Wildly popular Skype for Business is set to be rebranded under the Microsoft Teams banner within the next few months.
With an official announcement made on September 7th, Microsoft informed users that it is currently in the process of rebranding Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams and urges users to get on board.
Soon the upgrade will be mandatory, but, until then, Microsoft is giving businesses an “opt-in” experience and are encouraging them to take control of their upgrade to Teams so they can familiarise themselves with the newly enhanced app and all of its benefits.
For those who feel they are not ready to make the change so suddenly, Microsoft also added:
“If you are not ready to upgrade your users, there is nothing more you need to do. We will provide the next notification at least 30 days before we start your upgrade. If there are any actions you need to take, we will let you know.”
Skype for Business, an enterprise-grade version of one of the world’s most recognisable platforms for consumer IM, VoIP and Video Calls, has been active under Microsoft after replacing Microsoft Lync in 2015.
Microsoft Teams, however, is the company’s team collaboration application that offers a complete unified communication solution for businesses by merging together IM, Voice, Video & Conferencing into one platform, launched at the start of this year.
Although Teams already integrates with Microsoft’s Office 365 subscription-based office productivity suite (including Skype for Business), it looks as though they want to bring Skype for Business under the Microsoft Teams banner to reinforce the idea that Teams is an all in one, unified solution and not two separate entities.
As well as this, it could be that the Microsoft wants to make clear distinctions between its enterprise and consumer markets by removing the Skype brand the world of business together.
Though we are not given any further information as to why this change is happening, we can expect to hear more about it at the Microsoft Ignite conference which UC Today will be covering in full at the end of this month.
With this in mind, we urge our readership to come and check out the site in the week following the 25th September for a complete round up of everything we learnt about what Microsoft has planned for its enterprise markets in 2018.
How do you feel about this move? Do you think it’s necessary or is it just a needless inconvenience? If you have any further questions you’d like to ask, or if you would like to share your opinion, please feel free to submit your thoughts to our comments section below.
