[teekert]

Try using Skype for business... Your chat history is gone when you switch to another app and is not even saved on a PC. It's always the question if a chat ends up on your laptop of mobile. You frequently miss chats or have a "you missed a chat" email, even though you were logged in. It is an insanely poor product. I guess it's not where their focus is. It could easily be a Slack alternative except that it is so bad.

[emptythought]

I have such a passionate hate for S4B. This also happens to me, and the logging options mentioned below being enabled don't make a reliable difference: the logs don't always save!

Additionally, group chats often split in to two windows where the conversation suddenly continues in a second thread even when no one joined/left... and then you try and reply and it jumps to another conversation on its own.

People in my office have recorded this because it's so obtuse and unbelievable.

[gargravarr]

In addition to the awful client application, the logging issue is really frikkin' annoying. Something simple like 'show log history for <contact>' doesn't work.

I used to use Pidgin with the SIPE plugin, which worked well enough, and most importantly, logged in plain HTML with a fully working search mechanism, and if it came to it, I could just grep the folder.

Unfortunately my company recently moved to cloud-hosted S4B, and that completely broke Pidgin, so I've been forced onto the official client.

Someone at Microsoft really needs to learn the meaning of 'improvement'.

[douche]

Logs only save if you have S4B synced with your Outlook... Which you don't really want to do, because it will randomly toggle your presence status based on what it thinks your calendar is, and frequently causes issues with your .ost mail file getting locked by either Skype 4 B or Outlook so that the other one can't access it.

[strictnein]

> "Try using Skype for business... Your chat history is gone when you switch to another app and is not even saved on a PC."

Assuming you're in a corp environment, that's likely an IT decision, not a MS one. If you go to Options -> Personal there are two checkboxes for saving IM conversations and call logs in your Conversation History folder in Outlook. Mine are grayed out because IT decided to disable them (I'm sure to meet some corp requirement).

[tarlinian]

Our IT has done this as well...I'm told there are privacy requirements in Germany that equate logging chat history to eavesdropping on phone conversations, so it's illegal to log chat histories. This is insanely annoying since it's easy to accidentally close an active chat window and once the window's closed, the history is permanently gone.

[strictnein]

I also work for a German company, so that my explain it for me as well.

[basch]

you cant bounce back and forth between the mobile app and your desktop chat and the web chat without some of the clients not getting all the messages. its the exact opposite of facebook messenger. if i start a conversation on my pc, i should be able to continue it on my phone and walk away, and see what i said on my pc when i get back.

[hpshelton]

We built a true Slack alternative - Microsoft Teams ( https://products.office.com/en-US/microsoft-teams/group-chat...). Ironically that doesn't help the fragmentation argument...

[teekert]

Teams seems to get (relatively) decent reviews in the Android app store, sadly it's not available in our corporate software portal. I do have Sway installed though (tbh I think Sway can be nice just never saw anyone use it)... maybe I can suggest some alterations to the offering. (Edit: Never mind, I was able to login to teams.microsoft.com using my corporate account and instal everything from there. Thanx for the pointer.)

Strange thing is that indeed, the "save conversations" option is grayed out (unckecked) in S4B, yet we are allowed to use Slack.

[Maarten88]

My Skype for Businesses conversation history automatically goes in an Outlook/Exchange folder, so it never gets lost and I can search it. It's possible that our IT has configured this, but it has always worked like that for me, I think even since it was called LCS 2003.