Skype doesn’t synchronize with computer in several aspects:
A) A message sent on phone should show on computer and vice versa. B)Status/availability on phone and computer don’t synchronize. Computer can show I’m available when I’ve selected that I’m not. Or worse show I’m offline/off work when I’m not. This is very annoying and confusing; for anyone with ‘clock watching’ coworkers or bosses it simply causes unnecessary issues.
C) Status doesn’t synchronize with my Outlook calendar meetings, showing I’m available when I’m in a meeting or during times I’m out of office.
2) Get with it on conversation deletion. Who wants to have to delete every old message INDIVIDUALLY? How cumbersome and time consuming. That in of itself is a total failure.

Very useful when it works and that tends to be well when I initiate a conversation but when I miss a conversation, I can’t see what the person said when I click on the message. Where did that missed message go? I can see a preview of it in the main dashboard but when I click the contact, there are no messages. Given the high rating of Skype overall I have to believe there is an issue in our corporate setup or something along those lines. I’ll submit a ticket on both sides with screenshots. It looks like my company disabled the ability to select the option to “Save IM conversations in my email Conversation History folder”. Not sure if that is an indication of the potential root cause.

Very frustrating if also signed in with the desktop client. Conversations are not kept in sync. Messages are only sent to what the service thinks is your active device, but even that isn’t done well. I can be away from my computer for 15 minutes, yet messages are still sent there instead of the phone. I can be having an active conversation with someone on the desktop and have messages from another conversation sent to my phone instead. In 2019 every other cross platform message service gets this right. How can Microsoft get it so wrong? Even the first version of AOL IM on a blackberry over 10 years ago was more functional than this. Using out of necessity, but hate it!

Reliability and stability is just unacceptable. Even if I’m not in transit and using home or work based solid WiFi networking it will typically crash every couple of minutes. This is a hard crash. I know it is supposed to try to reconnect dropped calls - and it has tried to exactly once - Skype crashes so hard it completely relaunches and you have to find and rejoin your meeting. I can’t believe this is used by major corporations for business purposes. My calls are constant exclamations of “sorry, this app issues, can you repeat?”

The developers should be ashamed.

Since I have to use this pile of garbage to do my job, I hope every time that i see an update that someone actually fixed something. I don’t know why, maybe I’m just a masochist.

The first major issue, which is why I avoid using it when I can, is that your entire this app call log is blended in with your personal call log. There is no way to turn this off which makes it harder to separate your personal call history from your business call history. So I stay logged out when I can to prevent new business related calls from showing up.

The second major issue, is that the rest of Skype is just ok. The navigation, look and feel of Skype is average. I would expect a big company like Microsoft to put some muscle behind the development of Skype . If I had to guess, they put the bare minimum just so they can maintain higher profit margins.

First problem: I rely on the "Conversation History" folder in Outlook to find *all* of my SfB chats, not just the ones I happened to have on my Windows PC. It stinks that Skype can't sync those and add them to my mailbox folder somehow. Microsoft decides the features put into Exchange Online, this app for Business Server 2015, and this SfB mobile app; there is no reason that they can't make it work.

Second problem: Skype is *slow*. People's presence information takes 30 seconds, or usually several minutes, to update. That should not happen. It's instantaneous in the Windows app. Same sort of delays happen with changing my presence (status), changing forwarding settings, etc. Makes Skype unusable. It's faster to use RDP and access the client through my Windows PC remotely!

Third problem: When I'm placing a new call, why disable the speakerphone button?! Skype requires that the call be connected first, and then I can enable speaker. But, that requires that the other party wait on me before the conversation can begin. Microsoft misses details like this. Stupid. One example of many quality problems with their software.

I have to use this app for work and don’t really have any issues with Skype itself. However, I switched to an iPhone 8 recently from Samsung S5 and am noticing issues with this app audio quality on the iPhone. The this app call volume on speaker and headset is very low even at maximum volume. The audio volume works fine on the phone for regular phone calls and it seems to be an issue with this app only. Since there is no option to provide feedback from Skype like outlook I have written this review hoping for a fix.