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Microsoft Teams is Replacing Skype for Business To Put More Pressure on Slack (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft Teams isn't even a year old, but it's about to replace Skype for Business. At Microsoft's Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida today, the software giant is revealing that it plans to kill off Skype for Business in favor of Microsoft Teams. Skype for Business took over from Lync, Microsoft's previous business chat app, back in 2015. Microsoft's original Teams launch made it look obvious that Skype for Business would eventually disappear, given the fact that Teams integrates most of Skype's functionality already. Microsoft says it has been building a new Skype infrastructure that has been "evolving rapidly," and it will serve as the enterprise-grade service for voice, video, and meetings in Microsoft Teams. A new Skype for Business server will be available in the second half of 2018 for customers not ready to move to Teams, but Microsoft is pushing Office 365 users will to move over to Teams as the key communications client instead of relying on Skype for Business.
They're not "replacing" anything. They're:
1) adding Teams functionality to Skype For Business, because SFB is a functional product and Teams is new functionality,
2) rebranding SFB as Teams, because SFB is a clunky name and everyone has hated the name since it replaced Lync, and
3) releasing a non-cloud server called Skype For Business Server, because there are large enterprises that want to host their own stuff for various legitimate reasons.
This announcement has the following impact on everyday users/IT workers:
- Current SFB users will be getting Teams functionality added to their client soon. At the same time, they will see a branding change.
- Current O365 users will get Teams (rebranded SFB) by default.
- Enterprises admins in critical industries or paranoid organizations will soon have the ability to take SFB/Teams out of the cloud and into the server room.
Slack can't touch any of these features, either because it doesn't apply or because they don't have the rest of what Microsoft offers. Only an idiot would dump this for Slack. And I say that as a daily SFB and Slack user. We probably won't be using Slack for much longer. It's already prohibitively annoying to admin for and we have already been looking for a replacement. Getting Teams for "free" with the stuff we already use (O365, SFB) is the final nail in the coffin.
Have you ever used Skype for Business? It's a shitty app, and won't be missed in the slightest. If they just shut the entire fucking thing down today, I'd be thrilled.
It can't keep conversations synced across devices, if you've got multiple instances open (For example on your PC, a remote PC and your phone) it will randomly send a conversation to a device that you're not using and you won't see it until later, it freezes for about 30 seconds every time you get a new conversation, the audio cuts out constantly, when connected with bluetooth headset if and other app plays a sound Skype for business just completely shuts down all audio until the other sound is done.
The entire Lync/Skype for Business team should be fired.