Skype for Business Online to become Microsoft Teams

A few months ago, my organization decided that it was time to examine an intraoffice messaging tool to supplement email as our internal communication tool. Over the years, we had seen a steady increase in brief email exchanges that would be more suitable for instant communication rather than the asynchronous nature of email. Skype for Business was nominated and subsequently deployed to a handful of staff as a pilot project, something mostly to test the waters to see if we, as an organization, could adapt to this form of communication. Adoption for the most part was painless and the general consensus seemed quite positive. As a side note, our organization doesn’t use the calling capabilities of Skype, and are unlikely to pursue this feature any time soon.

Shortly after implementation, we saw that Microsoft was looking to begin building Skype for Business capabilities into their new collaboration platform, Teams.

Introducing Microsoft Teams

With the continuing growth and adoption of Office 365, Microsoft is getting a closer look at how organizations are choosing to get their work done. With increasing collaboration across different work groups and the technology to support it, teamwork has never been more important. Teams will bring together features from across the Office 365 portfolio to create a Unified Communications platform to deliver a single hub for teamwork. Features that will be available through Teams include:

 Chat

One of the core features of Teams is the ability to communicate through persistent chat in team groups and private one-on-ones. To make following a conversation easier, the group conversations are threaded. Real-time, threaded conversations make for a more streamlined way to manage diverging conversations. After all, we know trying to chase down the correct thread in an email conversation can oftentimes be a nightmare. The chat also features the ability to @ tag individuals, making notification of critical team members clear.

 Meetings

For organizations that leverage teleconferencing, Teams brings a wide range of meeting features that enables audio, video and web conferencing with anyone inside or outside your organization. From small group stand ups to larger broadcasts, Teams allows for audiences as large as 10,000 attendees. The ability to span these meeting features outside of your organization can be very beneficial as more resources move toward as-a-service models hosted by third-party providers.

Phone System

Taking the experiences gathered through Lync and Skype for Business, Microsoft evolves its phone system offering with Teams. Circumventing inflexible and proprietary telephony hardware, Teams will deploy an array of soft phones across PC, Mac and mobile devices to create a reliable, cloud-based solution. Microsoft has partnered with vendors to provide hardware certified for a high degree of adoption and interoperability with Teams. Phone vendors are actively working to meet this higher bar and will be qualifying against the new requirements starting the end of this calendar year.

All in all, it looks like Microsoft is pulling together and improving a lot of the functionality that was in Skype for Business into a product that is able to more comprehensively address the communication needs of an organization. With products like Slack taking large portions of the market share of corporate instant messaging, it’s time that Microsoft step up to the plate. Teams brings us a bunch of features that rival Slack’s with deeper Office 365 integration, along with robust meeting and conferencing features. Time will tell whether or not it’ll usurp Slack’s grasp but the future looks good for Teams.