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Comment by Jaruzel | Hacker News Reader

What you need there then (if you are a Windows shop - unlikely), is Lync or Skype for Business.

Despite it being Microsoft, I've found it to be the most reliable and seamless system for multi-party Audio, Video, and Screen-sharing based meetings - and I've used at some time or another in my career almost all the other big hitters in the corporate virtual-conferencing space.

Combine Lync/SfB with one of those nice multi-camera units[1] that sit in the middle of the meeting table and provide audio tracking of the speaker (the active camera switches to the person speaking) along with always-on 360 degree video as well - and it's the closest you can get to being there.

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[1] http://www.polycom.co.uk/products-services/products-for-micr...

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Our company has used 3 generations of polycom devices and they have all been terrible/unusable. Those units are just an IT nightmare because of how they are set up. The newer ones require two ethernet ports if you want them wired (because reasons?), and then also act as a weird computer joining the meeting. If you are in a room with a device, the room has to be invited and join the meeting, then you have to make sure that polycom device is set up with sound but that everything else in the room is muted or else the electronic Harpies will be unleashed. Then if you want screen sharing and video, since the video is regulated by the polycom but screen is shared on a laptop, you can potentially get the video in video in video recursive fun time which will result in fun buffering.

We have "quick" instructions on how to use these devices and they take up a whole page. Most of the devices are abandoned or just left there gathering dust while we use a simple Jabra speaker puck.

PS - Most of these experiences are with SfB. These devices are somehow worse with Webex.

Barfs.

Sorry, Lync/Skype for Business has been awful for us.

I'll be fair and state that I don't if it is Microsoft's or our tech teams fault.

> What you need there then (if you are a Windows shop - unlikely), is Lync or Skype for Business.

I've used that, and experienced comparable delays of at least 5 minutes of futzing on average to get everything working, with occasional bursts to 10 minutes.

Anecdotal, but our company uses SfB and it has been anything but good. We always have problems in voice calls (which forms the majority of use) - doesn't matter if we're all sitting on the same LAN with wired connections or on very good Internet connections away from the office. The number of disconnects, breaking audio, unable to hear someone, and of course, SfB deciding to crash sometimes after some updates - it's been terrible for people using it. The company has "saved" money by moving to it from using phone lines. Who cares about individual productivity anyway?

Having been on the other side of a Skype for Business installation I can tell you that it is extremely variable and can scale anywhere from a self-contained single server set-up[1] to a multi-region, multi-fail-over-cluster, highly available, extremely complicated set-up[2]. We had a few issues post initial install but spent the time to track them down to the point where our system was reliable and more usable than web ex and it's ilk. This is the crux of Lync, so much depends on your required set up and how well that was done.

[1] - http://bressner.com/ucbox-express/ [2] - http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=550989

Well, we're on MS Office 365 and all that it provides, including Skype. I have no idea how things could be so bad even with that (it used to be bad before with an on-premise installation too).

Skype for Business (i.e. rebranded Lync) is complete garbage.

If I could even log in to Skype for Business, that would be great.

Skype for Business is abysmal. Login credential always seem to be a huge problem using the desktop client so we just join using the web client.

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