For this lesson, we’ll dive right into the Skype for Business Admin Center. For Yammer, the service hasn’t been fully integrated into Office 365 yet and frankly, it isn’t a service I’ve spent a ton of time administering. I’ll mention a couple things about it you should be aware of, but I won’t spend a lot of time there. Look for more content coming in the future about Yammer administration.

Skype for Business

Once more, if you’re family with Microsoft products, this name should be familiar. If not, this also used to be called Lync. It is Microsoft’s product for Instant Messaging (IM), meetings and voice calling. If you do have a Phone System plan in Office 365, this is also where you administer phone numbers, PSTN calling, voicemail, auto attendant, and call queues. The admin center for Skype for Business isn’t nearly as overwhelming as some of the others. There are really only a few sections in the Skype for Business admin center to think about.

  • Users: Assign phone numbers, configure audio and video settings, enable/disable external communications and setup audio conferencing options
  • Organization: Configure privacy and external communications for the organization as a whole
  • Voice: Phone numbers (system and user numbers) and PSTN calling options
  • Call Routing: Call Queues and Auto Attendant configuration
  • Online Meetings: Meeting invitation settings such as a logo, footers, help URL and legal URL to be included in all meeting invites.
  • Reports: PSTN Usage and blocked users

Again, this is just a high level of what you can configure in Skype for Business to give you an overview of what’s possible.

Yammer

This takes you out to Yammer and the admin center in Yammer, https://www.yammer.com/[yourtennat]/admin. Honestly, I’m not going to try to cover everything here, but this is the place you go for everything Yammer related.

If you want to configure Yammer to work closely with Office 365, you will want to take a look at Security Settings under the Content and Security heading. this is where you can set up Yammer to enforce using your Office 365 Identity, Block users without a Yammer license in Office 365 as well as have Office 365 Connected Yammer Groups (i.e. all new Yammer Groups get a corresponding Office 365 Group).

Conclusion

While Yammer is a bit more complex to administer, Skype for Business (in my opinion) is one of the easier ones to administer. This lesson will be changing in the future as Microsoft rolls out the new Skype for Business and Teams combined admin center. So, save this URL and look for an update on to this lesson in the next month or so.