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:
- Skype for business tip 2: How to send a meeting request
- Skype for business tip 3: How to send your screen
- Skype for business tip 4: Do Not Disturb… with some exceptions
- Skype for Business tip 5: Tag for Status Change Alerts
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:
- 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.
- 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!
