Skype for Business Online adds support for Common Area Phones (At Last!)
The long awaited option for licensing common area phones for use with Skype for Business Online/Office 365 Phone System has arrived. Since the announcement of the Office 365 Phone System (Then called Cloud PBX) at Ignite 2015, IT Pros have struggled with how to configure and license common area phones for this offering. While the on premises version of Lync/Skype for Business server has long supported these common area phones, the cloud version has not. Until now, adding a phone which was not associated with a specific user required treating the phone's Office 365 account as an additional user, assigning it a combination of Office 365 licenses that made little sense for a stand alone phone in a break room or other other shared area. This was cost prohibitive in many cases, and prevented some companies from making the move to Microsoft's otherwise attractive cloud based phone system. In January, Microsoft's Alejandro Araujo Rajzner revealed in a Microsoft Te