Jeff Brown – Senior Technical Consultant

If you check the Message Center in the Office 365 admin portal, Microsoft announced that the Pulse service is no longer available as a free service but as an exclusive service for Skype for Business Broadcast Meetings. Microsoft Pulse allows for interactive voting, surveys, and polls to be conducted during a meeting for attendee interaction. […]

Announced on Friday, June 23, 2017, Perficient acquired Clarity Consulting based out of Chicago. Clarity Consulting adds many capabilities to Perficient’s Microsoft practice for custom application development and cloud implementations. Most notably is the addition of Clarity Connect, a full feature contact center solution for Lync and Skype for Business. Clarity Connect was developed specifically […]

The things you can find when you’re not even looking for them. Recently I was enabling Skype Meeting Broadcast in Office 365 for a customer, and I wanted to verify if there were any other PowerShell commands available with the word “broadcast” in them to make sure I didn’t miss any configuration options. When I […]

Last week Microsoft moved Skype for Business Online tenant dial plans from preview into general availability. As I have previously written about, dial plans are a great addition to those considering Cloud PBX for their organizations. Dial plans allow administrators to accommodate end-user dialing habits, such as dialing 7 digits for a local number. Dial […]

Microsoft Teams has generated lots of questions since its preview became available in the fall of 2016. Since the service was made generally available in March 2017, Microsoft has started releasing more tools and information on how to plan, provision, and administer the new service in Office 365. One of those tools released this week […]

Last November Microsoft released the Meeting Migration Service (MMS). MMS is a Skype for Business Online service that automatically updates Skype for Business meetings for users. MMS will identify any future single and recurring meetings for a meeting organizer, replace the meeting information block with new conference information, and send out meeting updates to all recipients. […]

Last week Microsoft announced general availability of auto attendants and call queues in Skype for Business Online in Office 365. These features have been in preview for several months, and I know many people are excited to finally have them released. The lack of auto attendants and call queues have prevented many organizations from utilizing […]

In my last blog post, I discussed why a network assessment is needed when moving to Skype for Business Online. This time I’m going to walk through a quick example using the network assessment tool provided by Microsoft and see if my home network meets the requirements (just an example, this tool is meant for […]

Shifting workloads to the cloud places a bigger emphasis on having a high-quality network to the Internet, and Skype for Business Online is no exception. Skype for Business Online utilizes multiple real-time media types, such as audio, video, and application sharing. The quality and user experience of these modalities will be impacted not only by […]

4/24/2017 – See my latest blog entry to see dial plans in action after being released from preview. When Skype Online was first introduced, it had its limitations, particularly around policies and customization. From an administrative point of view, you were locked down to being able to use only predefined policies. As Cloud PBX and […]

In the January release of Skype Operations Framework (SOF) materials, Microsoft gave us a set of Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) templates that cover various aspects of audio quality as well as client versions and devices. They also released a series of videos showing how to navigate CQD, build reports, and investigate quality issues. Because audio is […]