Ugh, people are still using Skype?
If you suggest some app they don't already know, it might feel like you're inconveniencing your contact. but everybody knows skype and it seems like there's an implicit understanding that if you aren't on skype you should be, so it's always the fallback option for chat apps.
Have tried various alternatives but actually not yet found anything that works as good as skype, despite having terrible UX. The sound quality is second to none and file sharing etc usually "just works".
I'd have a much harder time selling Discord because of how they market themselves. They could make "discord for business" that is literally the same app and have great success.
Other than that my only complaint is that it's a bit electron-y.
Discord is sometimes known as "slack for gamers" so you're effectively describing Slack :)
Effectively all I want is a lean chat/voice app that’s also ideally free. This is pretty easy - but when you throw in the other Skype features (group voice, screen sharing, mobile apps) as requirements, it’s actually pretty hard to match in the free tier.
Skype is $0 regardless of company size and the resource use is pretty reasonable.
On that topic: Why aren’t more companies using discord instead of Slack? Looking at feature matrices it seems discord does in the free version a lot of what Slack does in paid (e.g group voice)?
In most online communities, there will always be a place for an identity provider that doesn't require you to use a full name, and/or doesn't bind your login to your phone number. The addition of easy-to-use E2E crypto has been lagging among services like this, so this addition is welcome.
Skype still has a lot of brand recognition and mindshare among the older generations, and a large installed base, and so it remains useful for incidental chat in scenarios that Discord hasn't actively pursued, or situations which people's assumptions and associations with Discord's perceived nature would hinder.
I cannot fathom how an IM app could be so poorly implemented, it seems almost intentional.
In my team we are currently developing a software where not even we know what it should do. And in every release cycle we spend incredible amounts man hours just to be able to install it again. And still, in the company internal competition we often lose against teams with better political standings to the top, who haven't even written a single line of code yet for their competing product.
I can see that there is a lot of money in Enterprise, and I can see how it's kept alive by each of these enterprises selling their non-functioning tools to each other. But I really don't know where the influx of money to that system is. Nobody with a brain would pay a million bucks for a software that is proud to be installable, if he could spend the same money on hiring an engineer for 10 years and let him learn how to apply an open source solution that everybody knows does what you want after you installed it.
Also, it's not clear it makes much sense, even if you don't have that requirement - in just about every company, you want the helpdesk / IT department / some other central authority to be able to do password resets, which means that the central authority has the cryptographic ability to impersonate any user in the company. (Maybe this triggers logs, but protocol-wise, they can still read and write messages.) So E2E isn't really helping you; you might as well just encrypt all the messages to a key held by the central authority.
E2E is great for conversations between members of the public, where there isn't a central authority that determines identities, and where if you forget your password, the right way to regain access to the conversation is to meet your conversation partner in person and re-exchange cryptographic identities with them, end-to-end.
(I'd buy the argument "You should design all your protocols E2E first, and then add logging/escrow, instead of designing them less secure and bolting E2E on later," but Skype for Business already exists without E2E so that's a lost cause in this particular case.)
Message confidentiality between businesses. Did you perhaps think SfB only works between users in the same organization?
Yes? Doesn't the client connect to exactly one server [pool], which hosts exactly one organization?
I'm having trouble finding all the docs for setting up Skype for Business federation but it looks like the latter. Since "end" here I think means the business and not the individual user account (for the same reason - all the compliance logs, all the password reset abilities, etc. applies to conversations with other businesses), if they do trust-on-first-use certificate validation of the other business, isn't that already as E2E as you're going to get?