In the ongoing
Microsoft Ignite Conference 2017 in Orlando, Florida, the company has announced the integration of Skype for Business capabilities into Microsoft Teams.
With this, Microsoft intends to transform the way business communications take place. Microsoft Teams is converging conversations, meetings, files, Office apps, and third-party integration into a single hub to facilitate more productive meetings and super efficient handling of everyday communication. The users of Microsoft Teams will no longer require frequent context switching and will have all business communications, files, data, and apps at one place-Office 365. This is what Microsoft calls an Intelligent Communication.
Microsoft has integrated comprehensive calling and meeting capabilities, along with data and insights from the Microsoft Graph into Teams. This is being built on a modern Skype infrastructure based on cloud, promises higher quality communication experiences. Teams will eventually replace the current "Skype for Business" client in Office 365.
Currently, however, Microsoft has offered to continue to support Skype for Business in Office 365 and Skype for Business Server on-premises. It is releasing a new version of Skype for Business Server around this time of the year in 2018 for those clients who are not yet prepared to move their PBX and advanced calling capabilities to the cloud.
Microsoft informs via a
blog,
"We are also introducing new enhancements to Teams meetings, including audio conferencing (available in preview today)—enabling participants to join a Teams meeting by dialing a telephone number—and interoperability between Teams and Skype for Business, including universal presence, and messaging and calling interoperability.
The future of business meetings
Combining communications, collaboration, and intelligence in this way will make new things possible across the lifecycle of a call or meeting:
- Before a meeting, Teams will surface relevant documents and rich information about the participants to help you prepare.
- During the meeting, the conversation can be captured, transcribed, and time-coded, with closed captioning and voice recognition for attributing remarks to specific individuals.
- After the meeting, the cloud recording and transcript can be automatically added to the relevant channel, so conversations, documents, notes, and action items can be reviewed, indexed, and searched by the entire team."