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SysTrack Skype for Business Assessment

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The modern enterprise has many pillars upon which it is established and which are necessary for it to function. None of them however, are quite as crucial as the enterprises need for collaboration and communication. Every organization from the one-man freelance team to the multinational corporation has people who need to communicate with other people to complete the daily tasks required of them. As technology continues to develop and diffuse throughout every facet of business, the ways in which these organizations are required to communicate change as well.

Small teams who routinely work with one another are no longer housed within the same physical workspace while the meetings and presentations that occur between companies require far fewer in person encounters. Currently leading the way for and promoting this digital-centric communication is Skype for Business, a unified platform for real-time chat, voice, video, and screen sharing. Unfortunately, every technology is bound to experience some growing pains. We here at Lakeside Software are offering a SysTrack Citrix Skype for Business Assessment that will help alleviate some these pains and is described below.

The traditional method of deploying the Skype for Business client is to locally deploy it to each of the hundreds if not thousands of endpoints that require it and ensure that it is correctly configured for each user. Not only is this approach exceedingly difficult to manage but it also lacks the control, security, and visibility required by the same enterprises that need the features provided by Skype for Business the most. Citrix has stepped up and chosen to address these concerns with their HDX RealTime Optimization Pack (RTOP). Developed with and endorsed by Microsoft, the HDX RealTime Optimization Pack allows Skype for Business to be published as a virtualized application or within a virtual desktop with the same performance as a local installation.

This optimization technology is the only Microsoft-endorsed solution for delivering Skype for Business in a virtual environment as the architecture of the HDX RTOP ensures integration with other Microsoft office products is maintained. The audio-video quality continues to be “local-like” while the accessories and interfaces to which user have grown accustomed to are as they would be on a locally installed client. Any solution, no matter how powerful or simple still needs ample consideration before it can be to be implemented and utilized.

The SysTrack Citrix Skype for Business Usage Assessment can be used to explore the current environment and summarize the data that is most relevant for determining the benefits of adopting the HDX RTOP. Such areas include the number of different versions present in the environment as well as the how many of them are actually being used. Supporting multiple versions, many of which are no longer current, puts undue strain on a company’s helpdesk and other support resources. It’s also worth observing the usage patterns of the users.

Heavy and moderate users of Skype for Business will drive most of the resource demands associated with supporting it while the light users must still be provisioned properly to fill their roles. Finally, one of the most significant motivating factors for centrally delivering and managing Skype for Business for users is the ability to more closely control potentially problematic end user behaviors, like caching conversations locally in an insecure way. Each of these areas of importance can be examined with the SysTrack Skype for Business Usage Assessment.

These new products from Citrix are excellent and continue to provide remote application and desktop experiences to end users, but it’s essential to maintain visibility into consumption and user service quality to understand how best to develop a robust IT environment while also satisfying the needs of the users. Some of the tools granted by the SysTrack Cloud Edition have been used to create a snapshot of that performance but no environment is static. Be prepared to tackle this inevitable change with SysTrack and leverage the data in your favor.

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