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Comment by planetjones | Hacker News Reader

I wish Skype for business was a decent product but it's not. Strange UI quirks. Limits on the length of messages for no good reason. Emoticons which only appear once the message is sent - SQL statements are rendered to nonsense. All images are converted to thumbnails which need to be opened. Audio quality issues galore too. A lot of companies have moved to Skype for business for IM and VoIP. Not an enterprise level product.

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Isn't Skype for Business just Lync with a new name? I'm not sure it has any relation to the original Skype?

Exactly it's like someone said let's turn Lync into Skype. Rather than building something useful they added the Skype name and kept the same dodgy implementation. Pat on the backs all round...

Yes, even the .exe is still called Lync

I think it is, but lync 2011 and SFB seem like very different products.

A lot of the dodgy stuff is because there are a lot of internals that haven't really been changed since it was Office Communicator 2007. I've spent far too much of my life dealing with these oddities, and I'll assure you, it is a trainwreck.

If you want to really have fun, write software that uses their terrible SDKs to plug into and extend Lync/Skype for Business.

Still, since it's bundled with Office and Office365 Exchange, lots of people are using it and dropping SameTime or XMPP or other options in large corporations.

> Emoticons which only appear once the message is sent - SQL statements are rendered to nonsense.

I was going to say try to prefix with "!! ", but it doesn't seem to work anymore! It used to disable formatting and change to monospace font.

!! SQL statements, source code fragments, etc.

There is a setting in the client to turn this garbage off. It's a terrible default, though.

Settings > Tools > Options > IM > Show emoticons in messages

Of course, the people you're chatting with have to do it as well otherwise they'll still see them, but if you're sending SQL statements, log messages, and such, it makes sense to disable them.

My company switched from WebEx to Skype Business last year. There was a transition period. Everyone stayed in WebEx till they shut down out accounts.

The list of gripes is too long...but let's just say With the lost of productivity I hope they are paying my company to use it.

The one thing I will give them is large file transfers. I hate having to deal with gmail telling me I need to upload it to drive, then warning me that it isn't shared with the recipient, etc, etc.

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