If the rumours are to be believed, Microsoft will shortly be announcing that the capabilities of Skype for Business will be incorporated and embedded into Microsoft Teams.
But what does this mean to the way we work? Here’s three ways this will make your life easier:
- One of the questions we are often asked is ‘What do I use when?’, because Office 365 contains many overlapping components. Between them, Teams, Groups, Yammer and Skype offer similar features and outcomes – there are too many options. Consolidating some of them makes absolute sense.
- We can currently schedule both Skype Meetings and Team Meetings, however they don’t co-exist very well. From an end user perspective, a meeting’s a meeting, yet Skype and Teams meetings are different. The way you join them is different, they have separate Outlook add ins, and annoyingly, your presence status in one does not flow through to the other. Combining Skype and Teams meetings would be a great way to improve the user experience.
- If Skype and Teams are combined, we should see external parties being able to participate in our persistent chat groups. The potential impact to how we work here is huge; we’ll feel more connected to the people we work with, whether they work for the same organisation as us or not. We can be more agile and responsive because everything is right where we need it, we don’t need to constantly switch between applications to get our work done. Your conversations are in front of you, you can schedule a meeting in one click and authoring and sharing happens in the Team window, no matter what device we’re using.
This is exciting news. We’ll be awaiting the official announcement, hopefully at the Ignite conference, with bated breath. And of course, be on hand to help our customers transition at the right time.
Douglas is Lead Office 365 Training Consultant at Inform.
