Running a Teams Live Event? Close Skype4B!

Another quick one today.

With the large push to online conferences this year for “obvious reasons” you may have a need to moderate a Microsoft Teams Live event or two. I recently produced several sessions for Commsverse 2020 Online this year. (I might have presented a session too.)

If you’re not aware, the producer in a Teams Live Event is responsible for moderating the QnA, switching video sources and generally checking everything is going okay.

Teams and Skype Intergration

Something to keep in mind, however, is that Teams and Skype for Business have a fair amount of integration between the two applications when running on the same PC. This is so when you’re on a call in Teams and you take another call on Skype, Teams will correctly hold the first call to let you talk to Skype and vice versa.

The issue with this is that sometimes, that integration can cause problems. As it did for one event I was running.

The issue

As part of what I do, I still login to lots of Skype environments, it was 1am and I was overseeing some maintenance on a customer pool which caused my Skype client to log out.

No problem, the meeting is in Teams right? Wrong.

When the Skype client fell into limited functionality mode, my Teams client booted me out with a “We’re reconnecting you” prompt!

Horrified I quickly closed the Skype client and logged back into Teams.

Luckily it didn’t appear to cause any issues and the meeting went on without me. But, if there was a speaker transition scheduled for that 30-60 seconds I was hurriedly trying to reconnect it could have been quite embarrasing.

Wrap up

So what was the lesson here? Well just like when your presenting, make sure you close anything that you don’t need when your running a session. Including Skype for Business.

Hope this helps someone, catch you all next time!

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