Skype for business

Robert Mitchell has a great piece, Skype Slips into Business, that looks in some detail about how Skype is being used in a variety of business environments.

I resisted Skype for a long time, but now find it invaluable. I'm also recommending it to associates, especially those smaller companies that have multiple sites, but don't (understandably) want to spend hundreds, or even thousands, of pounds communicating between sites.

In the article, the usage of Skype by support and their employment of SkypeOut as part of a solution for providing unified access to a group resource, is interesting. The article also highlights some of the limitations of the Skype environment.

At the moment, Skype, is aimed at the single user peer-to-peer market, but if Skype is going to be effective within a wider environment, and particularly in business, then we need some other functionality. For example, group phone or ID capabilities would be useful. Some type of group billing/calling would be useful, and I'd much prefer to have some detailed information on who I'd called and who had called me.

From a client-application perspective, I wish there was a better and more effective way to manage users. I use my Skype account for home and business uses, but I cannot organize users into groups within the Skype client. Also useful there should be the ability to show different statuses to different groups, but I'd settle just for the grouping.

However, what I find particularly annoying is the connectivity between Skype and the OS X address book. The Address Book in OS X makes life so much easier because it becomes a single place to manage all your contact information. Unfortunately, Skype will only synchronize with that data, it will not use the data directly. If a friend or client changes contact details, I have to update Skype by hand, it doesn't happen automatically. It's an annoying limitation that gives a bad impression, because it makes Skype for OS X feel much more like a ported app and less like a native solution.

Top of my list though is that there is no API to the Skype service, and I think that is beginning to be a limiter for many business and individual customers. If a method existed for querying the phone calls (in/out), for updating my address book, for checking my availability or SkypeOut status, or getting messages, I could do many of the improvements myself. Skype feels like it should be riding on the same connectivity/API wave as Flickr, Google and others, but isn't quite there. I'm hoping (and probably guessing) that will change in the future.