Skype For Business 2016 – Flashing Active Call Window

After rolling out Skype for Business 2016 with Enterprise Voice as part of the Office 2016 suite, we discovered a weird UI issue. This is nothing but a display problem, but can still be a little distracting and annoying!

On a certain call type – incoming PSTN calls – the little active call window would flash. This took some testing to realise, as logically there shouldn’t be a corellation with how a call got to your Skype for Business client, and a display issue with a call window; but it was repeatable time and time again, on multiple PCs with different logins.

I then found a Technet thread on the issue, but this was for the older Skype for Business 2015 client, which is pretty much a reskinned Lync 2013 client. That patch wasn’t applicable to Skype for Business 2016.

I then decided to log a Microsoft Premier case, which was rather quick and after showing them the problem and waiting a few days, they came back to say the problem was planned to be fixed in the Skype for Business 2016  – December 2016 patch.

We’ll see what happens in December and I’ll update this post, but in case others discover this issue, it’s not you and you’ll need to wait a few months :)

5 thoughts on “Skype For Business 2016 – Flashing Active Call Window

  1. Interesting. We’re running SfB 2016 here too (16.0.6701.1036) to be precise, and I haven’t noticed this behavior as yet.

    I’ll be looking out for it now! :)

    (OK, I’ve tested it. Doesn’t happen for us. We’re on SfB 2015 Server at present, and our PSTN calls are delivered via a SIP trunk into an Audicodes SBC800 – I wonder if the details there are significant…

    1. Could well be – identical here, but using Sonus SBC1000 rather than Audiocodes.

      Thanks for sharing those details!

  2. As of February 2017, no help here (big telecom enterprise). White flashing while on a call is driving me berserk. Have to shove it to the corner of secondary monitor and put a thick business card over it – but then I always wind up needing some part of the UI under the card.

    Absolutely appalling behavior, from Microsoft, who seem to put a premium on creating appalling app behavior.

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