A timely and thoughtful roadmap can ensure open lines of communication and business continuity, no matter where your staff is located. It’s critical to make plans now for Teams implementation and staff training. Still, those facing the Skype sunset have no time to waste. GET OUR NEWSLETTER: Subscribe here for weekly content from AvePoint As of October, the number of daily active Teams users was 115 million - a 53 percent increase from numbers released in late April.īetter yet, the move can save time and money: Teams’ efficiencies help users reclaim as many as 8 working hours per week, a 2019 Forrester analysis found, and a 5,000-person organization using the platform will see an overall net benefit of $27.1 million over three years. The feature-rich Microsoft Teams application, which is included with Microsoft 365 for Business, can bring the same chat collaboration capabilities as Skype for Business and much more.Ĭompanies eyeing the leap aren’t alone: Teams adoption has surged during the pandemic, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. That’s where Microsoft Teams can fill the void.īut what challenges might companies that use Skype face in the months ahead?īeyond the transition itself, not too many. With many colleagues still absent from their cubicles, communicating across counties and continents, the value of an integrated solution is evident. An on-premises version, Skype for Business Server, will offer mainstream support through 2024. Microsoft announced the forthcoming retirement of its Software-as-a-Service edition, Skype for Business Online, in 2019 - well before the COVID-19 pandemic - to nudge Skype users toward the cloud-based unified communications platform known as Microsoft Teams.

The shift was well-timed: It predated a global health crisis that would forever change remote work. Skype capabilities grew over time, but so did the efforts of Microsoft developers to design a more comprehensive option better suited to the evolving needs of employee collaboration.

A 2015 rebrand of Microsoft’s Lync enterprise instant messaging software first released almost a decade earlier marked the birth of Skype for Business.īack then, workplace users might have relied on Skype (the consumer version was acquired by Microsoft in 2011) to send messages and to make audio and video calls.

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