Dear inventor of Skype for Business 'Insert auto-emojis in professional communications at inopportune times, and do not expose a means of turning this off' functionality:  You suck.
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by:Colleen Kayter
Emoji. aka Emoticons. Look for small Gear in upper right corner to see Options. Click on the IM category in the left panel. Here's your on/off switch.

Skype for Business IM settings.
You're welcome.
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by:Brian Matis
@Colleen: do you know if that turns off the emoticon display for the person who receives the message? i.e. if Jim turns it off on his Skype client does that just mean he won't see emoticons or does it affect the messages he sends to others?
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by:Colleen Kayter
Brian, if I type :) and it doesn't convert to an emoticon, then an emoticon is not sent.  Are you thinking that on the receiving end, their copy of SFB, with Emoticons switched on, will convert :) to an emoticon?

Given how AutoCorrect works everywhere else, the recipient would have to position the cursor immediately after the :) and hit the spacebar to have the app check the ACL. I'm not even sure that SFB will allow recipient to edit received msgs.

And this from SFB Help,

"Show emoticons in messages    Select to show emoticons in instant messages. To display the typographical equivalents instead of emoticons, clear the check box."

So I think that what you see is what your recipient gets since Skype IM is a closed system (your Skype IMs won't be sent to someone's WhatsApp).
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Author Comment

by:Jim Horn
Per Colleen's comments...

Gear icon > Tools > Options
Selected IM in left textarea
Unchecked 'Show emoticons in messages'.
Hit Ok.
Typed the below to a buddy
(c)
Let me know if the above reads to you as left paren - c - right paren, or some kind of emoticon
(a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g)

Open in new window

The (c) reads to me as left parent-c-right paren, and my buddy sees it as a coffee cup.
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by:Craig Kehler
I too have a strong distaste for invasive emoticons.

Also it bothers me when people try to communicate with a string of emoticons... modern day hieroglyphs?
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by:Brian Matis
@Jim: Thanks for the investigation into that. Sounds like my concern was correct—that the conversion to an image could still happen for the recipient, depending on their preference setting. The usage of emojis across devices causes similar issues too. For example, how Apple renders emoji in iOS can be quite different from how it is rendered for a viewer on Android or Windows. It'll even differ across browsers on the same platform (e.g. Firefox vs. Chrome). And some characters aren't even supported in certain environments! I might think I'm sending someone a particular icon and they might just see gibberish.

See some examples here:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/78kzn9/what-the-emoji-youre-sending-actually-look-like-to-your-friends

Or even better, the full unicode list:
http://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html

It's enough to drive a perfectionist mad... (Which is why I gave up on that sort of thing long ago ;-)
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by:Colleen Kayter
Brian, are you able to send IMs from Skype to iOS or Android other than Skype apps for those platforms?
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by:Brian Matis
@Colleen - No idea. Sorry for any confusion, I just went off on a bit of a tangent about the challenges of never quite knowing how the recipient of something will see it and was using emoji as an example.
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by:Colleen Kayter
My favorite rant, Brian. Too often see corporate design guides that spec custom fonts, then they wonder why recipients don't see it with the formatting they intended. No one hates system fonts except graphic designers... :P
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