cgs-skype

Using Skype for Business

What's New in 2016? In this clip we'll talk about all the new features of Skype for Business 2016. To get started, let's talk about the application interface. If you've formally used Skype or Lync 2013, this should look pretty familiar to you as Microsoft has taken both applications and brought the best to this new application. Now what we're looking at here in the Me section at the top is the color icon over my picture placeholder, you see that green checkmark? Formally in Lync 2013 to the left of what would be the rectangular shape or square-shaped picture placeholder would be a bar with the color indicator letting you know what the status was currently set to, green for available, yellow for away, red for busy or in a meeting, you get where I'm going with this. So now, directly over the picture you will see a round icon, like these, that'll indicate the status. Same for any of the contacts that you have listed in the lower area. Notice those are all round now as well with the same type of status indicator overlaying the picture. Now something else that you'll notice on this main interface that's changed is a smiley face at the top. This is a way for you to provide feedback to Skype. So by selecting this it'll take us out to the Skype for Business page, let you know how many ideas have been suggested, so you can actually add your own ideas. You can go ahead and take a look at all the current ideas that are out there and vote for which ones you like, and you can also share ideas of how you're using Skype with others. Great, let's take a look at some more features. I'm going to start an unscheduled Meet Now. And you may notice a few things that have changed here as well. So anytime you're in an instant message, it could be a scheduled or an unscheduled meeting, whether or not you have certain features enabled, like an audio call, or a video call, or sharing out some content, you're going to see that there are some new icons in this area. We'll start with the top right. You'll see what looks like signal strength, and this is your network quality, this is going to indicate to you is the quality good enough for you to be using video, for you to be using the audio call, or sharing some type of presentation content out? At the bottom of this area you also have additional call controls, so a quick easy way for you to be able to place your call on hold, transfer your call maybe to another device, another number, or switch what type of devices you're using, like a headset. If I go ahead and expand the instant message area to the side of this conversation, we have some new emojis available. They're called smileys now, but of course, it's more than smileys, and these are all of the ones that were available in Skype. We also have some animated emojis, so let's find our ninja. And there you go. There's also what's called call monitor. So maybe I want to stay in this conversation, but I really need to use my screen to work on something else, maybe I have a document or I need to do some research online. I can switch the size of this screen by minimizing it here. While that's minimized I get this compact call control area where I can easily hang up the audio call, mute my mic, or unmute. If a video stream is being shared I'd be able to see that in this compact window, and if I'd like to bring the call window back I just double-click over my name. Now this is always going to stay on top of whatever you're working on, so if you have something full-screen just keep in mind this will overlay on top. And that's important for you know because the function of this is to remind you that you are still in this conversation. So I'm going to go ahead and double-click on my name and bring it back to the original size. The last new feature, really it's more of an interface change to discuss, is presentable content. The icon still looks the same, still looks like a monitor, but when it's selected, in the previous version it looked like a caption gallery where you had icons to click on in a table view for presenting your desktop or presenting a specific application, maybe PowerPoint files, brainstorming with a whiteboard, sending files, or using that Q&A, or taking a poll. Now you'll notice that we have what is a vertical format list that you would select from, and if you don't see what you would like to present in this menu you'll go to More and see the last three choices. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next clip.

Getting Started In this clip we'll take an introductory tour of the many application areas including the Me area, Present Status, View tabs, Search bar, Options, Contacts, and Quick Action buttons. Let's get started from the top and work our way down. The Me area lets your colleagues know exactly what it is you're working on. Within this area I have shared that I am working on videos today. There's also a placeholder for a picture. Just below your name is where you'll see your status. Now your status may be automatically updated, that's your present status, or you can manually update that from the list that you see here. You also have a location. This location is custom, you can type in whatever you'd like, and if you'd like to remove those custom locations you can select so from the bottom of the list. Just below the Me area are your View tabs. By default you're going to be viewing all of the contacts that you have created within Skype for Business, that's the person that you see here. If you'd like to switch to viewing anything that has been missed this is a history of all of your missed conversations and calls, it could also be a complete listing of everyone that you've been communicating with recently. Notice just below the clock that we have three filter tabs to choose from, All, Missed, or Calls. And the last choice is a calendar, which is going to show if you have any scheduled meetings coming up today. Let's switch back over to Contacts and take a look at the list of contacts below. Now to add someone, there's an easy way to do this, you can simply search for someone by typing a partial or complete name. Just by typing a you'll see that we have found a match, Alexandra Courson, and if I'd like to add that person to my contacts list a right-click over the name gives me many choices of how I can add that person. I can add Alexandra to my favorites or to another contact list that I have created. I'll go ahead and add her to the Other Contacts. While we're looking at the contact list we can also filter this list by groups, you'll see that that is the default choice right now. By Status, that's the present status of what they're currently set to. Notice that we have the categories Online, Away, Unknown, and Unavailable. Or Relationship, you can build relationships within the preferences of Skype for Business, and this gives the option of what information you would like to share with that person depending on the access level that you have given them. Here we can see the categories are Friends and Family, Workgroup, Colleagues, External Contacts, and Blocked Contacts. If you've recently added someone to your Skype for Business contacts and you can't recall what that new hire's name is or that recent colleague addition is you can click on New and see all of those people that you've added recently, they'll show up in this filtered list for you. And another way that you can add someone to your contacts, other than using the search bar that we were just using above, is to use this icon to the right. By clicking Add a Contact you will see a drop-down list of ways that you can search and find that person and then add them to your contact list. Just above the search field are two menus. We have the cog, which is your options, and the drop-down arrow, which is your menu. The cog's going to take you to the Options menu and on the left in the navigation bar you'll see many areas that you can customize. A few that you may want to take a look at would be your picture, if you'd like to add a picture to that placeholder, what phones you have integrated, if you'd like to set custom ringtones and sounds for incoming calls, and if you're going to be using this to communicate via a video or an audio call you may want to go in and make sure that those preferences are set up for the devices that you would like to use. Great, let's take a look at the other menu. Just to right of the cog is the drop-down arrow. Within this menu you can transfer files, you can choose to sign in with another address, you can actually exit Skype for Business, as well as use the Meet Now feature. Now we go into this in a separate clip, basically this is unscheduled meeting that you can start at any time and invite others to it. As well, you do have the Tools menu, which is going to take you to some of those preference settings that we were just looking at, just another easy shortcut that you can use for that. And if you do need help within Skype for Business here's a great way where you can get to the Help menu, as well as give feedback or get quick tips. We were talking about contacts, and we'll talk about that for just another moment, we are looking at these contacts as groups, and we can see the names of those groups here, we have Favorites, Other Contacts, the Edit Team, and a New Group at the bottom, but what I'd like to mention is that you can easily condense and expand, so we can collapse Favorites when they're not needed, we'll do the same thing for Other Contacts, the Edit Team, and the New Group. This tidies up your list and then anytime that you need to work within a particular group you can expand that by clicking over the triangle again. In another clip we will get into actually adding contacts and creating groups to organize all of your contacts and information. Below the group area in the bottom left corner is your audio device area. This is where you can select a primary device that you'd like to use. It will show you a list of everything that it recognizes to be connected to your device. Here you can see that we have my LifeChat headset, as well as the built-in PC Mic and Speakers. If you do have a phone integrated with Skype for Business just to the right of that on this gray bar at the bottom is where you would see the choice for managing your call forwarding. So you'd be able to click on the phone and manage those call forwarding options. And finally, notice the smiley in the top right corner. By selecting this it's going to take us out to the Skype for Business feedback page where you can add your ideas, you can vote for others' ideas, and you can see what other interesting ways Skype for Business is being used. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next clip.

Adding Contacts and Creating Groups In this clip you'll learn how to create contacts in Skype for Business and tidy up that list by organizing these into groups. To get started we'll first search for someone that we can add as a contact. We'll use the search field here where says Find someone. Now we can search by name, that being a partial or a full name. We can also search by email address or even a phone number. So I'm going to go ahead and search for Tim. And your search results are going to appear just below the search field, so you can see where it says My Contacts, it is showing two different contacts for Tim Duggan. When I find the one that I'd like to add to My Contacts I'll go ahead and right-click over his name. And notice that my choices are not just adding it to Contacts, but different ways that I could start communicating with him right away. I could send an instant message, I could create a video call, an audio call, send him an email message, or even schedule a meeting with him. But I'm going to go down towards the bottom of the list where I have the choice of adding him to my Favorites or to my Contacts List. Now my Contacts Lists are only going to be the ones that are built-in by default unless you've already created your own custom group. So if you're just starting with Skype for Business you should see Add to Favorites, and in the Add to Contacts List you might only see other contacts listed there. I've already created the group Edit Team. Go ahead and add Tim to the Favorites. Now we're back to the Group listing of our contacts. You'll notice the first group is titled Favorites just above Tim's name, and below that I have Other Contacts and Edit Team. Your Favorites is always going to appear first at the top of the list, then Other Contacts, and then any of those custom groups that you create. If I'd like to create a custom group that I can place Tim in as a member, I can do so by right-clicking over any of the existing group names. Go ahead and select Create New Group and it gives me the opportunity to give that new group a name. (Typing) I have a new group, but I don't have any members of that group yet. Now if I'd like to make Tim a member of that group I can left-click and drag and drop Tim into that particular group. And now if I expand the group we'll see that Tim is a member of the Review Team, as well as still being a member of my Favorites group. Another method that I can move or copy a contact to another group would be to right-click over that contact's name, and then go to the area where it says Copy Contact To or Move Contact To and choose one of the groups available. We'll wrap this clip up with one quick tip, and that is that you can expand and collapse these groups. By using the arrow to the left I can collapse all of these groups down, and then just expand the groups as needed. That helps tidy things up a bit. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next clip.

Tagging for Status Change Alerts In this clip you'll learn everything you need to know about changing your availability status, as well as checking other statues and tagging for those statue change alerts. You may have already noticed in the Me area that you can manually change your status from the drop-down menu. Many of the choices are Available, Busy, Do Not Disturb, and away choices like Be Right Back, Off Work, and Appear Away. Some of these may be automatically updated dependent on if you have a calendar appointment or meeting showing as busy, if you have a phone integration where it sees that you are in a call and updates your status to such, or, after so many minutes of inactivity on your computer it automatically sets you to Away or another similar status. I'd like to communicate with Tim and before I start that instant message best practice is to check and see his status. I can see that Tim is busy, I'd like to know when he's going to be available to have a quick conversation about those quarter three earnings. I can use the status change alert to notify me when Tim is available to instant message. With a right-click over the contact, from the menu I will select Tag for Status Change Alerts. Now, any time that Tim's status changes, whether that's to Available, Away, Do Not Disturb, Be Right Back, even Offline, it's going to notify me this visually on my screen. Let's look for Tim's status notification. And there it is. In the lower right corner we can see that Tim is now available. We have the options to untag this notification, as well as ignore it. Now as that notification disappeared, if I didn't get the chance to untag that so that I don't receive future alerts, because this will stay enabled until you turn it off, I can also right-click over his contact again, and from the menu, notice the checkmark next to Tag for Status Change Alerts, select this to turn that notification off. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next clip.

Communicating with Instant Messaging (IM) In this clip you'll learn shortcuts for a quick way to start a conversation, also known as chat or instant messaging. To get started I'll first locate the contact that I would like to chat with. A double-click over that name starts the instant message. I'll go ahead and close this, and there's a couple of other ways that I can communicate with this person. I can right-click over that person's name and see a complete list of the ways that I can communicate and collaborate, and to get to this same Instant Message window I'll select Send an IM. And finally, from this Application window I can also hover over that contact's picture placeholder. This gives me several ways that I can communicate as well. The first one, that looks like a chat bubble, will open the Instant Message window as well. Once we're in the instant message area, the top area is where we'll see the complete conversation between all participants, whether that's two or more participants. The area where you see the blinking cursor at the moment is the area that I can type my message. (Typing) Next to my instant message is a timestamp letting me know when that message was sent. As Tim replies, you'll notice in the bottom of the conversation window an indicator letting me know that he's typing a message, and here's Tim's response. As he continues to type the message, and before I send a message back to him, I would like to take a look around and see what I can do to customize this environment to work better for me. In the top there's an area that says 2 Participants, if I'd like to see who those participants are I can click on that link and expand the participant area. As well, next to the names of the participants I can see what their capabilities are within this instant message. Anything that is highlighted or in the color blue to the right of their name lets you know that they have those capabilities. So at the moment, both he and I are communicating and we do have chat capabilities. If we had our microphones enabled, our cameras enabled, or if we were presenting content you would see these other indicators letting you know that as well, the microphone for audio, the camera for video, and the monitor for presenting content. I can also invite more people to this conversation by clicking Invite More People, and this will take me out to a place that I can see my contacts that I have set up already within Skype for Business and if there's someone else I would like to search for and add to the conversation I can type partial name or a complete name to find that person and add them to the conversation. Now I see that Nick is not online at the moment so I'm not going to add him to this instant message, so I'll go ahead and cancel out of this menu and get back to my conversation. Below the conversation area we have some additional capabilities. The paperclip is to choose a file that I'd like to send to Tim, and at the moment I would like to discuss a bit more about those quarter three earnings and I do have a file that I'd like to share with him, but we're going to take a look at that in a future clip. As well, if there's something that I'm sending to him that is of high importance I can include an indicator with my message. And we have the smileys, also known as the emojis, you might also know those as emoticons, many here that we can choose from. Finally, we have the Send button, you can also use your Enter key to send a message through. Below this area we have some additional options. If I'd like to hide my instant message I can turn that on or off with the bubble icon to the left. As well, I mentioned the capabilities that show at the top next to the participant names if they have capabilities for a video, audio, or presentation, those can be enabled at the bottom of this window by using these three icons. We will get into all of these features in separate clips. And finally, I would like to call out the ellipses in the bottom right corner, this is what's known as your more options. Anytime you see this throughout any of the menus in Skype for Business it's letting you know there are additional options you can choose from or use to customize your environment. If we're recording this as a web meeting we have the capability to go to manage those recordings. If I'd like to see the IM text displayed a little bit larger I have the capability to change that, we'll make that 150%. And if I'd like to change the font, if it's maybe hard for me to follow, this happens if you have maybe five or more participants, if everyone's using the same font it may be a bit more difficult for you to distinguish who is saying which message. In that case we can go ahead and change the font to know which message was mine. So I'd like to make this blue, and I'll go ahead and make this papyrus, and I'll make it size 11. (Typing) And this may not be exactly the font that you'd like, but you can see the difference in the text that we have here. Tim has said that that font looks a little funky, and you'll notice the emoji next to that is an animated emoji, something that is new or that has reappeared in the latest version of Skype for Business. I mentioned that you can hide the chat area by using this icon in the lower left corner, you also have the capability to turn off or hide the participant list as well by using the close in the top right corner. It brings you back to this view that you can always click on the participants here to see the complete list of the participants, and as well when we were in this mode we could invite more people, but you don't even have to be in that view to invite more people. While you're in this view you can always use the Invite More People icon that's in the top right corner here. To exit from this conversation use the X in the upper right corner. In the first part of this clip you learned how to start an instant message by inviting a contact. Now let's take a look at what it would look like if you were invited to an instant message. Once the invite is received you will see a notification in the lower right corner of your screen. This gives you the options of Accept or Ignore. With this notification I can choose to accept the invitation from Tim to chat, I can ignore it, or I can see additional options, allowing me to set this to Do Not Disturb, meaning that I'll longer receive notifications or messages popping up from any of the contacts that I normally communicate with. In this instance I'll go ahead and click Accept, and go ahead and reply, and our conversation is on its way. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next clip.

Connecting from Outlook In this clip you will learn how you can reply to an email with an instant message, also known as an IM. I'm viewing my Inbox and I have a response from Tim regarding an email that I sent him discussing a possible book title. In my current view I have my Navigation pane on the left, my mail listing, the contents of my Inbox in the middle, and on the right I have my Preview pane. From here, I can respond with an IM in three different ways. From the Preview pane I can use the Respond with IM, as you're seeing the icon here. From the ribbon I can respond with an IM from this area, or if I have the message open separately, as such, from the ribbon as well I can respond to this with an IM. So why send an email if you'd like to get further clarification, or just start a conversation, when you can use Reply with IM. Let's give it a try. Now there are two choices that I have here, I can Reply with IM, which would be reply to the just the person that sent this message, which would be Tim, and if I had additional participants on the To or the CC line, and I'd like to make this a group conversation I would be able to select Reply All with IM. With this example we'll select Reply with IM. Here's the Instant Message window. This might look familiar to you if you've been using Skype for Business Instant Messaging, or if you've watched other clips in this series where we've been discussing instant messaging. But there's something slightly different that you may notice at the top of this window. It includes the person that this message was from, that this email was from, as well as the subject of this email because this gives the participant that you're inviting to the message a bit more clarification about what this conversation is all about. Tim now knows that I am replying, just as he requested when I was free to start a conversation and he'll catch me up, and now he knows that I'm starting that conversation. My conversation has just started. You've learned a few ways that you can use reply with IM. I hope that his tip helps you to be more collaborative in future instant messaging. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next clip.

Starting an Unscheduled Online Meeting or Conference Call In this clip you'll learn how to start an unscheduled meeting or a conference call by using the Meet Now feature. This feature is located in the upper right corner of the main Application screen. By selecting the drop-down arrow you'll see the menu. Meet Now is your second choice. This opens a conversation, but it doesn't just open a conversation that you can invite others to, meaning it's not a just an instant message, it prompts you if you'd like to add audio to this call as well. You can choose to include Skype for Business as the full audio and video experience, so that means you could include using a microphone or a built-in microphone with your computer, as well as a web cam, whether that's internal or an external web cam. You could also request that someone call you at a particular phone number. In this example we're just going to say Don't join audio. This conversation window may look familiar if you've used instant messaging before. The top area is for our conversation amongst however many participants are joining you in this Meet Now. Remember this is an unscheduled meeting, meaning it hasn't been scheduled in Outlook, there's not been an invitation sent out to our participants, I am going to need to add participants, and I'll do that in just a moment. But the portion below where it shows that there's one participant in this conversation, this area is for the conversation, the back and forth between those participants. Where you see the blinking cursor is where you would be able to type a message to the other participants. But first thing we need to do is we need to add participants to this Meet Now. We'll do that by selecting the plus sign in the upper right corner, and either selecting a contact from your list of contacts that appears here, or you can search by using the search field at the top. I'm going to go ahead and add Tim to this conversation. And now in the upper left you'll see that I have two participants, I could expand my participant list if I'd like to see the names of the attendees that are here. And to the right of the participants we can also see the capability of those participants. Anything that is shaded with the blue coloring is letting us know that that is active, so right now we are both active in the instant message, I can see that Tim also has audio capabilities and he doesn't currently have his webcam on, he's not using video, and he's not presenting any content since those are grayed out. If I'd like to invite additional participants I can do so by using the Invite More People that's now below this participant listing. And if I need to make any changes to how my participants are able to participate within this Meet Now conversation I can do that in this menu. Now these top three that we're looking at, by default, the mute is activated, I am the only speaker, being that I am the presenter, I also have the capability to turn off instant messaging. So if I'd like the focus to be on my talking, or the content that I am sharing out from my computer, I can turn that off. I can also turn off attendee video if I want to make sure that they're not sharing out their video feeds as well. These type of things might also help with the, with any attendees that you have that might have a low bandwidth connection. Below these choices I can demote anyone that is a presenter to being an attendee, and right now I can see that Tim is a presenter, he's listed in that presenter group. If he were an attendee there would be a separate area with a breakout title that say Attendee and he would be a part of that group. So I'm going to go ahead and make him an attendee, and I'm going to say OK, and we should see that change happen. So now we can see that there is one attendee, and if I scroll down in my list I can see that Tim has now been demoted to an attendee. If I go back to my Participant Actions I can also invite additional participants by email. This works great if there is someone that you've searched for, but you notice that they're not signed into Skype for Business so it's showing them as offline, you can go ahead and invite them by email. And we'll open a new email message, we'll include a link for this meeting, so I could hover over this hyperlink and see the link that they would be able to click on to go directly to this meeting, all I need to do is type the participant's name in that I would like to invite, find them from the list, and send. I'll go ahead and say hello to Tim. And we have some additional features that we could include in this meeting as well. The instant message area at any time can be hidden by using the icon in the lower left area here. I would like to add additional features or additional capabilities to this meeting. I can do that as well by turning on my webcam, adding an audio portion, activating the microphone, or presenting content. We will get into these features in a separate clip from this one. To the right of this, the ellipses is your More Options, so if you're not seeing something that you would like to choose or customize, such as changing your font, or maybe making the text slightly larger, you can do that from this menu. Above the ellipses you have some additional capabilities as well. At any time, in any of the conversations that you're having in Skype for Business, you can send a file. You can also make a message of high importance. You can choose from those emoticons that are available here, as well as the Send button, which is just another form of Enter. So if you're typing a message or you're choosing a file you can press the paper airplane to send it along. When you're ready to leave the conversation you can use the X in the upper right corner. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next clip.

Scheduling and Starting a Meeting In this clip you'll learn how to make your conversation a collaborative workspace by making it a Skype for Business meeting. There are two ways that you can accomplish this. One is to use what's called an unscheduled meeting, also known as Meet Now within the Skype for Business application. We'll get to that feature in a future clip. For now we're going to schedule a meeting ahead of time by using Microsoft Outlook. To get started you'll need to be in the Microsoft Outlook application within the Calendar view. From the Home ribbon, where you would usually select New Appointment or New Meeting, we're going to look a little bit over to the right of that area and select New Skype Meeting. And this appointment area may look pretty familiar to you if you've scheduled an appointment within the Outlook calendar before. We have our usual To that we can add our participants to, we'll do that in just a moment. We also have the Subject line available to give a bit more of information about what this meeting is all about. We also have our Start and End time to signify when it's going to start and end. But what's a little different is what you see in the body area of this meeting. Join Skype Meeting is a URL, also known as a hyperlink, that will take you directly to this dedicated meeting area. And as I hover over this you'll notice the end portion of this link is what tells you the unique identifier for this meeting space, that's after the heather/ where you see the 9zdrpn and 99. All your participants have to do once they receive this invitation is click on this link and it will take them directly to the meeting. So let's go ahead and set this meeting up and we'll go ahead and invite Tim to it. (Working) And let's give this a time of 2:15 today, actually we'll make it 2:20. If you can't find the time in the drop-down you can always manually type that time in. I'll make sure that I have today's date as the end date for this. We can always add additional details to the body area of this meeting, and we're ready to send this meeting invite out. But before I do that I would like to take a look at some additional meeting options that I have as the presenter or the organizer of this meeting. On the Meeting ribbon if I look to the right of Appointment that is currently highlighted I can select Meeting Options. Now this area is all about permissions. So with these permissions we can make the decision on who doesn't have to wait in the lobby. The lobby is the area that everyone will wait in until the organizer launches the meeting, so the organizer officially starts that meeting and then everyone is able to join in and be able to see what's being shared, chat in the chat area, see the list of participants, use those audio and video controls as needed. So if there are individuals that we are saying do not have to wait in the lobby we can make that selection from this drop-down menu. So only me, the meeting organizer, is the person who doesn't have to wait in the lobby, that means everyone else has to wait in the lobby. Now if there are others that I'd like to be able to set up for this meeting, maybe someone else from my organization, I may want to add them so that they don't have to wait in the lobby and they can get their files and anything else they need to get set up ahead of time. So who's going to be a presenter? What you're doing here is you're deciding who is going to have the rights to share content, to present within this meeting space. Right now it's set up to anyone from within my organization, I can also select people that I choose and then use the Choose presenter area here to choose my invited attendees to be presenters. Now you'll notice only, the only person that's showing in the attendees area is someone that was already on the To line for this meeting invite. So to see or to have additional participants in this list that I can choose from to promote from being an attendee to a presenter, they'd have to be on the To line for that meeting invite. I'll go ahead and add Tim to the Presenter list, we'll go back to the menu here. The other choices that we had in here was anyone from my organization, or if I'd like to make everyone a presenter I can do that as well. Finally, I can limit participation in certain ways. This works great if you have larger meetings, meaning that you have participants, maybe 50 or more, and you would like to focus on the content and not have that sidebar of instant messaging or interruptions of audio and video. You can disable those features by checking the boxes that you see here. Since this is just a one on one meeting with Tim I am going to leave that at the default setting of having all of those features enabled. Before I click OK, to the left of this button you'll notice the Remember Settings button. This is if you would like to make these settings the default for all future meetings that you are scheduling within the Microsoft Outlook calendar. Keep in mind this only applies to the Skype for Business meetings and not your regular meetings. I am ready to send this meeting invitation out to Tim. And once I do so we will see this meeting appear on my calendar. And I can start the meeting a couple of different ways. Here's my reminder, I'm going to go ahead and dismiss that reminder. If I open this meeting from my Calendar view I can join this Skype meeting from the ribbon or from the link that's in the body area of the meeting information. And since I joined this meeting by clicking on the link it does recognize my username and password that I'm using for Skype for Business to see that I am the organizer for this meeting and to give me all of the proper rights to manage this meeting as I would need to. Within this meeting area we can see in a couple of different places that I am the only participant, at the moment, that is here. That is at the banner of the application window, as well as the participant list area that we have here. And go ahead and expand that area so that as Tim joins this meeting I will see him listed here as a presenter as well. I can see that Tim has joined the meeting, has unmuted his audio. We do have an instant message area in this meeting, it's where my blinking cursor is, I can type a message. And in the middle section is where our conversation will happen. If at any time I would like to invite more participants to this meeting I can use the Invite More People and select someone from my contacts list or type a name in, and add an individual if I'd like. Nick's not online so I'm not going to add him at the moment. I can also take a look at my Participant Actions. If I'd like to make sure that they're not able to use some of these features, so just as we took a look in the scheduling process when we were working within Microsoft Outlook in the calendar meeting, we could choose to disable these actions for our participants. If we hadn't, or at any time if you'd like to change that on the fly, you have the capability to do that. So if I do not want anyone using instant message or making sure they're not using their video, and everyone is an attendee, or if I'd like to send an invite with the meeting information, I have these actions available. So the top three, you'll notice that mute is already disabled, automatically mute is turned on when you attend a meeting unless you turn that capability off individually, but these two are the actions that are geared towards the participants. If I want to make everyone in here that may be a presenter an attendee I can demote them by using this action. And if I needed to invite someone else, maybe I want to send Nick an invite by email since I see that he's offline, once he receives that email he could sign in and participate in this meeting. So those options are available as well. In the lower section we do have the instant message area, so if I'd like to hide that area for the moment or have it display again I can do such. The middle three are just additional features that you can use within this meeting area. at the moment we are only chatting in the instant message area, but at any time I could enable my video to make this a video call. I can enable my audio, my microphone, to make this an audio call. If I'd like to I could share content out, I could present content to the audience. These are features that we will get into in a future clip. To the right you also have the ellipses, any time you see these three dots it's More Options to call out additional things that you may be either be able to choose or customize within the meeting area. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next clip.

Transfer a File in a Meeting In this lesson you'll learn how to provide a file to your meeting participants like a document for review or a presentation. You can send the file directly to those participants. Here I have a message from Tim. I've asked if he'd seen the latest sales earnings that's been posted to our team site today. He's indicated that he hasn't and he's requesting if I can send him a copy directly through this instant message. I can go ahead and do this by using the paperclip in the conversation area at the bottom of the screen. I'll go ahead and point to where the document is, go ahead and select that, and open the document, and the document is being transmitted. Right here we can see a timestamp and the document resides in the conversation. Now all Tim has to do to download and save this document locally to his device is select that or click on the document itself. I'll go ahead and send a message to Tim just to make sure he's received that. And as I'm chatting with Tim I'd like to find out how we're doing with our latest book, this is going to give me a better idea of what I can project for our sales depending on the revisions of this book and if it's ready to be published. So I'm going go ahead and request that Tim send me a document through this instant message also. I can see that Tim is typing a message and we will look in just a moment for that book as it comes through. And Tim is sending that just as I did, he's selecting the paperclip and browsing out to where that file is saved, selecting that file, opening that file, and then sending. And this is how the file looks when you are the recipient that is receiving it. If I scroll back up just a little bit we can see that this is Conversation Office 365 file, the file size, and if I'd like to download that file I can click directly over the arrow, and that file is now being sent to my computer. Great. I can see that this is a PDF file and it's giving me the option to open or cancel, I'll go ahead and select Open, and I'm now able to view this book in the native application that it is formatted for. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next clip.

Sharing Presentable Content Skype for Business is a communication tool in many more ways than just instant messaging. In this clip you'll learn about sharing presentable content. To get started I already have a conversation with Tim and I'd like to share some content so that we can collaborate and share some ideas. The first thing I need to do is take a look at what options are available of content that I can present. We're going to do this by selecting what looks like a display at the bottom of the Application window. Here you'll see a listing of many different things that we can share within this meeting. If you've used a previous version of Skype for Business or Lync, this list looks a little different than it previously did. In the past it looked what was more like a gallery caption type view or a table view. And now we have a list and it's not showing us everything we can share as there is a More selection, and we'll get to that as we work our way through this. We'll start by sharing the desktop. And with presenting the desktop you are sharing everything that is viewable on your screen. If you have more than one monitor it will give you the option as to which monitor you would like to share. Now we're not actually sharing the screen yet. What you can see on the screen at the moment is just a thumbnail preview of what the audience or the participants would be able to see. If I see that there's something confidential or something I don't want to share I can click Cancel. We'll go ahead and present it so that you can see how the controls work if I'd like to hand off access for this, as well as taking us back and stopping the presenting. Notice the toolbar at the top that says Connecting. Once I am presenting my screen that Connecting will switch to Presenting. The Give Control is no longer grayed out and I also have the option of Stop Presenting over to the right. So I'm currently presenting my screen, Tim's able to see everything that's on my screen. If I'd like to give Tim control to use my keyboard and mouse to navigate around my screen I can do that from this menu. If I did have other participants in this that were promoted to being presenters, as you can see Tim is here, I would be able to give them control as well. So I'll go ahead and give Tim control. He now has rights to use the keyboard and mouse on his keyboard and navigate around my desktop, as you can see the mouse is moving around. We can see that Tim Duggan is in control and if at any moment that I would like to take those rights back I can do so from that same drop-down menu. To the right of Stop Presenting is a pushpin. That's if I'd like to pin this toolbar to always display on my screen so that it doesn't hide. I can turn that on or off and if I want to stop presenting I am no longer sharing my screen with the participants. Let's take a look at a few other things that we can present. If I'd like to present just a specific program, that's helpful if there is some confidential information you want to make sure that you're not sharing out, any programs that you currently have open on your device you would be able to share out from this menu. So from here you can see that I have Send To OneNote, Outlook, and the OneNote application open, and just by making a selection on one of these I am able to present that. If I want to stop presenting, I'll use the same toolbar as what I was using before, and I'm going to go ahead and minimize that application and get back to our conversation. The next thing that we're going to take a look at is PowerPoint slides. And I'd like to preface this by saying, we were just looking at specific applications and that's great if you need to edit and make changes to an existing document. So let's say that you opened Microsoft Word and you have a particular document already open in that application, you can edit that document, save it, do whatever you need to do, make annotations in it if you want, and allow your other participants to be able to view it while you're doing that. Well, if we were going to share PowerPoint slides, but these are not slides that need to be edited, but they need to be delivered in a full screen viewing, as you would if you're presenting to an audience, and that's what we're doing here in this Skype for Business meeting, we're presenting to a virtual audience, we would instead of choosing Program we would choose Present PowerPoint Files. By doing this you are going to upload the files to this meeting and then be able to share those out. Now I do have a few things before we do that in Manage Presentable Content that I can take a look at. Notice the number 3 next to this. It's indicating that I have already shared some content in this meeting that is available for me to reuse. So we take a look here, you can see that I've already set up a Q&A. Here's the social media PowerPoint file that I've uploaded, and I've already opened OneNote at some point in this meeting. So If I'd like to be able to go right back to presenting those it's a great shortcut that you don't have to re-upload the content or go back and navigate out to presenting that, you can just go right to this area and click Present Now. So let's take a look at the PowerPoint slides. Now keep in mind when you upload a PowerPoint file for the first time, depending on how many slides, and how many graphics, and how much content, that makes the file larger. And by that file being larger it may take a few more minutes for it to initially upload. So you're not seeing that process at the moment on the screen because I've already done that with this file. This is what your PowerPoint slides will look like. This is called the stage. So on the left we have our participant panel, our conversation area, and any time you're presenting content it's going to load an area to the right, a little bit larger of an area to display that presentable content. So what we're seeing in this stage right now is the first slide of the PowerPoint that I've opened. We have navigation arrows to go forward and to go back. And if we look over to the right we also have thumbnails. You might be familiar with this when you're working in the PowerPoint application. Instead of the thumbnails appearing on the left side of the slide in a vertical capacity, they're running horizontally below the slide. And if you've included notes with those slides those will also be available here for you to view. I don't have any notes on this particular slide so that area is empty. While we are in this view there's something else that we can do. We can actually use what's called a Q&A, a question and answer. And if you're using this in a training capacity you can work within the slides and then switch over to a Q&A so that you can have questions about the the section you just covered, and so it can be the trainer and the students and they're asking questions amongst each other and answering those question, and then you can switch right back to presentable content. Before we take a look at that I do want to point one more thing out to you and that is the Annotation feature here in the top corner. So any time that you're working in the slides you have an Annotation toolbar that you can use, and you can use those features as you go through these slides. As well, this Annotation toolbar would be available for others to mark up as well. So if I wanted to mark that up, there we go. Great. So let's take a look at that Q&A that I just mentioned. We'll go back to presentable content. As I mentioned earlier, if I go to Manage Presentable Content, there's the Q&A that I'd already enabled. Now if you've not enabled this yet let's take a look at where you would enable that. So from the listing here, if we go to the More menu, it would appear next to Whiteboard and Pull. Since I've already enabled this it's not appearing in this menu. So we'll go back to manage and we'll open that Q&A. We have a caption that lets me know that I'm now presenting the Q&A. I'll go ahead and close out of this menu, and what's great about this is Tim has already asked a question as I had this Q&A open earlier in this meeting, and if I'd like to answer that I could do that, if I want switch back to the presentation I can do that from the tab at the bottom. So we're ready for the next section, we can go through the presentation, when we're done with that section we can go back to the Q&A, and we can answer some more questions. You have two categories for your Q&A, you have All and Unanswered. Right now we can see that Tim's question has not been answered, so it resides in this category, and of course it's going to reside in All as well. If I'd like to provide an answer to Tim, click here, and then I can provide an answer for him. When you'd like to stop the Q&A, at any time you can stop that. And you also have the choice to the left of that to save it, so if you would like to save it to your computer as a text file you can save that with any name, just browse out to the directory. Great. Let's take a look at a couple of other things that we have available with presentable content. At any time you can add attachments. We cover this in another clip, how you can actually send files through Skype for Business, but if you would like to send a file from the meeting this is another option to do so. So you can browse out, select the file, open the file, and it's now making this an attachment, notifying the other participants with the yellow bar at the bottom of the window that there's an attachment they can download. Notes, Shared Notes and My Notes, these all belong to a OneNote notebook, so just be sure that you have at least opened the OneNote application before you want to use this, and it's a great way for you to be able to take notes and then file those notes within a notebook. We're going to move to the More menu and we're going to take a look at Whiteboard and Pull. So we'll start with the Whiteboard. This is a great space to brainstorm with your colleagues. This Whiteboard lets you co-author with your colleagues using that Annotation toolbar that you see on the right. So I can be typing in text while Tim is making some notes as well, or he could even be taking a screenshot and including that, or browsing out and finding a logo or a graphic and including that. So let's take a look at how it would work. (Typing) So I can create some notes, any of these text boxes are movable. You'll notice that Tim is now using the highlighter as well, and even if I'd like to browse out and insert a picture into this I could do that as well. Tim has indicated with the green checkmark that he agrees with my notes and he has added Revision #2 into that also. And there is the photo that I have just inserted into this brainstorming. You'll notice that this gives me the capability to resize any of the images and move them around on the screen as necessary as well. It looks like our image may have been removed by Tim already, so we do have the capability to co-author and co-edit. You do have the capability to save any of the brainstorming that you're doing here within a Whiteboard, you can do that by clicking the three ellipses at the bottom of this toolbar and then going to Save As, and it will save this in a graphic file format. You have the choice of a PNG or an XPS file. Great, we'll stop presenting the Whiteboard and we'll take a look at the last presentable contact option we're covering in this clip, which is taking a poll. We'll find that in the More menu. A poll can be created ahead of time. If you have a scheduled meeting that you've scheduled in the Outlook calendar, and before you launch that meeting at the appropriate date and time you can go in and you can upload and set up any of this presentable content that we've been talking about today, but you can also create the poll ahead of time, so you can have the question and the answers ready for when you want to launch that poll and get those votes. So we're going to go ahead and call this poll the Microsoft Office Poll. (Typing) Give them some options. (Typing) And we'll click Create. So we're loading this poll, it's ready for the participants to vote. As those votes are happening, since I am the presenter of this, I can see the results. The participants in my meeting are not able to see these results until I decide to share those out. So when I'm ready to do that I'll go to Poll Actions and I will say that the Poll is closed and that I would like to share the results with everyone. So now Tim is able to see that Outlook is the most frequently used application. I can also save this poll by just choosing what I'd like to call it and where I would like to save it. And again, it's saving it as a graphic type file, a PNG. You also have the option of saving it a CSV file. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next clip.

Making an Audio Call Instead of a lot of typing, let your voice be heard in the conversation. This clip demonstrates how to place and manage an audio call in Skype for Business. There's a couple of different ways that I can make an audio call in Skype for Business. I can right-click over Tim Duggan's name and go to Call and select Skype for Business Call. Now something to note here. If you have more than one method that you can make a call, a voice over IP call, from here other than directly through Skype for Business, let's say that your desk phone in integrated, you may see that in the menu choice as well. Instead of calling from this menu though let's look at something else. If I hover over the picture placeholder for Tim I get the Contact Card menu. These are all the different ways that I can communicate with Tim. If I'd like to call him, from here again I have the drop-down arrow to see additional choices, or I can simply click directly over the phone to make the call. Now an invitation is being sent out to Tim and it will appear on his desk. We will hear ringing until he answers. Hi Heather, how are you? Good Tim, how are you? Very good, thanks for calling. Thanks, we're waiting for a few other participants to join us and while we wait I do have a participant that I'm going over the audio controls with, so give us just a minute. Okay. The bottom of our conversation, or our web meeting, we have the various ways that we can add additional collaboration features, and one of the ones that we're using right now is the audio call. And we can control this in a couple of different ways. If we look down in the bottom right there is what looks like a phone with a cog over it. These are the call controls. Let's say that you need to place this on hold for the moment. We can do that right from here. If you need to step away from your desk and you'd like to transfer that call to a mobile device you can actually select Transfer and then using the keypad here dial the digits to make that phone call. If you're currently using the microphone and the speakers that are built in to your device and you'd like to switch to a headset or another device, you can make that selection from this menu as well. Also from the call controls you have the control to determine how loud you would like to make this call by using the bar here at the bottom. And if you need to mute you can always click directly over the speaker to mute and unmute your microphone. And once you're ready to end that audio call you'll use the red icon that you see here. You can also use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Enter for that. Well Tim, it looks like our other participants aren't going to be able to make it. Thanks for taking the time and I'll look forward to talking to you soon. Talk to you soon Heather, bye-bye. Bye. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next clip.

Making a Video Call Turn your text conversation into a face to face video conversation. This clip will teach you how to make and manage a video call. But before we get started with making a call, let's take a look at the settings that we can go into and make sure that our camera's enabled and that everything looks the best that it can. To check the settings for an audio or video call we need to go to the cog in the upper right corner of the main application interface. From here on the left there's a navigation pane. We're looking for audio device and video device. It's always great practice for you to do this ahead of time, as I was just saying, before you participate in or conduct an audio or video call, to check these settings. We'll first take a look at our audio device. We need to select the device that we're going to use, here you can see that I'm using a Microsoft LifeChat headset. If I'd like to use the built-in PC and speakers, or another device, as my primary I can choose from this drop-down list. If I want to make sure that it is picking up audio from my microphone, if you look in the next section to the right of where it says microphone, you should see a blue bar that's bouncing from left to right. This is as I'm speaking it's picking up the audio level. I'd like to check the speakers, I can do so as well by clicking Play here. Next we'll take a look at the video device. Now what you should see is a spinning ceiling fan, this is intentional. I'm showing you what this would like from a home office. Always great practice, as I mentioned, for you to check this before you start participating in an audio or video call. Of course, this is our webcam, I am using an external webcam, the Microsoft LifeCam that you can see here at the top. If I'd like to choose a different webcam, whether that's something built into the device or something else that I have plugged via a USB or another method, I can do that from this drop-down list as well. You may have additional camera settings that you may want to check as well below the preview that we're seeing here from the webcam. As you can see here, Camera Settings, it'll take you into some additional brightness controls, as well as some other controls, the sharpness saturation that you may want to work with. I may want to adjust this camera to me, hello everyone, before I actually participate in that call. You may also notice I look a little washed out right now, that is because I have a window in front of me and it is giving me that light. I might want to turn on an overhead light or have a desk lamp next to me. Get the lighting just right before I join that video call. Great. Now we're ready to make a call. There's a couple ways that we can go about this. We can make a video call by right-clicking on the contact name and then selecting Start a Video Call. Or, by hovering over the picture placeholder for that contact, from the Contact menu we can select the camera. Now if you're already in a conversation with one of more participants you can always make it a video call by selecting this same icon that you'll see at the bottom of the conversation. Let's go ahead and send an invitation to Tim. Hi Heather, how are you? Good Tim, how are you? Very good. So I don't see your camera quite yet, maybe it's paused. There you go, great. How's that, you got me? I got you. Alright. Great. So we're going over the ways to make and manage a video call today and we've already been talking about best practices, to going in and checking the settings ahead of time to make sure that you have the right camera enabled, that your audio is working, and that you don't have any of those distractions, like a ceiling fan spinning, or one of those halo type of lighting effects. So the next thing that we're going to do is we're just going to take a look at the controls. Now that we've made the call, you accepted our invitation, we're going to take a look at how you can manage this video call. At the bottom of the conversation area we have a couple of options that we can use. At any time if you would like to pause or turn off your camera you can stop your video by selecting the camera that you see here. So I'll go ahead and stop my camera, and now you'll notice that the picture-in- picture that we're looking at, you just see my profile picture now, you're no longer seeing my camera. Then enable my camera. We will see a preview showing this caption of what my camera will look like, the video feed that is showing, and then the video will actually display again as a picture-in-picture. As well, to the right of that is the microphone, so that's the audio portion of this video call. At any time if I'd like to mute my mic I can click this icon or use the Window key and F4 to do that as well. And when I am ready to end the call entirely, that's ending the audio and video portion of this call, I'll go ahead and click the red hang-up icon that you see here. Nice to see you today Tim, I'll see you again soon. Bye-bye Heather. Bye-bye. Thanks for watching and I'll see you.

Recording and Publishing a Meeting In this clip you will learn how to record a meeting, play back a meeting, publish, and share a meeting with others. This can be especially helpful for colleagues that have missed a meeting or simply need to recap. I already have a meeting progress with Tim, so let's take a look at what it would look like if he's recording that meeting. So from here you can see a conversation. In the left we have the instant message area, and on the right we have what's called the stage. I'm currently presenting a whiteboard and if we look in the upper right corner there's two ways we can usually tell if something's being recorded. Next to that timestamp of the total time of this meeting there's a red dot with a white parameter to it. If we take a look at that by hovering over it we can see that Tim is recording this meeting. Now when the recording initially starts there will also be a yellow bar that appears towards the bottom of window letting you know that this meeting is being recorded. Now best practice is usually if you're going to record a meeting, let everybody know, both audibly, and maybe in the instant message area as well that you're recording the meeting. Let's take a look at how you can record the meeting locally to your computer. Before we do that, just a quick note, in order to record a meeting it has to be something more than just an instant message back and forth between participants, you need to add in some sort of a collaboration feature to make it a meeting that can be recorded. So in this instance I have added the whiteboard and presenting some content, and therefore I can record. To get us started we're going to take a look at the three ellipses in the lower right corner. And from this menu select Start Recording. A caption will appear in the upper right corner letting me know that the recording has started. And if I do hover over that red dot again, once it's started, we will be able to see that both Tim and I are now recording. To stop the recording we'll go back to the same menu and select Stop Recording. Now you may be asking, where is this recording being saved? It's being saved locally on the computer that you are using, so it'll be saved in the C drive within a Skype for Business folder in a subfolder called My Recordings. To get to those recording we can go back to those three dots again if we're still in the same meeting and go to Manage Recordings. This brings up the Skype for Business Recording Manager application. I've been recording some other meetings already, so we are going to see three or four meetings show up. They're all going to be in different states depending on if that file has been encoded already, if it's completed and it's ready for me to able to publish that out. Pending just means that it can't encode and process that file yet because it is working on something else. So here you can that there are four files. The Title will actually list the participants that were in this meeting. The Status lets you know if it's ready to be published and shared others, and you can see that that's the case with the fourth file, we'll take a look at that one in just a moment. But the first two are pending while it works on that third file that it's creating. Once it's complete you can select the file and then go to the Publish menu to publish this as an mpeg4 file. The Save to is the path of where it will save this file. We can browse out and change that location. Of course you could always save this to OneDrive, to SharePoint document library, or maybe even to a network drive to share it out with others. Before I save and publish this file let's take a look at the options. The default setting is to save and publish everything that is in this Skype for Business meeting. That includes audio, instant messaging, and video, as well as presented content, like the whiteboard that I'm sharing here. If you decide that you'd like to not share certain content just simply uncheck those boxes and then click OK. And once you're ready to publish that file you'll click OK. Let's cancel out of this and take a look at one more area. I'm go ahead and close out of this Recording Manager and I'm going to close out of this meeting area, and mention that if you're not in the meeting and you need to manage those meeting recordings you can always get to it by going to the Start menu and performing a search. So if you're using Windows 7 go to the Start menu and use Search, if you're using, let's say, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10 you can also use Search, and of course in Windows 10 you can search from Cortana, so let's give that try. Go to the Start menu and in the Search programs I'll type the keyword Skype, and here is the Skype for Business Recording Manager. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next clip.