DIDs FEATURED ARTICLE

Skype (News - Alert) has been a staple of my voice communications life for about a decade. At first it helped me connect with friends in India and introduce me to video calling, then it became the way that I call when traveling in Asia each year (I spend about half of my time on the road).

I still use Skype—and love making calls from my laptop while on the road—but other VoIP services are nibbling away at its hegemony. This makes Microsoft’s (News - Alert) push to transform Skype into a business VoIP solution interesting.

Office 360’s Skype for Business is looking to replace business phone systems and on-premise VoIP PBX (News - Alert) solutions. Skype for business features voicemail, connectivity to the public switched telephone network (PSTN), conference calls, transfer calls within the context of your Skype for Business contacts, hold and resume functions, and other things you expect from a business phone system.

None of this is particularly exciting, though. What makes me more interested in this evolution of Skype is that it now supports the assignment of multiple direct inward dial (DID) numbers.

DIDs are basically phone number alias that can be overlaid on top of another number. You might have 16 numbers, but they all resolve to the same business phone system or single master number.

One of the values of DIDs, as I’ve learned from all my continent-hopping over the years, is that it enables a business to be “local” even when it is not. You can have DIDs from all over the country or the world and they can resolve to a VoIP solution that follows you around the planet. I work when I’m living in Bangkok, for instance, but all my U.S. clients see is a New York number. This is good localization.

Now DIDs certainly aren’t unique to Skype for Business; VoIP solution providers such as Vitcom can help businesses instantly add DIDs for numbers all over the country. The ability to add DIDs to my Skype account easily is nice, however.

But is it enough?

No, actually it is not. Skype for Business wants to be my business VoIP solution, but it still isn’t full-featured enough. It is easy, sure, but so are many cloud-based VoIP solutions. And since Skype was not built as a business phone system from the ground up, its feature set is small compared with other business VoIP systems and it doesn’t stack up.

Skype for Business certainly improves upon Skype functionality. But as a business VoIP solution, it isn’t competitive enough. The DID functionality is cool, but a good VoIP solution should be more than just about DID. That’s important functionality, but not enough.

Microsoft, you’re not there quite yet.