With the announcement today of the next version of Lync being Skype for Business – http://blogs.office.com/2014/11/11/introducing-skype-business/ I have a wish list of features I hope to see in this next version. I may come up with more, but these were the three that immediately popped into my head as Oh, I hope it has this too!!

  1. Rock solid integration between Skype for Business and Skype. End of the day, I want ONE client for both business and personal. This could be done in a couple of ways:

    A) I think this would be my preferred option, either “linking” business and personal accounts or adding both accounts to the same client. That way all my existing Skype Personal contacts and my current Lync contacts would be showing in the same client without having re-add/connect to a set of users. Also allow the status to be set either separately or at the same time (on a phone call I want both to show busy, in the evening I want business to be away and personal to be available).

    B) My second option I would propose that would work, but wouldn’t be my preferred option is just better federation between business and personally. It sort of works between Skype and Lync now, but not as seamlessly as I would like. This would require my to re-add all my personal contacts into Lync for business, but it would at least allow me to just run one client.

  2. Bring back “Lync” to Phone calling for O365. It was originally available in O365 through Jajah, but went away and was never replaced. I was forced to switch to a third part Lync Host that had Lync to Phone bundled in and would allow my to port my number (see #3), but would love to be able to switch back to using O365 as my host for Lync as well.

  3. Porting numbers into Skype for Business, minimum on O365. Personal would be nice too. Back when I was using Jajah, I ported my number out of Skype and over to Jahjah. When Jajah integration ended, I may have just gone back to Skype, but I couldn’t port my number back. If Skype for Business on O365 includes Skype to Phone calling, let me port number number over from my current provider into Skype for Business, Please!! I don’t need another new number.

P.S. Have this all for the Mac Client as well as the Windows Client 🙂