Skype for Business: Update This Summer, and Meeting Broadcast to 10,000 people coming “later this year”

There have been plenty of great blog posts coming out of the Office Blogs team recently. Some of these came out during MS Ignite, so I’m now finding useful nuggets of information in them as I’m going back through them.

In this one, Skype for Business gains momentum, we got some firm indication about the new changes coming to Skype for Business meetings. Here are the three big takeaways:

Meeting Broadcast

“We announced today that later this year we will deliver the ability to broadcast Skype for Business meetings to up to 10,000 people at a time.”

Pre-Loading Content & Co-authoring

1. Pre-loaded meeting attachments (being able to add files to a meeting before it starts so that it shows up at the start of the meeting) coming this summer.
2. In-call co-authoring (multiple people working simultaneously on a single document in a meeting coming this summer.

“We also showed two new features coming this summer to Skype for Business: pre-loaded meeting attachments, which speeds meeting start times by having meeting content automatically show up at the start of a call; and in-call co-authoring, which makes it easy to initiate a co-authoring session so multiple people can work together on a single document right from within a meeting.”

There’s no formal indication of this, but it’s my guess that these features will come to Skype for Business Online / Hybrid environments first. Some, such as broadcast, only really make sense for online/hybrid environments, but it would be good to see pre-loading of attachments and co-authoring coming to on-premise installations as well.