Microsoft has released their prime news for 2017 which is to replace skype for business with Microsoft Teams. They went public with this news at their main technology event, Microsoft Ignite conference 2017 held on Orlando. Microsoft Teams, the core communication and collaboration tool will soon be integrated with Skype for Business Online capabilities and will replace the current Skype for business Office 365 client. With the Teams integration Microsoft announce their new vision as “Intelligent Communications”.
Intelligent communications go beyond traditional unified communications, enabling you to complete tasks more efficiently with minimal context switching, participate in more productive meetings that cover the entire meeting lifecycle, and better manage your everyday communications overload.
To meet this new vision, Microsoft announced two changes to their product road map.
- New Skype back-end infrastructure for enterprise grade voice, video and meetings
- Microsoft Teams will become core communication client for Office 365 customers
What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams was released in November 2016 as a new member to the Office 365 suite. It is a chat based collaboration tool which is integrated to office products to provide global, remote and dispersed teams with the ability to work together and share information via a common space. With the team’s workspace, users can share files and calendar, collaborative editing and easy switching between voice, video or text chat.
Teams is not a standalone product, it comes with Office 365 product suite. If you are not already enabled teams, follow these instructions (here). Not only office products, teams also integrated with SharePoint, Skype for business and exchange. Also it can be integrated with third party services such as DropBox, YouTube and google drive.
Benefits of using Teams in organizations
From the word itself, Teams improves group work, collaboration and communication within the organization. Team’s workspace enables chat conversions to visible to entire teams or to be conducted privately. They can see the history of the communications so everyone is updated about the situation. Also there is a hub which allows team members to work collaboratively without toggling between applications.
Teams is a highly customizable application, its workplace can be customized according to the business needs and the organization culture. Also it can be integrated with third party softwares to facilitate the group work. It supports the Microsoft Bot framework, so organizations’ intelligent services and applications can be integrated with Microsoft Teams.
Future of Teams
With new vision of Intelligent Communication, Lori Wright the general manager for Microsoft Teams & Skype explained at the Ignite, how would be the future of a business meeting with Teams.
- Before a meeting, Teams will surface relevant documents and rich information about the participants to help you prepare.
- During the meeting, the conversation can be captured, transcribed, and time-coded, with closed captioning and voice recognition for attributing remarks to specific individuals.
- After the meeting, the cloud recording and transcript can be automatically added to the relevant channel, so conversations, documents, notes, and action items can be reviewed, indexed, and searched by the entire team.
Following new features will be incorporated in to the product.
- Adding calling features in Teams—including inbound and outbound calls to PSTN numbers, hold, call transfer, and voicemail.
- New enhancements to Teams meetings, including audio conferencing enabling participants to join a Teams meeting by dialing a telephone number—and interoperability between Teams and Skype for Business, including universal presence, and messaging and calling interoperability.
According to the Microsoft announcement they will continue to support Skype for Business in Office 365 and Skype for Business Server on-premises. There will be new version of Skype for business server scheduled to be released in second half of 2018 to support customers who have not still moved to cloud.
Cheers
Asitha De Silva
References
Microsoft Ignite 2017
https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2017/09/25/a-new-vision-for-intelligent-communications-in-office-365/
