Orlando, US, September 25 — During the Microsoft Ignite event, Lori Wright, GM for Microsoft Teams and Skype product marketing, announces that they pursue to push Teams further and encourage Skype for Business users to switch to the new platform soon.
Microsoft Teams is a collaboration platform not unlike solutions such as Cisco Spark or Slack. Providing a great user experience here is just as important as a good interoperability and options to use bots and other integrations to extend productivity and communication quality. Having a look at the other tools and options of the Microsoft Office 365 suite, one could believe that they could stand a good chance in this aspect.
What is Microsoft Teams about?
With Teams, you can collaborate freely with others using a PC, or smartphone via an app. You can chat with instant messages, call via VoIP or have a video conference with several people at once. If you’re curious about that, check out their interactive demo of Microsoft Teams to see more of it.
As of now, Teams already works together with popular productivity and collaboration solutions such as Wrike, Hootsuite, Smartsheet, Zendesk, Asana, Trello, GitHub and more. Each one of those has a certain focus, most likely users will focus on one or two of these integrations to do their work.
Plans for meeting room systems
As far as the Skype Room Systems go, Lori Wright, previously CMO at BlueJeans Network before joining Microsoft, wrote, “We remain committed to bringing the familiar Skype experience into any and every meeting room. We have seen strong customer momentum with Skype Rooms Systems. Today, Lenovo announced they will bring to market a new Skype Room Systems device, Smart Hub 500, expanding on the current portfolio of Skype Room Systems with Logitech, Crestron, and Polycom. In addition, Polycom, Pexip, and Blue Jeans Networks will deliver cloud video interop capabilities within Teams. This adds to the existing video interop capabilities for Skype for Business delivered by Polycom’s RealConnect for Office 365 and Pexip’s Infinity Fusion product”.
Roadmap and dates?
As of now, Office 365 users can already try Microsoft Teams out and test how it works for them. Further information on planned features of Teams will be provided by Microsoft shortly when they update they roadmap, in October.
Skype for Business will not disappear in one big bang either. Microsoft will continue to provide it as part of their Office 365 solution. They will also still support Skype for Business for all on-premises Business Server installations in enterprises. As of now, Microsoft has not provided a date for when they plan to end the support of Skype for Business but they encourage users to review Teams as their new solution.
Photo credit: Microsoft
Source: Lori Wright (Microsoft)
