Hacker News Reader

Comment by fergie | Hacker News Reader

Is it actually a product people love or just a product companies buy? The Skype integration seems like a bit of a red flag.

View on HN

Aside from the crappy mobile app, Skype for Business (formerly Lync - has nothing to do with the consumer version of Skype) is pretty excellent when it's deployed correctly.

I totally agree. I got forwarded a skype for business invite this morning for a meeting with Microsoft and I haven't used it before. I clicked on the link followed the instructions, which meant installing a pkg on my mac.

The thing that struck me was that after installing the pkg I got taken straight to the conference - I didn't have to go back to the link, put any ID / PIN or anything. It was seamless.

The seamless redirect after install is a nice touch. However the "receive link in email for software/plugin download to install so you can do this important thing" harkens back to earlier times and is the classic malware infection scenario. I guess it still works because enough people still do it.

Jitsi Meet beats that hard by not having any package to install in the first place: https://jitsi.org/Projects/JitsiMeet, https://meet.jit.si/

Personally I've always found it to be inferior to Hangouts and Facetime.

Maybe, but those can't be deployed on a company's network.

It's funny because here in silicon valley I've seen many conference rooms setup with Google Hangouts for video conference and Apple TV for presenting locally. Never see any Microsoft or Cisco stuff.

Seems that's a self-inflicted problem by corporate IT.

A red flag? Skype for Business is kind of the standard communications platform for large/enterprise companies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com