Enabling your video conferencing units to be added as Skype for Business contacts

To enable your Skype for Business users to easily place direct person-to-person calls to your video conferencing units that are subscribed to the Pexip Service, you need to add each video unit as an individual "contact" to your company's Microsoft Active Directory (AD).

Doing this makes the unit searchable by all your company's Skype for Business users under the local contacts list.

To add the contact address:

  1. Add the videoconferencing unit as a new contact in your AD as usual.
  2. Edit the SIP address for the contact and set the msRTCSIP-PrimaryUserAddress attribute to the SIP address of the VTC unit e.g. boardroom@company.com.
  3. Repeat this process for each video unit that your company is using with our Skype for Business gateway service.

If required, you can also follow the same process for any users on the service by adding their personal video addresses as AD contacts.

Note that there is a limitation in Microsoft when searching for the devices where the search string needs to contain the first word in the name. For example, if the name is "Room XYZ", searching for the second word — "XYZ" — will not yield any results. This should be considered when defining the naming convention.

Your Skype for Business users can now easily call your video units directly. See Calling a device or user on the Pexip Service from Skype for Business for more information.

Alternative dial pattern

As an alternative to creating AD contacts, you can use the following dial pattern to call VTC systems, however this is not recommended as it is not an obvious syntax for end-users to remember:

  • where the SIP URI for the device on the Pexip Service is: <name>@<domain>
  • the Skype for Business client should dial: <name>__<domain>@pexip.me

    (there is a double underscore between the name and domain)

So, for example, if the SIP URI for the device on the Pexip Service is: boardroom@company.com, the converted SIP URI for the Skype for Business client to dial would be: boardroom__company.com@pexip.me

Limitations when using the same domain

Either of the two methods described above allows Skype for Business clients to call VTCs on the service, regardless of whether they are using the same or different domains.

However, if you use the same domain for Skype for Business and your VTC systems on the Pexip Service:

  • You can only make calls from SfB to those VTC systems.
  • Outgoing calls from VTC to SfB clients with same domain or into SfB meetings with same domain will not work.