Forum Discussion
From Skype to Teams, but keep compatibility
Use Teams for meetings and everybody will love them and say "please schedule a Teams meeting so we don't have to use Webex, SfB, ..." 🙂
> You can never dictate which platform the other side uses. This should not influence the decision for your platform.
Exactly, we cannot. If our two biggest customers (which are multi-million dollar companies) use Skype, then it's not smart to move to Teams, only to educate our users about: "We now use Teams for everything, but if you schedule meetings with customer A and B, then please schedule Skype meetings" and also educate our customer. It's not a move we would ever consider. Our highest priority is to be able to collaborate with our customers and deliver a good service.
Some of our users will schedule the wrong type of meeting, cause the meeting to be delayed or fail completely. Or what happens when you schedule an impromptu meeting in a Teams meeting room? The Skype partner can't join until he installs the Teams client? Will he be able to install the client? If both partys are technical, will they even understand why they can't join the meeting? Maybe the can't install the client because of company policy? If he uses the web client, will this work?
I can tell you right now, that moving to Teams, or having both, Teams and Skype enabled for telephony and video conferencing will cause the aforementioned issues. And I will assure you that nobody in a company that uses 100% SfB will tell you "please schedule a Teams meeting so we don't have to use [...] SfB, ...". That doesn't make any sense.
So unless SfB clients can join Teams meetings, or our customers move to Teams, we will not move to Teams ourselves.
DanielNiccoli but your customers do not need to install the Teams client to join your meetings, they only need Chrome or Edge to get a fully features meeting experience. If you switch to Teams you don't lose the ability for the Skype client to open when you join a meeting that they organize.
- Ok - I can understand this.
It is totally your choice. Consider this as some input that the interop scenario you are waiting for will probably never arrive in the product. The other option you have is to align your move to Teams with your customers but depending on how they move to Teams there will be some overlap where not everything is 100% Teams or 100% SfB.
Maybe your customer has also Teams running and can join the Teams meeting. If he does not have the client he can easily join your Teams meeting via Edge or Chrome.
The last sentence had a smiley you probably missed that. I said it because a lot of joining issues I see for SfB meetings are gone in Teams meetings and the quality is really good.> Consider this as some input that the interop scenario you are waiting for will probably never arrive in the product.
Yeah, I understand how you meant this. If my previous post sounded a bit rough, it wasn't directed to you. It's just that I feel that it's more and more that I feel a disconnect between Microsoft and their customers. And it gets frustrating.
Aligning the move to Teams will eventually be it. Having overlaps or gaps wouldn't be a problem because it's something that is only temporary and can be communicated. And also because it will affect every member of the party, so not just but also our customer.
> easily join your Teams meeting via Edge or Chrome.
I know if this possibility. But having worked in IT for so long, I have some doubts about the practicality of this, especially when you come in contact with less tech-savy people while scheduling meetings.
> I said it because a lot of joining issues I see for SfB meetings are gone in Teams meetings and the quality is really good.
No, I totally understand and seeing what Teams can do in comparison to Skype really wants me to switch over. And I also believe that once we demonstrate Teams voice calls to our colleagues, they will want to use Teams even more. What I wanted to say with my response was, that it doesn't matter so much what my colleagues think, but what our customers say when they suddenly have to use a different client than what they're used to and what they already have installed.
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Or maybe we should try and re-evaluate the web based Teams client once more.
