It supports text, audio, and video chat, and integrates with Microsoft 365 components such as Exchange and SharePoint.

[6] In May 2013, Microsoft announced that it would allow Lync users to communicate with Skype, a consumer IM platform it had acquired in 2011.

[9] On September 25, 2017, Microsoft announced that Skype for Business Online would be discontinued in the future in favor of Microsoft Teams, a cloud-based collaboration platform for corporate groups (comparable to Slack) integrating persistent messaging, video conferencing, file storage, and application integration.

[15] The main new features of this version are the addition of real-time multi-client collaborative software capabilities, (which allow teams of people to see and simultaneously work on the same documents and communications session).

Lync and Skype for Business implement these features as follows: All collaboration sessions get automatically defined as conferences, where clients can invite more contacts.

Skype for Business supports federated presence and IM to other popular instant message services such as AOL, Yahoo, MSN, and any service using the XMPP protocol, although support for XMPP has been deprecated in Skype for Business 2019.

Microsoft does offer details of its extensions on MSDN and provides an API kit to help developers build platforms that can interoperate with Skype for Business Server and clients.