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.

Comments

And so it begins...

[hyades1]

An office suite program is integral to the efficient functioning of just about any business. So now, predictably, Microsoft is using its newest version of Office to leverage other applications into accepting more and more of its programs. Identify what "Teams" does that "Skype for Business" doesn't (especially with respect to how much of your business will reside on Microsoft servers after the change), and that is the amount by which Microsoft has increased its hold on your company. I have no idea what those differences might be, but I have little doubt they exist.

Companies that opted for Libre Office are starting to look smarter and smarter, while those that took the easy route and "upgraded" to Win 10 and Office 365 ("All Your Cloud Are Belong To Us") are probably going to regret their choice sooner or later.

Re:This is the exact opposite of what they should

[spiritgreywolf]

I've been using Teams for a little bit at two of my clients - and I have to say Microsoft REALLY needs to improve the efficiency of Teams before they go fully replacing Skype. As soon as I run the fat-client app whether on Windows or Mac, it's a resource suck as bad as anything I have seen. It's like a really sad, slow version of Google Wave.