The intent of this article is to clearly explain a few of the concepts and delivery models surrounding a topic of continuously growing interest: bringing traditional video teleconferencing (VTC) solutions into Skype for Business meetings. The main differences since then are that the overall solutions have become more streamlined and feature-rich in the few years that have passed while knowledge of the back-end infrastructure is deemed less important as more of these components are moving into cloud-provided models. The concepts outlined here may look familiar as much of what was covered in this previous article has been applicable to on-premises Skype for Business Server (SfB) deployments for some time.

Interoperability is a term which can been used in a few different ways throughout the industry, but the articles here attempt to separate the overall term between ‘ native’ integration provided directly within a client or endpoint versus ‘ interoperability’ which can be provided indirectly between systems by way of an intermediary component.

The summaries below also include various details from today’s announcements from Microsoft and some of their device partners at the Ignite 2016 event in Atlanta. Fresh on the heels of the recent Microsoft broadcast entitled Video Interop in the Cloud have come a number of questions from the overall community looking for further clarification on exactly what all this means.

Skype business online conference call