The official retirement date for Skype for Business Online has been set: July 31 of this year.
If you’re still using it for any portion of your business’ communication, it’s time to make a decision on what you’ll transition to. In light of the continued global pandemic and work-from-anywhere requirements for business IT, business leaders should weigh their options carefully when deciding on the next collaboration tool they’ll adopt.
You (hopefully) probably knew this was coming and the official date shouldn’t be much of a surprise, but we have a feeling many businesses haven’t pulled the trigger on changing over just yet.
According to Microsoft, Skype usage increased to 40 million people during the coronavirus pandemic, which was an increase of 70 percent month-over-month. However, it’s widely known that WebEx and Zoom have grown more quickly in popularity since lockdowns began nearly a year ago.
Adopting Teams Means Gaining Extensive Features
Fortunately, Microsoft has invested in Teams as its lead product for intelligent communication and modern collaboration. The company has made tremendous investments and feature enhancements and has committed to doing so moving forward.
For business applications, Teams offers a variety of primary features that aren’t available in Skype for Business. These features make Teams a great fit for companies of all sizes.
They include the unique ability for users to:
- Share a file with offline participants
- Like and acknowledge chat messages
- Maintain persistent conversations with threaded replies
- Search for files, content or people
- Use @ to mention colleagues
- Co-author autosaved versions of documents with others
- Link to OneDrive or SharePoint Online for file management and sharing
- View and interact with calendars within the application
- Blur backgrounds on video meetings
- Record and share meetings with auto-transcription options
- Add bots for improved efficiency (i.e. Polly, Who, T-Bot)
- Mute conversations
- Activate do-not-disturb function on the mobile app
Teams has been wildly popular, as part of Microsoft’s 365 suite of services. As of April 2020, as the pandemic was just beginning, Microsoft stated that their Teams product now has 75 million daily active users.
Boost Your Team’s Collaboration Abilities
At In The Cloud Technologies, we are experts in all things Microsoft. We provide top-notch integrations for our business clients, ensuring their technology works properly and efficiently and allowing them to stay up-to-date with the latest collaboration trends.
If you’re still using Skype, make sure you look into Teams as an alternative. The platform is feature-rich, reliable, secure and easily adopted by employees.
We would be glad to help you in any way. Reach out today to start a discussion.
You can reach us by phone at: 857-321-8458 in the US — we look forward to working with you!
