Hi all
We're implementing Skype for Business and we've a mixture of Windows and Mac clients. We're able to easily add a GPO for the Windows clients to mark Lync traffic with DSCP tags for QoS, but I can't find any documentation or guidance on how to do the same for Skype for Business on MacOS.
Any pointers welcome.
Skype is Microsoft product, and GPO is a Microsoft service, you need to ask Microsoft.
Like you I could not find any documentation on how to do this for Mac clients. While you can configure the server side, and while the network switches etc. can match this the clients Mac and Windows have to be told to individually to use only the network ports that have been configured for QoS. Normally both the Mac and Windows clients use a large range of ports.
For Windows I believe this is done via a PowerShell command but of course this does not exist on a Mac.
My best suggestion would be to look at any Skype for Business plist files to see if they have any similar entries.
Sadly Microsoft have an appallingly bad and long history of very poorly 'porting' their Windows apps to the Mac and often according to widely held opinion deliberately cripple the Mac versions. While Adobe have copied many of Microsoft worst practices this at least is one Adobe are generally not guilty of.
I am not sure why they chose to use such a wide range of ports in the first place except to frustrate firewall rules. If they had stuck to a handful of well-defined ports then this problem would have never arisen.
Hi JimmyCMPIT. I've posted he same question in a MS forum as to see if the Mac S4B supports DSCP marking or not. I didn't intend my question to read as "Can Microsoft GPO apply to Macs" as I know that's not possible. The intention of the post was to see if MacOS can label Skype network traffic with DSCP markings to get the same result as Windows GPOs can achieve.
My post here is because Skype sits on top of the MacOS network layer where QoS would be applied. The question could equally apply to Jabber or Facetime so is really "How does MacOS deal with QoS?" with a focus on the Skype for Business client.
Apologies if my response may have sounded like "go take your problem to MS". I generally find Mac integration issues with Windows network questions can go un-responded to on these forums but MS forums can be an excessive in futility as well.
Best of luck with this.
I'll keep my fingers crossed that something turns up from the MS product team on their forum. They're rewriting the MacOS and it will gain features over time. I'm kinda hoping that the Mac client can pull a policy (if that's possible) from the Lync server and '...it'll just work'.
That would be the logical way to do it but again we are talking about Microsoft. The Windows client does not work this way so I would not hold ones breath.
Can QoS be applied to Skype for Business on MacOS?
