Skype for Business Online retires in six months – what you need to know

We love Teams, but I'm sad at how much we have to use Zoom because we have thousands of volunteers that help us and only need video calling. Getting O365 for all of them doesn't make sense. They don't need O365, they just need to be able to host weekly group video calls with students, but since the video calling option doesn't exist independent of MS Teams, there is no way to provide this in Microsoft systems. So now we're stuck in this weird world of Zoom and Teams, and users that don't know when to use what.

How it seems like it should have gone. Skype (or some rebuilt/rebranded version of it) is still the video call and chat platform, but it's critically integrated into Teams as the video, chat, and calling portion of the platform. It comes with O365 just like Teams. The difference is, being I want to be able to add users to our account that just have Skype (video calling) capabilities and not the whole O365. Instead, it's all or nothing...and in our case.....nothing for these thousands of volunteers we have. Because of it, we are now an organization that uses both Zoom and Teams heavily, where if there was a video calling only option, we would just be in Microsoft integrated products.

So what do I get? Half my calls in Teams and half my calls in Zoom. What a pain and so disjointed....neither being able to do everything we need and jumping back and forth between the 2.