Forum Discussion
Multiple chats sessions with same contact in S4B window ?
I see multiple instances of chats with the same contact. This is really cluttering up my Skype for Business app window in both my mobile iOS and my desktop app.
Example:
Chat session with Joe at 10:00 for 10 minutes
Chat session with Joe again at 14:00 for 15 minutes
Now I see two separate chat streams with the same contact. Why isn't this singular? If I have a chat session with Joe and i do not actively remove/delete that chat session, shouldn't it just continue the next time one of us write?
Is this by design? Do I need to adjust something in Skype for Business Admin on 365?
I am using latest builds . iOS Version 6.11.1.310 and Mac OSX 16.2.156
Please help, this is sure to cause complaints amongst staff and I expect will introduce user acceptance numbers to drop. Especially if this is to be compard to WhatsApp, or any attempt to replace WhatsApp.
Cheers p
Unfortunate that this journey has reached a dead-end. I need the functionality and am not particularly set on which software delivers it ... provided said software is within the MS family and my existing license structure. Therefore, does Teams solve this, and is the general advice, "sorry, S4B is never going to solve this as the core architecture is not built to do so, which we inherited, and are not going to rebuild from scratch because we've released Teams ... so start using Teams?"
Because, if that's so, and we can get that from Phil or another MS rep then I'll mark it as the best answer and move on with my life. Phillip Garding appreciate your efforts. What do you say we just finalize a solid answer here ... Move to Teams ?
- Phillip Garding
Microsoft
There are several open questions on this thread, and I want to try to address them.
We acknowledge that people are frustrated with the experience of having conversations with a person show up as separate sessions. This is a usability problem for some users, and we invested time exploring a variety of ways to mitigate this in the client. To address the problem, we implemented the Grouped View in the Chats panel in order to bring all sessions with the same user together and simplify viewing and finding chats.
In Preferences, there is an option to Show single window for conversations with same user that sounds like it might affect the behavior of the chats list, but this actually does something else. This setting only applies when Show conversations in separate windows option is enabled, meaning chats are opened in a separate top-level window instead of shown in a panel of the main Skype for Business window. If both settings are enabled, and you have a chat window open with a user, any new messages from that user will be shown in the open chat window. (Before the 'single window' setting was implemented, you could have multiple open windows with the same user.) This is true even if those messages show up in the Chats list as a separate session. These are subtle concepts to explain, and we struggled to find wording for the checkbox in Preferences. Unfortunately, all choices had the potential to be misinterpreted.
The Chats list in Teams is organized around people and groups, so the duplication problem seen in Skype for Business is not an issue. Messaging in Teams is built on a completely different architecture than Skype for Business. Teams has a database for storing messages and does not rely on storing conversations in Exchange, so there is no session concept in Teams chat. Teams is an excellent and growing product. We encourage customers to adopt Teams as our next generation communication product, but many factors go into the decision of which communication product to deploy. For those customers who choose to continue using Skype for Business, we are committed to maintaining and improving Skype for Business for many years to come.
Phil.
- I honestly don't understand the bussiness sense here. Sure it might be easy for small companies to casually drop S4B and use teams but why not simply add this "feature" to S4B? People clearly want it. It makes design sense based on literally every single chat application people have been using since direct messaging started. There's even a tab LITERALLY called persistent chat in OPTIONS! And all it does really is let you choose the sound and priority of messages. How hard can it be to have one window for each user. Even if the original code wasn't designed for this, how hard is it to stitch the sessions together in a GUI with a line separating sessions.
It's July 2018 and I'm still experiencing this issue on Mac High Sierra. My company runs Skype for Business 16.18.51.
Is there any hope this issue will be resolved?
-Robert
My solution? We moved our entire group to Teams and configured S4B forwarding for our accounts. Goodbye Skype. The only issue is that Skype conversations are not forwarded to the Teams mobile app, but we're working on that. At least now I have consolidated and persistent conversations! Good riddance.
- Hi Drew,
When you say: "S4B forwarding", are you talking about call or message forwarding? If it's the latter I would be very interested in knowing how you did it! Because like you I've migrated all my users to Teams but sometimes they still receive messages in Skype...
Thanks
ChristianSince our group is small we used powershell to configure it at the user level for those that wanted to move to Teams. This document details the options: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/migration-interop-guidance-for-teams-with-skype
Grant-CsTeamsInteropPolicy -Identity jsmith@example.com -PolicyName Tag:DisallowOverrideCallingTeamsChatTeams
- My company recently migrated to Office 365 and has started using Skype for IM between departments. The split chats and slow synchronization between the iPhone app and Windows client are the two complaints I'm hearing the most so far.
I am on the latest code, and I still am seeing multiple chats sessions with same contact in S4B window. Has anyone found that this latest code is resolving this?
No, according to the latest post from an MS Dev, they are still working on this and don't have an ETA as to when it will be solved.
- Phillip GardingCorrect. We have a fix in internal testing, and we are working to fix edge cases and bugs before we release this to Insiders for external testing.
Phil.
I don't believe M$ will ever correct this issue. As a System Administrator in the middle of a G Suite to Office 365 migration, it has been very disappointing to see that for now there is no comparable, reliable instant message option, in my opinion, offered by M$ 0365. Furthermore, they have already been indicating that they will be phasing out S4B into M$ Teams. More information here. It doesn't make a lot of sense for them to put much more time or development into S4B when it will eventually go away.
- Phillip Garding
Hello, Loren:
We are working right now to fix the split conversation problem. We are working to ship this in a client update before the end of 2017.
We are absolutely committed to continue supporting Skype for Business customers through client and server updates for the foreseeable future. Of course, we will encourage customers to move to Teams as they are able, but we recognize that many of our customers, especially on-premises customers, will not be able to make that move for years. So Skype for Business is a long-term commitment for us.
Phil Garding
Seems like a fairly simple fix, considering the fact that the Home edition keeps all conversation with one person in one thread. I use both Skype for Home and Skype for business. Just loaded Skype for Business on my home PC with the latest version... STILL has same issue. Seriously? not to be snarky but I don't get why a simple function takes so long to implement. If I ran my home business like this I would be out of a job.
Summer has been and gone in the UK and the problem still hasn't been resolved.
It's coming up to summer in the southern hemisphere now...
Really need all the same contact to have the same thread for all sessions.
Should we expect an update or wait and hope for our orgs to be switch the teams?
I am also (still) having this issue. Now end-of August. Looking forward to update.
Phil:
- I have not discerned a pattern except that it seems to split when there was a number of minutes between chats for me. Happens about 4-5x in the course of a working day chatting with one person.
- I am on a Mac (seems to be true of most/all ppl in this thread), my colleague is on a PC running Windows 10.
Any news on this?
- This is still happening in SfB 16.9.37 on macOS Sierra (August 2017). Possibly a related issue - older chats keep reappearing after being deleted.
