Skype For Business Trusted Server model

Multiple domains in the Office 365 tenancy can present problems when users try and login to Skype For Business 2015 and their SIP URI is different from the SIP domain.

To resolve this, create a group policy object using the Office 2016 ADMX templates and specifically, the Skype For Business policies contained within.

These are used to add the SIP domain where it differs from the user's SIP sign-in name.

The policy is Computer or User based and will mean that the annoying popup, announcing the SIP domain, sign-in name disparity, is not displayed.

A simple solution, but implementation is very often complicated by the CAB bureaucracy in place within your organisation. 

Skype Online Smart Auto Contacts

A cautionary tale...

A little known option in Skype for Business online has caused some of our customers to become less than happy with the product.

I'm talking about the pop-ups that announce the change in status of some of their contacts, which can appear at the most inopportune moments.

The option is described in the literature as the Smart Auto Contacts list and is a binary, organisational option. This is as precise as the granularity gets in this option so I would like to see Microsoft make this more obvious to the tenant admin in the Office 365 options.

This option is on by default and cause analysis of the manager attribute of the user's AD account at first Skype client logon. If this attribute is populated along with the team members on the manager's AD account tab then these will be added to the Skype client by way of a group called 'My Group', with all members having the 'Tag for Status Change Alerts'. This information is only assessed once and therefore unaffected by AD changes.

We have issued some five and half thousand licenses to our users and also set a GPO to enable Skype logon, which when used with the appropriate on-prem AD user attribute SIP address, forces all of users to auto logon to the Skype client.

This has the effect of reducing the option to minimise the impact of smart auto contacts by deactivation to almost zero. Sure, we could wipe the Skype licenses from all of our users, turn off the smart auto contacts list option and issue all of our licenses again, but the potential negative customer feedback doesn't seem worthwhile.

We'll look for alternative solutions to deactivate this option on all clients PC's via the Windows registry , as messy as that might be.