In August of this year, Microsoft announced that their Teams flagship product had finally achieved feature-parity with the much-loved Skype for Business Online application. This was big news for the company, who told everyone last year that they’d soon be replacing Skype for Business (SfB) with the Teams service entirely.
What’s more, the announcement was also significantly ahead of schedule, as Microsoft had assumed that it would take until the end of the year before they were ready to replace SfB Online with Teams. However, just because Microsoft is moving in the right direction, doesn’t mean that their journey is over just yet.
What’s Next for Teams and Skype for Business?
As Dave Michels points out in his “Quipz” newsletter:
“Microsoft is taking a unique approach with Teams. While most workstream collaboration applications are focused on messaging and integrations, Microsoft is also positioning Teams for /unified-communications/ucaas and conferencing.”
To some extent, this means that Microsoft has more work to do if it wants to create the ultimate workplace app that it has promised its users. Currently, much of the roadmap has already been completed for the transition from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams. However, it’s worth noting that feature parity has only been achieved with Skype for Business Online – not Skype for Business Server. The newly updated roadmap outlines some of the things that Microsoft will be doing to fill this gap, including:
- Call parking
- Group call pickup
- Shared line appearance
- Location-based routing
As Michels commented in his newsletter, right now it’s hard to tell whether enterprises will need to start moving SfB workloads to the cloud before Microsoft reaches feature parity with SfB server.
We’ll have to wait and see what the rest of 2018 has to bring.
Moving to Microsoft Teams
In the meantime, Microsoft continues to encourage its customers to move to Microsoft Teams as quickly as they can. The company has provided plenty of resources, templates and guidelines for the transition online, and tips for how you can onboard your existing Skype for Business users onto the Teams platform.
Microsoft even recommends running Teams alongside your Skype for Business Server until your team feels comfortable enough using the new system, and they’ve finished rolling out the additional features that your organisation might need.
