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Bye Skype, hello Teams!

With the launch of Microsoft Teams in early 2018, there was a great deal of uncertainty about the future of Skype for Business. Where many people at the time thought "it will not run so fast", we can now state officially: Microsoft has completely replaced Skype for Business.

New way of working together

The importance of Microsoft Teams It is clear that we no longer work in one fixed team. We increasingly work together with multiple groups of people or teams. This can be a department within the company or a project team with team members from different organisations.

Small, temporary teams are put together to achieve a specific goal in the short term, such as Sprint teams. In order to save expensive, time-consuming travel, we use (or used) Skype for Business, but sharing or collaborating on documents was an important pain.

Microsoft Teams: endlessly applicable

With Teams, Microsoft offers a reliable online platform for chatting, calling and conferencing. The philosophy behind it is to increase the productivity of organisations by simplifying communication and collaboration.

By launching Teams, Microsoft puts an end to the fragmented use of all kinds of different tools and each new team in Teams automatically has a common OneNote, SharePoint and Planner. Notes and documentation related to a project can be easily stored and consulted or edited as part of a team. Naturally, the integration with the standard Office 365 applications such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint is optimal, and it is also very easy to share a presentation or results sheet during an online meeting, just as in the past with Skype for Business.

Are you working with Teams yet?
Microsoft Teams offers you so much more than just chat & video conferencing functionalities. Get started with our tips and discover the other built-in features!

Microsoft Teams vs Skype for Business

Teams will be positioned as the central communication hub within Office 365. To show that it is not just a replacement for Skype for Business, we made the following comparison:

Skype for Business

Microsoft Teams

Chat (Instant Messaging)
Chat with individuals or in group
Calling contacts (picture & sound)
Share files
Contact person is online
Contact is offline
Meetings
Scheduling online meetings from Outlook
Desktop sharing during meeting
Chat before, during and after the meeting
People or groups tagging in a conversation
Like comments
Blur the background
Collaborate
Shared file editing (Word, Excel or PowerPoint)
Making notes during the meeting (OneNote)
Creating and monitoring tasks (Planner)
Retrieve shared documents (SharePoint)
Mobile
Calling, chatting and conferencing via mobile

Switching to Teams? Don't forget your users!

At this moment Microsoft has no plans to stop Skype for Business in the short term. The support remains, only no (or only limited) new features will be added, so making the switch to Teams seems to us to be the best move anyway.

Please note: successful migration is only possible by paying attention to the involvement and training of the end users during the implementation of 100% (User AdoptionChange means resistance. Avoid the Digital User Gap and make sure everyone's with you in your company!

Find out more!

Ask for advice from our modern workplace specialists.

“By launching Teams, Microsoft is putting an end to the fragmented use of all kinds of different tools.”

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Do you already know Teams? We will discuss a lot of useful things that will improve the (cooperation) of our teams!

Written by:

Tom Hufkens
Marketing Manager at VanRoey

A familiar face at VanRoey for 15 years. Literally and figuratively: because of his role as Marketing Manager, he is regularly at the centre of our communication. He regularly shares his experiences of new marketing methods during workshops & events.

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