Microsoft Teams is now a complete meeting and calling solution
Published Aug 24 2018 08:00 AM 219K Views
Microsoft

Last year we announced plans for Microsoft Teams to become the primary client for Intelligent Communications in Office 365, replacing Skype for Business Online over time. Today, we are pleased to announce we have completed our roadmap for bringing Skype for Business Online features and functionality into Teams, and Teams is ready to meet your messaging, meeting and calling needs.

 

Today, more than 200,000 organizations are using Teams, including nearly 70% of enterprise customers who use Skype for Business Online.  We encourage your organization to join them and move to Teams today.

 

Marketing meeting.jpg

 

Teams delivers Intelligent Communications

In recent weeks, we added many new communications features to Teams.

  • Messaging: Teams now offers unified presence, federated chat, and contacts, as well as in-line translation capabilities that allow team members to converse in their native language.
  • Meetings: Cloud-based meeting recording, support for larger meetings of up to 250 participants; federated meetings, which provides the ability to host meetings across multiple organizations; meeting lobby so you can qualify dial-in callers before they join your meeting; and dial-in fallback support to ensure people can join a meeting even in the event of network issues.  For additional information on new meeting capabilities in Teams, check out Meet Now with Microsoft Teams.
  • Calling: Boss and delegate support, call queues, auto-attendant, consultative transfer, do-not-disturb breakthrough, the ability to forward a call to a group, and out of office support. In addition, Direct Routing enables you to bring your own telephone service to Teams, which along with Calling Plans provides you additional choice for dial tone in Microsoft Teams. 
  • Enhancements to the devices ecosystem for Teams: An update for Skype Room Systems that enables them to join Teams meetings; Teams app for Surface Hub in the Microsoft Store; Teams Conferencing Gateway, which allows you to use existing Skype for Business certified SIP-based phones with Teams; and USB HID Support for Teams, enabling customers to answer, end calls and control mute and volume using USB peripherals. In addition, cloud video interop services to support Teams meetings with existing VTC systems are underway with offerings from Pexip, Polycom, and Blue Jeans to be generally available later this calendar year.

 

Make the move to Teams

Over the last few weeks we have released resources, tools and guidance to help current Skype for Business Online customers with their upgrade to Teams.  This includes:

  • Self-serve guidance featuring a proven success framework for upgrading to Teams, including best practices, guidance, and resources for customers who are ready to use Skype for Business and Teams side-by-side or to fully transition to Teams.
  • Upgrade tools in the Microsoft Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center that enable customers to migrate users from Skype for Business to Teams. These tools are starting to roll out now and are expected to be available to all Office 365 customers later this calendar year.

Not every organization has dedicated IT resources to manage their transition to Teams. In order to assist these customers, we will begin offering them Microsoft-driven automated upgrades to Teams. We will communicate directly with customers regarding their upgrade options through email and in the Office 365 Message Center. 

 

To learn more about how to upgrade to Teams, and to get started today, visit the following resources:

 

92 Comments
Silver Contributor

Well done to everyone involved in this monumental task and the roadmap completion! It's fantastic news for customers who can benefit so much with adopting intelligent communications!

Amazing work guys! :) 

Teams will take over the world! Great features and capabilities on the horizon too!

Bronze Contributor

Glad to hear the team is aiming end of year for room systems enhancements. Polycom/Trio is a big must for us to move forward! Nice work!

Iron Contributor

@James Skay

Congrats on the great work, but "completed our roadmap" in what way? Certainly not rolled out.

 

Not complete from the linked roadmap:

  • Outlook meeting scheduler for Mac
  • Outlook meeting scheduler for OWA and mobile

 

Missing from functionality perspective for "bringing Skype for Business Online features and functionality into Teams":

  • No ability to touch join a Teams meeting from Polycom VVX phone
  • No ability to add another PSTN caller to a current phone call on any platform/device
  • No caller id mapping to the local address book
  • etc.
Iron Contributor

Microsoft Teams is a complete messaging solution, just missing many basic features that SfB have:

 

  • Add external/federated contact to contact group.
  • Possibility to do desktop sharing during a 1-1 chat.
  • Ability to pop-up the chat windows.

And many more...

 

 

Brass Contributor

We currently use Skype for Business for running online webinars. There are a number of features that we use in Skype for Business that are not available in Teams meetings (yet?):

  • Turning off IM/chat for all attendees
  • Muting audio for all attendees
  • Moderated Q&A
  • Real-time polls

Teams Live Events provides a few of those features but comes with a 15-60 second delay (as documented here), so is unusable for an interactive webinar.

 

I'd love to understand what completing the Skype for Business to Teams roadmap means...

  • Are these features dead and will die when Skype for Business goes?
  • Will they come to Teams at some point? If so, what's the post-completed-roadmap roadmap?

What a great work in just one year! Keep going doing such a great job ! 

Silver Contributor

Just scroll the Teams forums to see how many users struggle with a basic feature of notifications not working. Having a bloated window for one on one chats, no thanks. No compact mode, no detachable chats.

 

Interoperability. I can't find many users, who are using Skype in our org (or even Teams) just to chat. We can't all be in teams you know, sometimes you just need to contact someone and Skype finds anyone i need.

Iron Contributor

This is great work! Congratulations!

 

I do worry about stability and performance, though. Lync/Skype for Business wasn't always the most reliable application, and Teams is a much heavier app. Dialtone-level reliability is difficult for end user computers, and that's true even before putting an OS and applications on top of it.

 

If this is to become the singular phone experience, please build some kind of redundancy and performance guarantees--in the end user application itself--such that a failure of other functions of the application doesn't affect the ability to make and receive calls.

Copper Contributor
One feature we use regularly is the TEL: link on websites. When clicking on a phone number on a website, Skype For Business is an option to dial the number. Teams is not. So my Office 365 Cloud PBX users can't click on a number in their browser or CRM software and dial from Teams yet. A must have before we make the move over.
Copper Contributor

Great job! Thanks for your efforts in making Teams an all-in-one solution for Unified presence, calls, teams chats and meetings. 

Copper Contributor

Re Tel Link on websites. One key place that phone numbers are found is in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. The October release is going to include some native integration with Teams so that people on Teams can have limited access to D 365  Sales data. For sure it would be very strange indeed if clicking on a phone number within teams - on what is in effect a Dynamics 365 website kicked the user out of Teams and into SfB to make that PSTN call. That would be really weird.

Hopefully that means that by the time of the October release the Tel link will be working.

Copper Contributor

Good news but we tried to use, for a subset of IT users, Teams in alternative to SfB just a couple of weeks ago (using the Island setting in our Tenant for these users) and we several issues with IM not reaching them even if the persons were logged and available in Teams (and going straight to email as missed conversations)…

 

Additionally the loss of functionality in Office 365 displaying presence when for example selecting an individual as recipient, it is a must have capability for us: when will it fixed/added?


Brass Contributor

I'm sorry, but there is NO WAY that Microsoft Teams is ready to replace Skype for Business. It took only two minutes for my dev team to find out a gap in the feature parity. At the moment there is no way to share desktop without being on a meeting! Do you guys even do User Acceptability Testing these days?

Deleted
Not applicable

Hello,

 

Great news :)

 

Is there a solution when we want to have incoming (PSTN) calls in Teams rather than S4B ?

The "preferred calling application" seems to be missing (removed?) ... and there is no possibility to follow those steps: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/configuring-teams-calling-quickstartguide or https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/migration-interop-guidance-for-teams-with-skype

 

* csTeamsInteropt * with "AllowOverrideCallingDefaultChatDefault" PowerShell is allready removed / missing.

 

csTeamsInteropt_missing.png

 

 

@James Skay : What is MS recommendation in this case (when we don't want force any calling application and let users decide for the moment) ?

Should we wait some updates or someone knows a workaround ?

 

Thank you for help ;) 

Microsoft

@Deleted the interop policy settings are being replaced by the TeamsUpgradePolicy modes; these mode control the routing of calls/chats, meeting scheduling, and feature sets available. Chat and Calling must be set together (meaning, if calls go to Teams, then Chats must also go to Teams). There is no longer an ability for the user to decide their preferred client for chat/calling; this is all admin-driven - this is why you are getting an error with your PowerShell cmdlet above (it is trying to grant a policy to let the user choose).

 

For additional details, you can check out a video series on Upgrade here: http://aka.ms/sfbtoteamsjourney

 

Deleted
Not applicable

@Bryan Nyce : Thank you for video sharing :) i immediately bookmarked it

 

Does it means that : if we apply the TeamsUpgradePolicy : 

 Grant-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy -PolicyName UpgradeToTeams -Identity user@contoso.com

it will configure user account to receive (PSTN) incoming call in Teams an no longer in s4b ?

BUT :

 - will user still be able to join s4b meeting if he's invited internaly or externaly ?

 - if user is speaking (from his Teams) with someone using s4b, will it works ? 

 

Right now : if someone speaks to "user@contoso.com" from s4b and if "user@contoso.com" is only connected with Teams, he receive s4b's email notification. What will happend if we change TeamsUpgradePolicy to UpgradeToTeams ?

 

Thank you for your help,

Microsoft

@Deleted I would recommend watching the videos first before doing anything. :) Assigning the UpgradeToTeams mode will upgrade the user to Teams - resulting in calls/chats being received in Teams, and the SFB client will be reduced to a meeting join client. Interop will be based on the mode assigned to the target user. In your example, if that user is upgraded to Teams, they will receive the chat within Teams (and not a missed IM from SFB).

Deleted
Not applicable

@Bryan Nyce : Thank you for your time I'll focusing on videos ;)

 

update : videos are awesome ! very well explained Thx again !

Copper Contributor

@James Skay- any update on when application/desktop sharing from a chat will be released? (as per at least 2 other comments on this post... ) 

 

That's the only sticking point I am aware of for us rolling this out internally / recommending to clients 

 

Cheers,

Brass Contributor

Wow... I thought I was the only one here not buying this PR stunt. Shame on me for not reading the other comments like those from Fabio Catassi, Martin Booth, Jean-Philipe Breton and Fred Franks.

 

I think the message here is that Microsoft should avoid trying to score cheap PR points with disingenuous statements such as "reached product parity" when that is clearly... disputable. Your partners and paying customers are not impressed and feel antagonised to say the least -- and they will call your bluff.

Copper Contributor

Great news - huge font! :)

Copper Contributor

 Agree with may of the other comments that Teams is far from being at parity with Skype.  The screen real estate that Teams takes up is huge compared to Skype.  I get that you can do more with Teams, but there are a lot of basic things that just aren't there yet.   

Bronze Contributor

Curious to know how to make a call *as a delegate* on behalf of the person you support. I haven't been successful. Any tricks to make the magic happen?

Copper Contributor

As a Microsoft partner, it's very frustrating to have to defend Microsoft's practice of using paying customers to beta-test their products.  I agree with all of the previous comments - Teams is NOT on the same level as Skype for Business.  I still haven't figured out how to enable presence in Outlook - it just brings up Skype for Business presence so I have to keep using that for now.  Then someone will inevitably send me a Teams message that will show up as an email so I have to open another app.  This is even more frustrating when using a mobile device.  I shouldn't need 2 apps to simply IM in a corporate environment.  Actually 4 if you count SharePoint comments and Yammer. 

 

It seems like it would have been much simpler and easier to add channels, persistent chat, and file sharing to Skype for Business and just change the name to Teams later like they did with Lync.  Then it could have been used by customers who prefer to keep things on-premises.  

 

Microsoft - please listen to customer feedback.  While a lot of these new products and features seem cool, it is frustrating for users when this all feels like it is still in development, constantly changing, and having to re-learn basic tasks like meetings and IM.  As a partner, we hear about these things constantly.

 

If anyone knows how to change the presence organization-wide in Outlook to Teams, please reply - I can't find it but it may just not be available yet.

Copper Contributor

MS Teams is improving to be fair, but is useless to anyone on a different OS to windows. Our software development team use both windows and linux machines, currently for some unknown reason there is no linux client for MS Teams, which means MS Teams is useless to our developers. This is the main reason we are still using Slack. If we had a linux client we would use MS Teams as we are already Office 365 users.

Deleted
Not applicable

@David O'Brien : You should tell your devs to vote to increase the rank of the request on uservoice :) this is just an idea ... but it does not cost anything. here is a shortcut: https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/16911565-linux-client

 

Bronze Contributor

More info about delegate calling.

Steel Contributor

Sorry to continue to harp on about this, but the UI chat client is not yet good enough. There are basic UI defects which have been pointed out at length on the UserVoice forums, and which still need to be fixed.

 

There is no compact mode, despite it being the #1 UI request and having been in "working on it" status since February last year. Not even any ETA, or indication of what is being worked on. This despite at least three people in the forum thread independently hacking the web-client's CSS to prototype a compact layout, in a matter of hours each time. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is in fact not being worked on at all.


There is no multi-window support.

 

The threaded conversation UI is an anti-pattern, leveraging the user's existing knowledge of how chat clients work, and turning it against them so that they regularly create new conversations instead of following-up on the one they are reading. Compounding the problem, there is no way to correct this mistake once it has been made.

 

Putting the search bar in the window title bar also goes against ingrained behavior patterns for Windows users. It doesn't even save any space, as the conversation title (which is not interactive) is placed in the window client area. It would be much friendlier to swap these two controls, so that the title bar retains its standard role as a title and drag handle.

Steel Contributor

[Removed by author - duplicate message]

Brass Contributor
We've successfully pushed our IM-only users to Teams, and our IM + dial-in users to Teams with SfB coexistence (in case a partner wants to use SfB at all costs). 3rd party audio conferencing providers (ACPs) are being phased out, so it's necessary to migrate from those ACPs to Microsoft Audio Conferencing as well. Here's how we did it: Migrating from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams Cheers and feedback is much appreciated! Oh and please release the macOS Outlook add-in ASAP :p
Steel Contributor

[Removed by author - duplicate message]

Brass Contributor

Great news but as so many others have clarified, Teams is NOT "a complete meeting and calling solution" nor able to replace Skype for Business yet. Would love to do the full transfer to Teams as soon as possible for our users but then MUST all features be there. So without repeating them, would you @James Skay and @Bryan Nyce please comment on those?

 

Thank you.

Copper Contributor

I like Teams quite a bit. Just one downside so far - and one that is highly voted in community - we have permanently disabled chat until the option to delete your own conversations is available. This is required by our legal department and the reason we will still use Skype for Business (or something else) for chat until this is resolved. C'mon Microsoft, it can't be that hard!

Iron Contributor

@Tia Brott-Silkett

 

You can delete your messages, this is a messaging policy that can be turned on or off. You then apply that policy to the users you want.

Iron Contributor

So what's the story on call recording for regulated industries? For instance we need to record calls both inbound, outbound and between internal users so Teams to Teams.

Iron Contributor

@Centurion Good point. I imagine the inbound and outbound can be done with a bring your own SIP scenario, but does not handle Teams to Teams or even cross tenant. This is a needed feature for the roadmap for sure.

Brass Contributor

We use Polycom VVX series phones - cannot find any information regarding a roadmap for integration to TEAMS ? 
This is holding us back not being able to link the phones.  

 

Currently BTOE works well between phone and skype for business client.   

Brass Contributor

Paul, they have an FAQ:

 

Polycom Phones and Microsoft Teams

 

It says 2018Q2 for Microsoft support, 2018H2 for Polycom support. For Trio phones. VVX, sometime later I guess. All we get is promises so far, but I'm yet to see an actual phone that I can actually BUY and use with Teams, right now.

 

It's coming soon(tm) everywhere.

Iron Contributor

VVX phones work right now through a gateway. The current ones will not be updated native Teams. That will be a new set of phones. The existing Trio will have a Teams update. Polycom/Microsoft announced last week this is coming out Q4 of this year.

Brass Contributor

"The current ones will not be updated native Teams."

 

Where did you get that information from?

Microsoft

You can see the devices for Teams here: http://office.com/teamsdevices

 

Some devices, such as Yealink, will have SFB firmware and be upgradeable to Teams. The current 3PIP phones will work through the gateway (with limitations: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Skype-for-Business-Blog/Certified-Skype-for-Business-Online-P...) but generally will not be upgraded to Teams firmware, unless called out by the manufacturer (such as the Yealink mentioned above).

Iron Contributor

 Teams for Trio is announced. Here:

Screen Shot 2018-10-10 at 11.42.55 AM.png

 

Polycom VVX is not being updated. See the Polycom FAQ:

http://www.polycom.com/content/dam/polycom/common/documents/faqs/polycom-phones-and-microsoft-teams-...

 

"Q: Which Polycom Phones will run Microsoft Teams natively?

  • Polycom will introduce new desktop phones for Microsoft Teams in early 2019."

The reason is that Teams phones run Android and a special app for that OS. The VVX does not run Android OS and does not have the hardware to do so. The Trio can.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Best,

 

Fred

Brass Contributor

I'm not going into detail why all those links are just implying the lack of VVX support, instead of flat-out explaining that. But whatever, if MS guys say they won't have Teams, I believe it.

 

Anyway. How do I set up a "gateway" to let my Office 365 Teams users (formerly SfB Online, that is, no on-premises infrastructure) use the VVX 500/600 phones with Teams? Is there a good tutorial?

Microsoft

There's nothing to setup for the gateway - we manage it in the cloud automatically. The VVX devices should simply work, as outlined in the previous post.

Brass Contributor

Bryan - thanks for the update.   Any information is gold dust.  

How would the linking between VVX phone and the Teams desktop client be handled, will BTOE (Better Together Over Ethernet) be updated to support this ?

 

Any ETA'S ?

Iron Contributor

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the reason why is also explained. Several other sources note this, including the FAQ's statement of new devices. 

 

The gateway is setup on the Microsoft side. You simply sign into the phone with your O365 Credentials and calls will work for you. I didn't even have to sign-out of the phones. They just route. Try calling a Teams number from the S4B phone. OR try making that phone user a "teams only" mode user.

Brass Contributor

Outlined or not, they don't work as of now. We tried to log in with Teams-only users and make calls, but it does not work.

Brass Contributor

I tested a few weeks ago and could sign in, however it was severely crippled with answering calls - ie it would pickup but wouldn't be able to establish a link properly so the line was connected but essentially dead.

 

How about the phone linkage to the desktop app - we use the click to call (on pc) and pickup the handset feature - this presumably will not work without some integration ?

Microsoft

@Paul Austwick I am not aware of any plans to support BToE with Teams.

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