
Having said that, these capabilities are vastly improved in Teams and can be considered outside the teamwork components. Teamwork in Microsoft Teams is a fundamental shift in the way teams collaborate as opposed to an evolution of meeting, chat and calling features that exist in Skype for Business. Customers running on-premises servers will be within mainstream support on the latest version until 2023. As mentioned, the retirement date for Skype for Business Online cloud service is July 31st 2021. Many organisations use Teams as well, but have not completed the switch to Teams for these communications.Įventually, all Microsoft customers using Skype for Business will need to migrate to Teams. Today, Skype for Business is widely used by organisations for meetings, instant messaging and voice/video calling including telephony. The name change was a strategic rebranding following Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype in 2011. Skype for Business launched in April 2015 as the next evolution of their Unified Communications platform, Microsoft Lync. Customers using the service will need to plan and migrate from Skype for Business Online within the next 2 years. Microsoft recently announced the upcoming retirement of Skype for Business Online for July 31st 2021. Many of these customers are using Skype for Business Online as part of the Office 365 cloud service. While Teams is being adopted at a rapid rate for teamwork, many organisations are still using Skype for Business as their main tool for communications and meetings. Today, Microsoft Teams is used by 500,000 organisations 1, starting to realise the benefits of the rich teamwork capabilities of the platform. Over the short 2.5 years since Teams was launched, Microsoft has rapidly developed the platform and achieved adoption rates higher than any product in Microsoft history. Later that same year, Microsoft published its vision for modern collaboration and teamwork, and announced Teams would replace Skype for Business over time. Microsoft Teams was launched on March 17th, 2017. A brand new collaboration experience to bring together people, conversations and content-along with the tools that teams need-so they can easily collaborate to achieve more. In November 2016, Microsoft announced Microsoft Teams.
