A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced that the roadmap for Microsoft Teams had been completed. During the Microsoft Ignite Conference a community admin posted in the Partner Portal a text regarding 2 important dates:
Information about Skype for Business Online retirement
Update 30.07.2019 – confirmed retirement date
Microsoft announced the official retirement-date of Skype for Business Online.
“Skype for Business Online will be retired on July 31, 2021, and after that date the service will no longer be accessible.“
Source: Microsoft Teams Blog
Upcoming Key Dates
Starting Oct. 1st, new Office 365 customers with 500 seats or less will be onboarded to Teams and will not have access to Skype for Business Online. Tenants that are already using Skype for Business online will be able to continue doing so (including provisioning new users) until they complete their transition to Teams..
That means, that if companies create a new Tenant with 500 seats or less, there will be no possibility anymore to choose their preferred communication platform. Anyway, I do not see a problem to use only Microsoft Teams: In my opinion it is much better than Skype. For Example, the quality of audio & video, the overall functions and the integration. You can connect a lot of external tools and interact with them. I do not see any reason to go with the good old Skype for Business anymore – do you?
Acceptance of Microsoft Teams
Of course, some important features, such as “presence” do not work in Outlook at the moment. According to the roadmap, the rollout of this feature will take place soon. Based on a Twitter post from Tony, there is already a growth in organizations using Microsoft Teams. This means, a lot of companies have already started the migration.
I’m curious to see how long it will take before it is possible to only work out of Microsoft Teams. E-mail integration is already on the roadmap, so nothing stands in the way of the powerful all-in-one solution.
