Yesterday, as part of the release of the new Skype 3.0 beta for Windows, Skype also released a new version of their “Guide for Network Administrators.” Like the previous version, it provides details about Skype’s peer-to-peer architecture, discusses Skype’s potential network impact and provides Skype’s view of how to protect your network. But of more interest for most folks will be the final 9 pages of the document where there is a new “Deploying Skype in The Enterprise” section. It first provides some general information about ensuring the integrity of the Skype installation software, discusses some of the configuration files and finally goes into greater length about the registry settings that can be enforced through Windows Group Policy settings.

Given the concern about Skype that enterprises have had, this type of information is certainly welcome. Like the 3.0 beta, the guide only provides Windows information, so we would certainly hope that as the guide matures, it will include more information about the Mac and Linux versions of Skype as well. It will be interesting to hear feedback as enterprise IT security people start to take a look at these guidelines. Are they enough? Is more needed? (If you have comments, we’d love to hear them.)