Microsoft Teams vs Skype for Business: What's New and What's Changed?
Communication is one of the most vital and influential aspects of the workplace. It’s quite common that people are given a task or have been a part of a discussion but have no idea what to do next. According to the statistics, 57% of employees report not being given clear directions on a task, and managers are not comfortable communicating with employees in general. If this is the case with teams and groups sitting under one roof, what might be the case with teams in which the members work from different locations across the globe? This is where communication tools like Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams come into play. The comparison between Microsoft Teams vs. Skype for Business demonstrates that Teams is the superior tool. There is no mystery here. We will explore these differences in the article. Yet both tools have changed the way we interact and exchange ideas, and both offer outstanding UI and incredible collaboration experience. However, the way both tools work is quite different.
Read this article to know more about the key differences in technology, the processes, and the way your business can work using these technologies. Let’s dive in.
Microsoft Teams vs Skype for Business 1. Persistent Chat Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business both facilitate real-time chat. Dispersed teams have long required an alternative to phone call conferences. Although both calls and videos can be productive, interruptions due to lack of presence often disturbed and intruded deep work. However, Skype for Business and previous software such as Lync and Microsoft OCS transformed the way businesses communicated. On the other hand, in Skype for Business, once a chat was closed or the business day was over, the chat was dropped. In this case, chat logs were kept in certain other platforms, such as Outlook or Exchange. In order to fill in this gap, Microsoft Teams introduced persistent chat. •
Microsoft Teams allowed a unified presence. People could see if you’re available, busy, or in a call
•
You can also set an “out of office” message in Teams. Stakeholders get a reminder that you’re out of office if they either mention you or send you a private chat.
•
If you have a missed call or a new voicemail, Teams will now show a notification in your Activity feed.
2. Messaging Like persistent chat from one person to another, teams can be created to produce an ongoing stream of information for a set topic. Teams can be set up on a per department, per project, per customer or any basis desired.
Anyone who is part of your group can share messages, files, emojis, GIFs, and stickers with other members of the team. And any group member can also start a team meeting by hitting the ‘Meet Now’ button.
3. New Collaboration Features: •
With the Guest Access feature, anyone with a business or consumer email accounts, such as Outlook.com, Gmail.com, can participate and join a call as a ‘guest’ in Teams with full access to the team chats, meetings, and files.
•
Teams now support Indonesian, Romanian, and Vietnamese languages, and you can create up to 200 channels per team.
4. Meetings Many meeting features are similar to that of Skype for Business, making the adoption of Teams simple and intuitive. Both tools share common features like screen sharing, call recording, and file uploads. The interface changes from blue to purple, and a meeting can be hosted within the pane that contains all your team members and one-to-one chats. Some other cool features of Microsoft Teams include: •
You can either blur or customize the backgrounds
•
Whiteboard masking: when a team member is physically drawing on a whiteboard, their body won’t be in the way
•
Live captions and live events with access available to users outside of Microsoft Teams.
5. Integration The original integration of Skype for Business was limited to predominantly calling and connecting from telephony apps and systems, where third-party apps like Zapier provided IFTTT functionality. With the integration between other collaboration apps, Microsoft has announced the end of life program for the integration of Skype for Business with third-party audio conferencing providers. If you migrate to Microsoft Teams, the Teams app store is full of your most used and most critical apps that should be ideally added to your Microsoft Teams tenant as a “tab.” The Teams app store brings together a number of apps that bring your preferred apps into Microsoft Teams, which reduces the time spent switching between apps and tabs and frees up hours of productivity.
6. Storage When you create a new team in Microsoft Teams, this also creates a new SharePoint site in the back end. So, every document or file that you upload to the team – either in the team messaging area or to the files tab – will be saved in SharePoint. However, you must have to license to achieve this because Microsoft Teams Free doesn’t include SharePoint access. There are a few limitations on usage for the free version. The limit for file storage in Microsoft Team Free version is 2GB per user, whereas in paid versions you get 1TB worth file storage capacity.
Microsoft Teams Wins the Race Teams is way ahead in the scoring. From compelling collaboration features in Teams to Persistent Chat and the ability to extend Teams using third-party apps
and platforms, make Teams a handy and productive communication tool. With almost 200,000 companies across 181 industries in more than 35 languages, and with 3 million Teams within a year of its release, it is a tremendous milestone for Microsoft. If your organization is entirely on Microsoft with Office 365 and Exchange, it’s always better to adopt and utilize Teams as it includes all the compliance and security features that are compatible with Office 365.