The next round of quarterly Skype for Business Users Group meetings has been announced and scheduled starting this month.
Latest News
As of last quarter’s events our group has made a few exciting changes. First and foremost is the rebranding from the Lync Users Group to the Skype for Business Users Group. For discussing and sharing event information on social media keep an eye out for @SkypeUG and #SkypeUG.
This change also includes a brand new web site which will be used for all member registrations, for all locations, going forward. The events will transition away from the individual Meetup.com pages over the next few quarters. The new site gives us the ability to roll out new features and content for all event locations uniformly and will allow us to grow as additional cities are added over time.
Event Details
This quarter’s event will be conducted in our familiar two-session format:
The first session, presented by Polycom, will cover an array of available video and audio conferencing products as well as video interoperability solutions for Skype for Business. A Microsoft Solutions Architect from Polycom will be on-hand to lead the discussion and address any technical questions from the group
The second session will provide an in-depth look at the new features and capabilities of the recently launched Cloud PBX solution in Skype for Business Online. A local subject matter expert will be leading this presentation.
Industry Experts will be on-site to deliver these presentations and help answer any questions related to Skype for Business. Food, beverages and additional door prizes will be provided courtesy of the Skype for Business Users Group and its official sponsors.
Western U.S. |
Central U.S. |
Southern U.S. |
Eastern U.S. |
For a full schedule of regional events the Skype for Business Users Group Meetups page lists all planned event locations with links to the associated registration page for each regional group. For anyone who is not yet a member and would like to participate simply visit the site listed above and register for your local group, this will automatically create a new user account for you to use again for all future event registrations..
Chicago Event
As usual I will be hosting the Chicago event downtown. Food will be ready at 5:30 so come early if you can to spend time socializing with the group before the presentations begin at 6:00.
| Date | Location | Address |
| Thursday, January 21th 5:30PM – Food and Networking 6:00 PM – Presentation Kickoff |
Chicago Users Group | Microsoft Technology Center 200 East Randolph Drive, Suite 200 Chicago, IL 60601 |
Additionally I am attending the following events this quarter to provide the sponsor presentations in-person:
- Jan 26 – Cincinnati, OH
- Jan 27 – Milwaukee, WI
- Jan 28 – Kansas City, MO
- Feb 04 – Boise, ID
- Feb 10 – Portland, OR
- Feb 11 – Seattle,WA
- Feb 16 – Detroit, MI
- Feb 18 – Charlotte, NC
- Mar 02 – Atlanta, GA
The remaining events are being handled by regional experts including Dustin Hannifin, Randy Wintle, Adam Jacobs, Jose Mateo, and Paul Gurman.
How…did you post this on the 26th after the Chicago meeting on the 21st?
Really not sure where to post this….but been battling an issue with Skype For Business (365 version) for a while now. We were experiencing poor audio in multiparty calls (point-to-point worked fine), despite the fact we seem to have plenty of bandwidth, and other partners on WAN did not seem to see the issue.
It’s a tough problem to crack as there’s lots of tools, but also lots of variables.
What we did know is peer-to-peer audio calls used UDP direct between the two hosts, and that worked fine on our LAN and across our WAN.
When we got into a multiparty call, or a SfB “meeting” which involved the 365 MCU, the audio would sometimes become poor.
We do many-to-1 NAT for our hosts, so many devices share the same external IP.
In looking extensively at the Fast Track 365 network analyzer tool (http://na1-fasttrack.cloudapp.net/o365nwtest) we seemed to notice that once the UDP streaming tests reached a certain threshold, packet loss occurred, resulting in poor rating for Consistency and Quality of Service, along with poor download capacity rating.
We use a firewall at our edge and noticed there was a UDP screening threshold option set there. As we tested with increasing that threshold (including disabling it altogether), we noticed a major improvement to the test results, similar to what our partners saw. We still have not confirmed this has fixed our issue, although the test results look promising.
My Question (Finally!): Is this a known issue that using pure cloud SfB may need adjustment of udp-threshold? I’ll be following up with our firewall vendor in regards to this as well.
Thanks for any info/comments you can provide.