Teams is ready to replace Skype for Business

On the 24th August 2018, Microsoft announced that teams has now all the features that Skype for business offers and more and that it (Teams) is now ready to replace Skype for Business. (Source).

Teams offers a lot of functionnalities and the communications features that have been implemented are just a sub set of what Teams can do.

To be honest, I have been using it on a daily basis for the last couple of months, and I can only assure that it really made my life easier. I can only imagine the benefits and advantages that a team of employees can get from it.

In most of the companies, there are few systems, multiple links to remember, couple of locations for data (SharePoint, One Drive, you local drive, attachments …etc.), in addition to the different tools you have to use (Browser, Outlook, Skype, VS, Trello …etc.), at the end, employees spend too long trying to get to the location of their data or processes.

Teams allow to have all these functionnalities, data, and tools in the same place. You can define a channel, include the users and create the apps or connectors you want them to have access to.

By defaut, you get a conversation area (a sort of chat room), files area (which at the end will be stored in SharePoint), Wiki (free text),

But you can add a lot more, I use planner for all my tasks, trello for a specific type of tasks, I include (embedd) links to visualstudio.com, my SharePoint tenant, my dropbox files (yes, some people use Dropbox 😉 )…etc.

Back the Skype for business replacement, Teams offers now :

In-line translation
Federated chat
Presence
Cloud based meetings (up to 250 participants, well if you want to have more than 250 in a meeting, I would suggest you invite CNN and D.T 😉 ).
Call forwarding, Delegation of call, Out of office support, Call to a group …etc.