Microsoft Corp. today announced a major update to Skype for Business that aims to reduce the amount of work involved in operating large-scale deployments.

Ron Markezich, head of marketing for the Office 365 division, laid out the new features in a blog post published shortly after the start of the unified communications industry’s Enterprise Connect event today. Arguably the biggest addition is Call Analytics, a monitoring dashboard that enables administrators to view technical issues centrally that may interrupt calls for line-of-business personnel.

Reducing the amount of effort required to pinpoint a problem should speed up the troubleshooting process, which in turn can help organizations solve errors faster.  A similar consideration drove Twilio Inc. to add a diagnostics tool for its own communications service late last year. Dubbed Voice Insights, the feature can automatically identify which of the numerous connectivity errors, headset issues and other problems that might crop up during a call is causing trouble for users. Markezich indicated in his post that the new Skype for Business dashboard similarly enables administrators to determine whether a call is interrupted by “network issues or headset problems.”

Two other features introduced in today’s update are geared toward the growing number of organizations that rely on the service to support their contact centers. The first is called Call Queues, which makes it possible to automatically prioritize customers call based on the order in which they were placed.

The other feature, Auto Attendant, is aimed at helping companies more easily implement a phone menu for processing different types of inquiries. It can take not only text input but also voice commands thanks to built-in speech recognition algorithms.

Microsoft’s move come as the market for business-oriented conferencing and meeting services is heating up. The combatants include Cisco Systems Inc., which today introduced new Spark devices and features at Enterprise Connect, as well as Google Inc. with recent additions to its Hangouts and Amazon.com Inc. with its Chime service introduced last month.

Microsoft’s efforts to maintain Skype’s leadership position appears to be paying off. Markezich revealed that the service now handles more than a billion meetings per year, while usage of Skype for Business Online has doubled over the past 12 months.

Image: Microsoft