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Dear blog reader,

Would you like to improve your Skype for Business skills? Look no further – I’ve listed five useful Skype for Business tips for you. In this post, you’ll find my first tip about shortcuts. You can find the other four tips here:

Are you working on a project with a colleague and do you need to message them regularly? With this tip, you can send them an Instant Message with just one click.

Just right-click anywhere on your desktop and select ‘Shortcut’ under ‘New’.

You’ll see this screen:

This is where you enter your colleague’s e-mail address. In this example, we’ll use info@xylos.com.

Please note: Since this is an e-mail address, you’ll need to type ‘sip:’ in front of it. Like this:

Like this: Sip:info@xylos.com

Click ‘Next’.

Enter a name for your shortcut and click ‘Finish’. In this example, I’ll call my shortcut ‘Info Xylos’. You’ll see the following icon on your desktop:

Double-click the shortcut and select ‘Skype for Business’ to open it.

Tip: You can check the option to always open this shortcut type with Skype for Business.

The system now automatically replaces the shortcut’s default icon with a Skype icon:

If you right-click the shortcut and go to ‘Properties’, you’ll see two additional options:

  1. You can set a keyboard shortcut. In this example, I’ve chosen Ctrl+Alt+F5. Wherever I work with Windows, I can now open the Skype chat screen with this keyboard shortcut and immediately send a message to my colleague.
  2. You can change the shortcut icon by clicking ‘Change Icon’.

Bonus option: shortcut for phone calls

You can’t just create instant message shortcuts – you can do this to instantly call a colleague as well.

If you right-click the shortcut and go to ‘Properties’, you can enter your contact’s phone number, preceded by ‘tel:‘.

This also works with the keyboard shortcut.

The only thing you need to do now to call your colleague is click ‘Click to call’:

Stay tuned for the next tip!

 

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