Regionally Hosted Skype for Business Meetings

Hi I posted a quick update on the Regionally hosted Datacentres that are coming to office 365, but thought I would write a quick article to provide a bit more detail on the content of the video for those who are interested. One of the common question I get asked “is Skype is great but how does it affect my network bandwidth and what is the performance like” and this announcement will be great news for you. :)

Effectively what we are launching is for globally dispersed customers who have a single office 365 tenant is the ability to host Skype for Business Meetings in the Datacentre that is closest to their users. This will give them best performance and quality for Audio, Video and screen sharing in their meetings.

At the moment all users in the tenant will connect to the single datacentre which as can be seen in this scenario would result in the Australian users connecting to North America Datacentre for their conference calls.

This typically meant the customers start to look at improving performance with more expensive MPLS or the Express route services. However what will now happen with a Regionally hosted meeting is that the traffic will go to the closet datacentre which will result in a lot better performance on cheaper internet links which can be seen below.

The other great capability is that once the users are in the multi region solution if the Australian users are in a meeting with the North America team is that they will connect to the Microsoft Australian Office 365 Datacentre and then connect to the North American Datacentre via our Hyper Scale fibre backbone which means that you as a customer don't need to ramp up your higher cost MPLS services as we provide the high-performance connectivity.

The headline picture shows the areas where we are offering the service in blue and the areas we are not in red.

If you would try the service now you can go to Skype preview and register using your office account. For Skype Preview Click Here

When the service becomes available in the second half of  2017 you can simply contact premier support and then you just need to follow these steps:

I would encourage you to watch the Skype Meeting Broadcast Video featuring Jamie Stark and Daniel Strader which provides a lot more detail than this simple introduction:

Watch Regionally Hosted Skype for Business Meetings

Also, if you would like to find out more about Skype for Business and the new online services then please contact your account representative and we would be happy to help you get things set-up.