WHITE PAPER Compliance and Best Practices for Deploying Skype for Business An Osterman Research White Paper SPON Published September 2015 sponsored by sponsored by sponsored by SPON Osterman Research, Inc. P.O. Box 1058 • Black Diamond, Washington • 98010-1058 • USA Tel: +1 253 630 5839 • Fax: +1 253 458 0934 • [email protected] www.ostermanresearch.com • twitter.com/mosterman Compliance and Best Practices for Deploying Skype for Business EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Skype for Business represents the consolidation of Microsoft’s primary telephony and unified communications platforms: • Skype was originally released in August 2003 by a group of Scandinavian and Baltic developers who sold their platform to eBay 25 months later for $2.6 billion. Four years after that, a group of investors acquired 65% of Skype for $1.9 billion, giving the company a valuation of $2.75 billion. This was followed 20 months later by Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype for $8.5 billion. Today, there are 50 billion minutes of traffic generated on Skype during a typical monthi, accounting for approximately one-third of all long-distance traffic worldwide. • Microsoft released Office Communicator 2007 in October 2007, which was later rebranded and relaunched as Microsoft Lync 2010 in December 2011. Lync is Microsoft’s corporate unified communications platform and has more than 100 million users and 79% of US businesses using or planning to deploy itii. Lync and Lync Server 2013 were released in 2012. In late 2014, Microsoft announced that it would rebrand Lync, as Skype for Businessiii. Skype for Business was officially launched in April 2015. Skype for Business includes a number of capabilities, including telephony, instant messaging, presence capabilities, video calling, group conferencing, whiteboard sharing, remote desktop control, persistent chat, and other unified communications capabilities. KEY TAKEAWAYS • Telephony – a key component of Skype for Business’ capabilities – is second only to email in terms of the amount of time that users spend on a typical day in the context of their communications and collaboration activities. • A growing proportion of organizations are migrating to unified communications because of its inherent advantages for fostering collaboration, enabling telework, and improving corporate agility. • Skype, and increasingly Skype for Business, are leading offerings in the unified communications space. Microsoft’s share of the unified communications market is growingiv, and we anticipate that the company will become the leading company in the space in the near future. • Deploying Skype for Business requires careful planning to overcome the technical and business obstacles inherent in the paradigm shift that it, and the overall migration to unified communications, represents. • Skype for Business requires proper management to ensure that organizations are properly monitoring content sent through the platform, and that business records generated and stored within it are properly archived. ABOUT THIS WHITE PAPER This white paper was sponsored by Actiance. Information about the company and its relevant Skype for Business-related offerings are located at the end of the paper. TELEPHONY IS STILL ESSENTIAL THE SECOND MOST IMPORTANT TOOL BEHIND EMAIL Email is the primary communications and file-sharing platform in use today, but telephony continues to be an essential mode of communication, coming in second to email, but consuming 62 minutes of the typical user’s workday, as shown in Figure 1. ©2015 Osterman Research, Inc. 1 Compliance and Best Practices for Deploying Skype for Business Figure 1 Minutes Spent per User per Day on Various Communication Tools Source: Osterman Research Underscoring the essential role played by telephony is the fact that there are more telephones (landlines, smartphones and feature phones) than people on earthv; and almost every household in the United States has telephony capabilities, whether provided by a landline and/or mobile phone. Moreover, many email users find that the telephone is often the best way to transmit sensitive information for which users do not want a record, since voice calls are rarely archived or backed up (that’s changing), unlike emails, instant messages, social media posts and other forms of electronic communication. Plus, one study found that 38% of the efficacy of communications – i.e., the ability to convey information in the way it was intended – is contributed by voice tonevi, making telephone communications an essential for business and non-business communications. In spite of the growing use of the Web, email, mobile device apps and other modes of communication, telephony remains essential across a wide range of applications, including customer service and sales. As just one example, one study found that 90% of US consumers prefer to resolve their service issues by telephone, compared to face-to-face interactions (75%) and Web/email (67%)vii. Consequently, telephony will remain an important and business-essential communications mode, and the ability to manage telephony well will be critical to business success. CONVENTIONAL TELEPHONY HAS MAJOR LIMITATIONS A conventional communication and collaboration system in the typical workplace provides each employee or other worker with most or all of the following components: • An email client (typically Microsoft Outlook) that includes calendaring and task management along with sophisticated email capabilities. • A desktop telephone. • An instant messaging client. ©2015 Osterman Research, Inc. 2 Compliance and Best Practices for Deploying Skype for Business • A social media account. • A mobile phone that, among other things, offers text messaging/SMS services. • Access to a customer relationship management (CRM) system to manage and communicate with customers and prospects. • Availability of a departmental fax machine. Despite the utility of these tools, the conventional communications and collaboration paradigm has several inherent limitations, which include: • Email messages and attachments are accessed in an email client on a computer or mobile platform. • Voice calls are placed on, and voicemail is accessed through, a telephone. • Social media is accessed through another client. • Instant messaging conversations are conducted in a dedicated client. • When faxes are sent or received, users must walk to a fax machine and process individual pieces of paper or images/PDFs that are delivered to their email inbox. Consequently there is minimal integration of data between the different communication modes, the interoperability between them is poor, and there is a lack of organizational flexibility and agility when accessing the various communications tools and data stores. THE BENEFITS OF TRULY UNIFIED COMMUNICATIONS Separately deployed and separately managed communications tools and interfaces are somewhat workable if the user is in a traditional office setting. However, there are several limitations in the current, desktop-centric paradigm. For example: • More users work outside of a typical office environment and so are not as productive when doing so with conventional communications capabilities. For example, when users are working remotely, their desktop telephone and fax capabilities are not directly accessible. Only email will work more or less like the in-office experience because browser-based email operates much like the Outlook client that most users have available to them in the office. • If employees and contractors cannot work remotely, this results in higher facilities costs because organizations must provide work space for a larger proportion of the workforce. • IT costs are normally higher in a disjointed environment because IT staff members must manage multiple systems, each with its own management interface, upgrade cycles, training requirements, etc. • Finally, corporate agility is minimized because information workers are more limited in their remote work capabilities, and so there are fewer options for employing remote workers or implementing telework programs. This approach to workplace communications allows users to be productive, but only to a point. Alternatively, consider the benefits of a communications system in which all of the capabilities are unified into a single solution: • Information workers are able to send or receive email, use the telephone, access voicemail, initiate instant messaging conversations, and send or receive faxes from a single interface. Moreover, data can be shared digitally between all of these communication modes. ©2015 Osterman Research, Inc. 3 Compliance and Best Practices for Deploying Skype for Business • These communications modes are accessible on any desktop, laptop or mobile platform available to the user, regardless of their location using a thick client or virtually any Web browser. The “unified communications” approach is what its name implies – an integrated set of communication and collaboration tools that users access via a single interface and that are managed as a single platform. Unified communications includes various tools, including email, voice/telephony, calendaring and scheduling, and real-time communications capabilities that are available to a user through a thick client and/or a Web browser. Other functions that might be included in a unified communications system are text messaging/SMS capabilities, Web conferencing and mobility services. Various unified communications systems also integrate security capabilities like intrusion prevention and email filtering