Skype for Business – How to Change Privacy Relationships

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Skype for Business Video Transcript 

I’m going to show you how to change Privacy Relationships in Microsoft Skype for Business. Skype for Business uses Privacy Relationships to control the contact information that is available to contacts in each of the five different privacy access levels. In other words, with Privacy Relationships, you can make only specific items on your contact card available to certain people. For example, I might want my coworkers to be able to see my phone number, but not external contacts.

To change the Privacy Relationship of a contact, right click on the contact from your contact list. Go to Change Privacy Relationship, and choose from the options listed here. There are five different options:

1. Friends and Family
2. Workgroup
3. Colleagues
4. External Contacts
5. Blocked Contacts

Skype for Business gives you a brief description of what the privacy includes below each of the options. For example, Friends and Family can see all of your information, but they won’t see any of your meeting details, which are shown only to people in the Colleagues or Workgroup Relationships.

Workgroup contacts can see everything that your Colleagues do, but they can also see your mobile phone number. And they have the ability to contact you even when your status is set to Do Not Disturb, which normally stops any contact or IMs that you don’t initiate yourself.

The farther you move down this list, the less information a contact will be able to see until you get to Blocked Contacts, who will not be able to contact you at all through Skype for Business.

I work with Adam a lot and want him to be able to reach me at all times, so I’m going to add Adam to my Workgroup. Click on the Privacy Relationship you want your chosen contact to have. You can verify a contact’s privacy relationship by right clicking and navigating back to this list. If we right click again on Adam, we can see that he has now been added to my Workgroup.

At any time, you can choose Auto-assign Relationship to reset this contact’s status to Skype for Business’ default relationship

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