When titans of industry and state meet, worlds can change. The World Economic Forum launched a three year “Rethinking Personal Data” project, including data portability. Their first report, Personal Data: The Emergence of a New Asset Class, shows their direction.
A new asset class? That’s a telling use of language. Investopedia refers to securities with “similar characteristics, behave similarly in the marketplace, and are subject to the same laws and regulations.” Stocks, bonds, cash, real estate, and intellectual property are common asset classes. Some managerial accountants defined human capital as a new asset class.
Securities and IP go back hundreds of years. As a new asset class, personal data will have its own characteristics and market behavior, its own laws and regulations. We’ve barely mapped this new landscape. U.S. law doesn’t even recognize a theory of rights associated with personal data. So there is a great deal of work ahead. Some of that is ours, at the DataPortability Project. It falls to the DPP to crisply define data portability’s purpose, why it matters, how it fits into lives lived digitally. That’s some of our work at next week’s Internet Identity Workshop in Mountain View. [Skype me if you’d like an IIW discount code.]
Speed matters. A look at the chart below, from Bain, shows a rush to capitalize on billion dollar markets in data.
If we don’t embed data portability values and vision into the new identity and personal data infrastructure, it could take decades to achieve our goals.
So read WEF’s first report, below the fold. See where their thinking is now. And ask: where can we amplify their commitment to personal data portability?
Full Story »
Privacy International (PI) blogged three concerns about Skype security last week.  Let’s see how they rate on our fear-meter.
1. Risk: Impersonation. Skype lets you present yourself using any name. You could present yourself as someone else or have your identity confused with another user.
My take: I’m going to rate this 1 scared face out of 5 on the fear-meter. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Systems enable protected speech through anonymity, pseudonymity, and even using a pseudonym similar to someone else’s real name.
Future: Skype can offer to validate identities, either directly (credit cards) or through partners (banks, web sites, employers, governments), and to share a “this looks like a real person who holds this name in real life” badge. Trust builds network value.
2. Risk: Eavesdropping. PI says Skype lets third-parties manipulate downloads because Skype.com doesn’t use https to encrypt file downloads.
My take: 2 of 5 on the fear-meter. The opportunity exists for network hackers to intercept and rewrite downloads, burdening you with spyware, malware, etc. There are easier strategies, like co-opting the source of downloads by law enforcement or political powers, as seen in China and other countries.
Future: Skype could encrypt. It’s relatively cheap for Skype to use Transport Layer Security for downloads. So you’ll only receive malware authorized by Skype’s managers and partners.
3. Risk: Eavesdropping. PI says Skype’s speech compression method (variable bit rate) can reveal what words are spoken, even after encryption. They do this by matching the encrypted profiles of phonemes (the sounds that make up words) with unencrypted profiles. They claim phrases can be identified with a 50% to 80% accuracy, citing a Johns Hopkins University research project by Charles V. Wright, Lucas Ballard, Scott E. Coull, Fabian Monrose, and Gerald M. Masson (go Blue Jays!). The report’s abstract:
Despite the rapid adoption of Voice over IP (VoIP), its security implications are not yet fully understood. Since VoIP calls may traverse untrusted networks, packets should be encrypted to ensure confidentiality. However, we show that when the audio is encoded using variable bit rate codecs, the lengths of encrypted VoIP packets can be used to identify the phrases spoken within a call. Our results indicate that a passive observer can identify phrases from a standard speech corpus within encrypted calls with an average accuracy of 50%, and with accuracy greater than 90% for some phrases. Clearly, such an attack calls into question the efficacy of current VoIP encryption standards. In addition, we examine the impact of various features of the underlying audio on our performance and discuss methods for mitigation.
My take: 3 of 5 on the fear-meter. Yes, it is possible, in theory. Enterprise and government customers will care about this risk and want stronger protection. Meanwhile, crackers, academics, and intelligence agencies are productizing the analysis.
Why only three scared faces? If Nuance, Google Voice, and Skype transcripts are so horrible with raw voice streams, phoneme extraction and phrase encoding must be extremely hard to do with compressed and encrypted data. So only 3 for now.
Future: Skype and others who offer encrypted audio streams will tweak compression and encryption. It may cost a little more audio bandwidth and more CPU/battery. So don’t expect those changes to come too soon.
 I’m looking at today’s Inbox Love Conference agenda through a filter of Skype product and ecosystem strategy. What can Skype learn from email’s long legacy? Where might they fit together?
- A unified inbox – with chats, social/work updates, emails, events, tasks, and calls – would be very useful; one place to check. http://mail.Skype.com? Twilio’s Jeff Lawson is speaking on this.
- Rich caller ID. Rapportive could easily tell you about incoming callers and the other people in chat rooms. They could deliver a rich, social-media-informed caller-ID for incoming Skype calls, assuming Skype offered a useful web platform or in-client extensions.
- With inbox overload comes the need for relevance filtering. Xobni could easily offer data mining of Skype conversations. That’s if Skype offered real client extension or cloud platforms. Xobni’s Jeff Bonforte will speak.
- Most inboxes barely tell you about threads of conversation, let alone relationships. The folks at Graphight could help you renew old relationships, cultivate valuable ones, and invest in those that matter to you. Skype lets them fall off your radar if you’re not careful.
- Spam, identity theft, and other security issues apply to both; crossover of lessons learned?
- Email is part of our identity infrastructure. So are telephone accounts. When will we trust Skype accounts enough to authenticate users for authorizations that matter?
- Email was one of the first identities that let us participate online anonymously, pseudonymously, or as ourselves. Skype could be better at giving us more control over how we present and identify ourselves to different people.
- Hosted email is becoming the rule, not the exception. Yet the ability to migrate gigabytes of archives from one email account to another isn’t universally easy or even promised. True for Skype history and archives too, still tied to a given desktop and not stached (stash + cache?) in the cloud. Offer a graceful exit, please.
- Inboxes come with contact lists, accumulated from the spew of email from subscriptions, strangers and acquaintances. Skype offers few opportunities for weak ties to become contacts, or for discovering potential friends, family and colleagues.
- A contrast: Email is used for formal communication; IM for casual and collegial conversations. Do you break how the tools are used when you mix those contexts?
- Email traffic had been losing out to instant messaging for years. Now IM (down 8.3%) is losing out to chat and updates inside of social networks. Clearly, conversation follows (a) where your friends are and (b) where the context is fresh and relevant. Do you have more friends in Skype than X? Do you find more things to discuss inside of Skype?
- Would you want an email/Skype gateway? Email a message to a Skype name? Read it in your Skype client? Reply from Skype and read it in email? IM’s backed up or mirrored on a list server? Could be very useful in collaboration.
image credit: Claire Graves from Poke London from when she worked on the 2009 Skype Store makeover.
37Signals looked at their data and will shut down their OpenID service. Good on you for treating OpenID‘s usability issues seriously and for designing a smooth transition path. You gave it a shot for three years and it didn’t work out.
I’d love to have the 37Signals team come to the place OpenID was born: the Internet Identity Workshop. This is a teachable moment. Bring your observations and your customers’ pain so the next generations of digital identity serve you better. Two events are coming up: IIW #12 is May 3-5 in Mountain View but you might want to come to Identity Collaboration Day February 14th in San Francisco before RSA.
Skype’s long term identity will not be the new phone company. Skype is in the business of helping people manage their relationships.
Dear Skype,
Please:
- Join the Personal Data Ecosystem, a new umbrella organization and Identity Commons project, and participate in the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW)and Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) communities to advance person-centered identity and personal data concepts and technologies.
- Experiment with helping your customers visualize and act on their non-Skype social updates in the Skype context. New contextual conversation triggers from outside of Skype should foster better relationships and more, longer, better conversations.
- Expand SkypeWeb‘s presence service to also return mood messages where privacy settings permit.
- Start talks with Ping.fm, Comcast Plaxo and others who can help you pipe Skype’s updates through the social web.
- Test the effect of bringing workplace updates (from Yammer, SAP Friend Optimizer, Microsoft SharePoint, for example) into Skype on chat, conferencing and other calling behavior.
There’s an emerging role for Personal Data Stores (some people call it a personal data locker or data bank) that finds your information, collects it, and makes it easier for you to manage your relationships with the sites/services/apps/orgs that use or have custody of your data.
The Money Metaphor
One analog for the Personal Data Store is the bank where you store your money and keep it safe. They help you:
- get your money from other places
- put it to work passively with as they loan it out on your behalf and pay you interest
- pay others with your money through transfers, credit cards, EFTs, checking
- understand and manage your money’s states, flows, and allocations with metadata, reports, analysis and alerts
- comply with tax and other government authorities.
Continuing the bank analogy, vendors like Skype may take some of your money and hold it for you but that doesn’t make them a bank. Their core business isn’t helping you with your money. They just need to be responsible with your money and their own bank should work well with all of their customers’ banks.
The money metaphor for personal data works pretty well. People need institutions to act on our behalf, to be beholden to us for the security and utility of our personal information assets.
Back to Skype. 2008′s 28 “What Skype Means To Me” posts showed Skype bringing families closer together and helping people work remotely were more important than Skype’s disruption of the telecom industry. Skype’s true purpose, its long term identity, will not be the new phone company.
Skype at its core is in the business of helping me manage my relationships. Relationships are the accumulation of conversations and other things we do with each other. Those conversations and our social graph are awash in data. Yesterday I asked Skype to bring more of that data from other places into the Skype user experience.
There are two roles Skype-The-Company would play in this. The first is Social Peripheral Vision Provider. An SPPV provides a view into what is going on in the world through the lens of your interests and the people you know. You see this in desktop apps like TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop and mobile apps like those from twitter, facebook, and foursquare. Consider this a role between social surveillance and social sousveillance.
The second role is as a Personal Data Store, helping Skype users control, manage, and employ their own profiles, updates, and the records of their conversations. None of the major internet or financial institutions does this well or at a broad consumer or business level. Google provides a measure of identity consolidation through the Google Profile. Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are substantial health PD projects.
Skype should be a PDS for your online data. Skype should help you:
- get your data from other places
- put it to work for you through de-personalized aggregation
- “Sign in with Skype”, authenticating my identity to other services
- field anonymized requests for contact (“someone at IBM would like to speak with someone like you at Skype Journal”)
- share your data with other services on request (“LinkedIn is checking for your latest contact information”)
- facet how you present yourself so your Warcraft avatar is different from your LinkedIn profile photo
- contextualize your social graph’s activity (“these seven work contacts are in this meeting”, “your Tallinn contacts are leaving the office for the night”, “you haven’t checked in with your usual Monday morning people”)
- withdraw from other services, removing my data thoroughly
Skype could be the fourth party in Vendor Relations Management where its billion users (just a few more years) contract their data to companies that use it. As Joe Andrieu explains in his VRM and Personal Data Stores post:
Here are a few rights that users might want to be able to secure for their data, as well as some privileges they could provide to vendors:
- Reciprocity – That vendors who access a particular type of data also agree to reciprocally provide updates to that data. For example, I might let Amazon access my media history records if they agree to update it with my past and future media purchases at Amazon.
- Non-propagation – No further distribution of the data beyond the specific services authorized. No reselling to third-parties. No re-use by other divisions.
- Non-persistence – No retention of the data beyond the session of the current transaction. For example, an emergency room physician can access my personal medical history while I’m under his or her care, but he or she can’t store that data on any internal systems.
- Anonymous Persistence – Data can be retained, but only if it is suitably anonymized and disassociated from the individual user.
- Editable Persistence – Data may be retained by the vendor, but it must be editable and deletable by the user.
- Anonymized Analytic Rights – Vendor has the right to query the PD at a later point for business or operational analysis, as long as that analysis ensures anonymity after the fact.
Doc Searls added to the Cluetrain Manifesto‘s “Markets are Conversations” premise a tenth chapter: “Markets are Relationships.” eBay’s instincts were good when they bought Skype, a conversation enabler, to make eBay’s markets better. Skype’s cloud infrastructure could bring great power to their user’s side of business relationships and rich, trusted customer data to the vendors’ side. This could easily be the line of business that outpaces SkypeOut as a Skype’s top income source.
In Skype4Win5b: Menu > Contacts > Import Contacts…
First, pick a source.
This password antipattern asks for your login to another site. This is poor design, weak security, and Skype should know better. One of the reasons the world has OAuth.
Skype goes off to get your contacts.
I got error messages. “Windows Internet Explorer. Stop running this script? A script on this page is causing Internet Explorer to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer might become unresponsive.”
I pushed through the error and Skype let me know this would take a long time. “Searching your Facebook address book for Skype contacts. This can take a while…”
551 results. Avatars for one in five contacts. Real names (only loosely real), email addresses, and Skype names. No “location” data.
The Import contacts window closes and leaves you in the main Skype window with a flood of contacts. I could not see if they were in any particular order.
I blasted 551 generic messages…
Some of them were to existing Skype contacts. I’m not sure if Skype de-duplicated the imported contacts.
I wound up copying and pasting a message to my new/renewed contacts five hundred and fifty one times.
We’re facebook friends and I just ran Skype for Windows 5 Beta’s “Import Contacts from Facebook”. More than 500 contacts! I hope this is OK. I’m an Oaklander, the editor of the independent Skype Journal (http://SkypeJournal.com) and I steer http://DataPortability.org. This bulk importing of friends and associates feels odd. Yet I’m glad to have you in my Skype contact list. I wish there was more context brought over from facebook.
That messaging was inconvenient, unexpected, time consuming, and painful. I’m still sending out messages.
Assuming I’ve not been completely burned by this experience, I can import from a few other places where I have contacts. You can choose from Facebook, Microsoft’s Hotmail, Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Outlook, Microsoft’s MSN, and Rediff. The “Other” pull down menu shows more sources with whom Skype has negotiated contact access. mail.ru, Yandex, Libero, Rambler, WEB.DE, mail.com, 163.com, Wirtualna Polska, Daum, Interia, mynet, Indiatimes, 126.com, FastMail, and SINA. Does the arrangement of choices change based on your homeland or IP address so Daum is your first choice if you live in Korea?
To recap:
- Repair the password antipattern where OAuth2 is supported.
- Debug the browser errors and the delays.
- Test the idea of a custom “I friended you” message (LinkedIn does this). This improves responses, even with broadcasts.
- Automatically categorize the imports – “Imported DATE from SOURCE”
- Autocategorize imports for the renewal use case – “People I now know no facebook too”
- For large lists, consider letting me queue the invitations, separating the work of downloading the prospective contacts from inviting them, and letting me chunk the invitation queue. Each invitation creates the chance of my having to stop what I’m doing and chat with someone, perhaps for ten to twenty minutes. That happened this morning just before a conference call. The invites can trigger an overwhelming amount of work, hurting my relationships with others.
- Bring over more data from facebook to help me determine whether I’m importing a person or a company, an active friend or a three-year-old acquaintance.
- This is an import, not a synchronization. The minute you add a facebook friend, your Skype and facebook are out of sync. Detect people I know and suggest I add them to my address book, continuously and in the background.
Caveat downloader, this is still a beta and subject to change.
The best place in the world of identity to be next week is Washington, DC, for IIW–East. I want to talk with people about (a) the future of personal data property laws and (b) data portability in the public sector. 
I go to unconferences like IIW for the identity-focused brainpower. We’ll have the architects behind projects like OpenID, OAuth, Open Social, Portable Contacts, Activity Streams, Information Cards, XRD, XRI, XDI, SAML, DiSo, The Pamela Project, Higgins Project, CardSpace, Shibboleth. Industry groups like the Identity Commons, Liberty Alliance, OASIS ID Trust and the ITU-T Focus Group on IdM send thought leaders.
Two more IIW events follow this year: IIW-Europe, October 11 in London, and IIW #11 in Mountain View, California, November 9-11. They continue our community’s conversation that leads to builds better person-centered digital identity systems.
So far I see early-bird signups from Yahoo!, AOL, Microsoft, Oracle, Nokia, Alcatel-Lucent, Johns Hopkins University, Gartner, Cisco, Orange, AARP, the State of Connecticut and federal agencies. What a great mix.
There’s a race to be the keeper of your online identity by many of the largest Internet companies (Microsoft, Google, Yahoo!, Twitter), by financial institutions like banks and credit card, by government agencies (IIW was co-founded by Utah’s ex-CIO), and by those who provide your Internet (mobile, cable, and telephone companies). Skype is in a pretty good position to compete if it choose to.
More than 500 million people have Skype names but they only use them to sign in to Skype. Meanwhile Facebook, Google, Twitter, Yahoo!, MySpace and LinkedIn provide portable identity to their customers. The chart is courtesy of a Gigya.com report on multiple identity services.
Identity providers offer:
- Registration.
- Authentication for login.
- Data sharing.
People are more likely to use existing accounts than to create account new ones. A "Register with Facebook" button, for example, transfers trust to the new site and lowers the effort to explore it. Site operators love the higher conversion rate since more people sign up.
Once you’ve registered using a trusted authority, the new site doesn’t need to worry about your changing passwords or your profile. Your trusted authority, like Google or LinkedIn, knows your latest account information and takes care of authorizing you.
Your identity provider can also share your data with other sites. Different providers choose different data to share.
They commonly share your proper name, email, nickname, bio photo, profile URL, birthday, gender, location and a list of your contacts (your social graph in socialmedia speak).
Skype would be able to share most of those fields and more. Skype’s data model also offers mood message (like a tweet that lasts), primary language, time zone, and availability. Skype also has phone numbers (the ones where you forward SkypeIn call), online numbers (where you call and Skype rings) and Skype names.
Skype is missing a vast opportunity. Being an OpenID and OAuth provider reinforces your brand during more of each customer’s day, in more ways. It provides valuable behavioral data. It helps customers choose their primary trustee for their profile data, their contacts and friends, their media, and their conversation history.
Skype is rolling out their platform products starting with SkypeKit and continuing toward Communications as a Platform. "Sign In With Skype" could be great bait for Skype’s developer program.
Unfortunately, Skype’s identity model is soooo last century.
- IDs cannot be transferred.
- You cannot have multiple personas for each identity.
- You cannot present different profiles to different parts of your social graph (a family face versus a work face).
- Pricing and contracts are tied to user accounts, so Skype forces you to break your life into work and non-work, which is not how people communicate today.
- Skype never provided any APIs for account creation, change, transfer or deletion, so enterprises cannot automate account provisioning and manage the lifecycle.
- Skype manager, a control panel for supervisors, doesn’t offer an API for managing funds.
- Skype doesn’t model roles which might be shared among multiple Skype names, so inbound calls go to a pool of users to answer the call.
Some of these defects are structural, requiring serious reengineering. Other fixes would be additive, feasible within a few quarters.
Skype has a chance to build its identity technology, bring it to market, to win hearts and minds. Is it on Skype’s roadmap?
Updated: 10 July 2010: Added "Sign In With Skype" button mockup
Sometimes you need an interruption. Very good news. Very bad news. Very important news.
It’s the "very" that’s tough. Sifting through everything to find what’s meaningful to you right now is a monumental task.
Relevance engines like those at facebook and xobni and Google Buzz consider the source, of course. Is this person authoritative on this subject? Do I trust this person in this context? Does this person provide raw or processed information? How does this source compare with rival sources?
We have very crude general purpose filters. Part of this is working with sparse data about what you personally find relevant over time. It’s also hard to package raw data in ways that are easy to find and analyze. So I expect ActivityStreams and the open stack to come up at today’s Internet Identity Workshop as a strategy to help your agents generate more relevant and timely alerts.
Of course sometimes any interruption will do.
Thanks, Doonesbury.
- eBay’s post-Whitman management gets credit for doing something right. Staffing the right executives in 2008. Letting the new leaders turn the startup into a company worth selling. Sending the right signals to potential buyers. Getting the deal done. Not rewarding the founders for their Joltid extortion. Nice way to turn things around!
- Silverlake controls everything. With Silverlake Partners owning more than 50% of Skype Ltd., it’s their call when to float Skype stock in the future or sell Skype to another company.
- Skype will fund its own expansion. Don’t expect cash infusions for acquisitions, infrastructure, labor intensive services, or advertising. Skype has been producing more than $10 million monthly in free cash. Skype’s roadmap will chew up all of it just for internal growth and to create cash reserves.
- Skype will keep its overall direction and product strategy. Skype doesn’t need to rethink its business anytime soon.
- The SEC pipeline of data will be gone. eBay’s 2009q3 10Q report (coming this October) may be the last detailed reporting of Skype operations and finances ever. Privately owned companies need not report performance unless they float stock.
Five product changes I expect from Skype in the next year.
- Better P2P. Skype will first deploy a simple functional replacement of the Joltid P2P engine. They will improve it, building in six years’ of real world experience Joltid never had. Skype should be able to make its P2P network more resistant to Internet outages and blocking, more resilient in the face of damage to the peer fabric, more efficient in finding and routing connections between users.
- Better video. Perhaps their own video codecs. Higher resolution video as cameras and PCs catch up. Multiparty video calls. Better use of processors, including video digital signal processors.
- Skype Inside. A clearer platforming strategy, building on their experience with Skype Lite (clouds of Skype supporting thin, mobile Skype clients) and Skype For Asterisk (adding UI-free Skype clients to someone else’s servers). Think "Communications as a Platform," where you can build Skype messaging, presence, and calling into mobile, desktop, and server applications.
- ID anguish. Skype has an immature user identity model, left over from instant messaging services in the mid 1990s. We’ll see greater conflict between Skype’s two identity systems. Skype’s consumer and corporate Skype names (user IDs) aren’t interchangeable although their users and markets overlap.
- A little less anti-social. Skype’s great at talking with people you know. It does nothing to help me find interesting, entertaining, or useful strangers. Almost nothing (do birthdays count?) at helping me curate my friends and cultivate my relationships over time. Skype backed off from supporting its Skypecasts service (hosted calls with moderated Skype chat backchannels) and Skype public chats (web links to group text chats). Skype will research how to help people do more during a conversation (collaboration) and how to add more of the value found in other social media (discovery, ridiculously easy group formation, social gestures, non-conversational messaging).
photo credit: underlying photo CC BY 2.0 by Casey Serin.
Ping.fm is a synch service in the social stack, mostly in microblogging and rich presence.  Set up on Ping.fm:
Enable posting with Skype
To enable posting through Skype, request to add the bot "pingdotfm" by searching for the username and add it as a contact. When the bot appears on your contacts list, send it an IM with your verification code.
The ping.fm page will show your verification code once you log in to the site.
Ping.fm posts results in multiple places.
 Twitter. (microblogging)
 Vox. (blogging)
 LinkedIn. (professional network updates)
This is one of many ways to update your Ping.fm account so Ping.fm can update your many online lifestreams. Ping.fm’s bots also talk with AIM, jabber (including Google Talk), Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger.
Hat tip to the Pacific IT chat.
tags: skype, ping.fm, synch, synchronization, dataportability, microblogging, im, chat, twitter, linkedin, vox
Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
Skype for Vampires  offers the first Vampire-Ready Digital Identity System
Along with Skype for Vampires comes a new ID system, reflecting deep research into vampire market needs.
Multiple Pseudonyms, Persistent Identity. As you might imagine, vampires may wish to remain closeted. S4V now lets you define multiple aliases. You can apply aliases to individual contacts and contact groups. Your core digital identity should last as you shed aliases over the decades.
 My Species. Each alias may have its own species indicators. You can choose from Human, Vampire, Dhampir, Werewolf, Pixie, Decline To State, BiteMe! We can only guess what BiteMe! presence means.
Profile attribute: MyType™. Vampires can share their personal tastes using the common ABO blood group system (A, B, AB, O). Humans will be able to share their blood types in their profiles. You will be able to search the Skype directory for people according to MyType.
Real Vampire™. Is this contact really undead? Skype partnered with the American Vampire League to certify Skypers users as AVL members in good standing. Building on technologies like OpenID and OAuth, this is Skype’s second use of third-party authentication after its MySpaceIM partnership. They are promoting VoID, the Vampires over Open ID protocol.
These features should also be useful to humans. We all want to share ourselves differently with different people, applying the appropriate social context. Your boss shouldn’t know you hang out at vampire bars, your bloody friends shouldn’t know you go to church, and your church committee shouldn’t know how you voted. Skype now makes that possible.
See also:
tags: skype, skypejournal, bloodtype, realvampire, mytype, myspecies, biteme, vampire, dhampir, werewolf, pixie, presence, aliases, facedtedidentity, identity, id, trublood, trueblood
Call me at +1-510-455-4384, Skype me, follow @skypejournal and @Phil Wolff.
Visit our Skype Journal private roundtable, one of the longest running public Skype chats.
Business Control Panel (BCP) Management by Role.
When a manager leaves the company and takes her Skype account with her, will the company lose access to its control panel? To its funds? To its records? To its control over control panel membership?
BCP "ownership" should belong to a defined role, an alias, perhaps even a shared alias.
A manager, their manager, the telecom manager, someone from HR and someone reporting to the front line manager could share that role.
Skype’s current architecture prevents proper:
- Succession
- Delegation
- Supervision
- Audit
Without management through roles, powered by aliases, Skype’s BCP will create problems outside of very tiny, unusually stable organizations.
See Things I Really Want from Skype for Business:
Skype is a productivity and collaboration tool, well suited for workplace. Millions of people use Skype at work. Skype for Business is a Skype team and product family serving small and large organizations.
Multiple Business Control Panels Per Company.
The power in Skype for Business lies in Skype’s Business Control Panel (BCP).  The BCP is where Skype gives you fund multiple Skype accounts and manage SkypeIn phone numbers for your organization.
Today, you are allowed only one BCP per company.
It’s time to decentralize authority.
- Give authority to managers and team leaders closer to the people who use the service.
- Permit companies to create BCPs to match their formal organizational structure.
- Permit teams to create BCPs to match their informal organizational structure.
Benefits to Skype:
- More customer eyes on spending and activity.
- More awareness by first line managers of Skype and it’s uses at work.
Benefits to Business:
- Allows sponsors to respect privacy expectations within a company by limiting the size of BCP membership and visibility of BCP activity data and billing details.
- Roll up aggregate statistics and financials across a company to better understand spending and activity by department.
See Things I Really Want from Skype for Business:
Skype is a productivity and collaboration tool, well suited for workplace. Millions of people use Skype at work. Skype for Business is a Skype team and product family serving small and large organizations.
Multiple Companies Per Account.
A Skype account is a person.
Let me be affiliated with more than one company.
I may have:
- a full time day job,
- bake cookies under my own name,
- help a friend’s business on weekends,
- sit on the fundraising committee of my mosque,
- edit my professional association’s newsletter, and
- support my kid’s virtual lemonade stand.
No place in the real world does someone have just one enterprise affiliation.
We live in a buzzing swarm of many connections and groups.
When you ask people to choose just one, you shove them into the welcoming arms of competitors for every other relationship.
See Things I Really Want from Skype for Business:
Skype is a productivity and collaboration tool, well suited for workplace. Millions of people use Skype at work. Skype for Business is a Skype team and product family serving small and large organizations.
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7 years and 2 days since Skype Journal launched as a stand-alone blog.
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