Microsoft Teams To Replace Skype for Business Online

Microsoft has announced that Skype for Business will be retired in July 2021.

The announcement, made by on the official Microsoft blog, has been on the cards since it first floated the move back in 2017.

There is now a major incentive for both new and existing customers to move to Microsoft Teams. To help that process along, from September 2019, all new Office 365 customers will be onboarded to Microsoft Teams with the option of selecting Skype for Business Online removed.

Existing Skype for Business Online customers will have two years to plan, prepare and execute their migration to Microsoft Teams.

James Skay, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Microsoft said:

“We now feel we’re at the point that we can confidently recommend it as an upgrade to all Skype for Business Online customers”.

The changes do not affect the consumer version of Skype, and there are no plans to retire the on-premises server version of Skype for Business.

What is Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams is cloud-based team collaboration software that is part of the Office 365 suite of applications. The core capabilities in Microsoft Teams include business messaging, calling, video meetings and file-sharing.

It’s the fastest-growing product ever released by Microsoft and one of the leading solutions for collaboration software today.

Overtaking Slack

In July 2019, Microsoft announced that the number of daily active users for Microsoft Teams had reached 13 million with over 19 million people using it every week. Over 200,000 organisations have already adopted it.

Closest rival Slack has only 10 million daily active users, making Microsoft Teams the most popular team collaboration tool on the market.

Evolution of Microsoft Teams

The evolutionary path to Microsoft Teams started in 2007 with ‘Office Communicator’. That was replaced by Lync in 2010 before it, in turn, was replaced by Skype for Business in 2014.

The Skype Feature Parity Milestone

Feature parity between Microsoft Teams and Skype was announced last year effectively heralding the end for Skype for Business Online.

Microsoft will be adding the ability for Teams and Skype consumer customers to communicate using chat and calling in the first quarter of 2020.

IT managers are becoming increasingly impressed by the flexibility and usability of the new Microsoft Teams platform. Where native capabilities (such as contact centre, handsets/headsets, video conferencing installations, SIP gateways, etc.) end, we supplement these with products and services that deliver a complete end-to-end solution, across voice, data, security, mobile and video technologies.

The Great ISDN Switch Off

In case you missed it, BT will no longer be selling ISDN lines from 2020 and by 2025 ISDN will have been completely replaced.

So, if you’re planning an upgrade to your business phone system in the next 6-12 months, it might be time to take a serious look at Microsoft Teams with Direct Routing. For businesses with over 50 users, we could save you money on deployment and licensing, whilst you gain all the benefits of using Microsoft Teams as a messaging and collaboration tool with a phone system to boot.

Talk to us about Microsoft Teams

Marlin Communications can help your business get all the benefits available from a move to Microsoft Teams as your business phone system.

Call us on 0800 032 8274, email us at [email protected], or use our contact form.