“Hello? Can you hear me? How about now? Sorry, you were breaking up there, let me move to a different spot.”

This conversation is a daily occurrence across all businesses as employees rely on calls and conferencing tools, especially with the ubiquitous use of Skype for Business (S4B), to get work done. Successful organizations are contingent on fast and reliable voice, video and screen sharing capabilities and, in today’s business world, to experience anything less than “good quality” in a professional workplace is unacceptable. Poor quality, disruptions and failures can critically affect employee productivity and create significant frustration. Unfortunately, this is too often the case and when it does, the first question to ask yourselves to start remedying the problem is not what is not working, but rather why is it not working.

Indeed, the main challenge organizations have with S4B is that they are unable to determine if issues are isolated or globally widespread. The only means they have to get a feeling of issues’ severity is from ticket count, which only reminds them that they have a problem, but rarely tells them why.

For this very reason, Nexthink has developed its “Skype for Business Diagnostic Content Pack”, a prepopulated set of investigation dashboards to make IT administrators’ lives a lot easier. It does this by giving them access to interpreted insight to make sense of their S4B activities. The pack performs two main function under the hood:

• Categorization: It targets and tags all devices with S4B installed to help specify data collection.
• Remote Action: From the tagged devices, Nexthink Collector automatically extracts a multitude of data hourly.

This reliable and precise data collection process provides insight not just about the devices used to make calls, but also about specific details such as call success, failure, drop and general quality. This data can then be reviewed, interpreted and investigated through Nexthink’s two different user-friendly interfaces:

Dashboard

Accessed through Nexthink Portal, investigators can access intuitive dashboards revealing long-term performance behavior across all devices using S4B for a holistic overview. For instance, to compare call Wi-Fi vs Ethernet call quality, or to compare failed (non-initiated) calls vs dropped (initiated but interrupted) calls. Already, such information enables key pointers to locate issues potentially stemming from bandwidth quality or network glitches. To increase precision, this information can be filtered by audio, video or screensharing calls.

Scoreboard

While the dashboard provides more macro-level insight, the scoreboards, accessed through Nexthink Finder, allows investigators the ability to drill down into singular endpoints to isolate micro-level issues. For example, a single device which has been experiencing constant quality drops might also experience a high CPU utilization which the investigator can see in the device’s timeline view and correlate to the quality drop.

S4B is a vital tool to any organization, and for it to perform well should not be a luxury. To enhance its digital experience optimization solution, Nexthink offers the S4B content pack to collect and interpret S4B-specific insight, enabling IT administrators to make data-driven decisions to improve employee satisfaction and productivity.

Click here to find out more from the official documentation page.

To download our Skype for Business Library Pack, simply go to the Nexthink Library within Nexthink Finder.

Watch the full webinar recording here.