Forum Discussion
How can Teams replace skype??
Since its announced that Teams will replace Skype for Business, how will teams fit in our environment? The only thing we use skype for is IM. It works great, integrates with outlook all is good. I have used it to share my screen and view someone else screen which also works great.
Teams doens't seem to have chat at all, just group chat which seems all too much like email and rather useless. The info I can find seems that Teams only works with Office365 groups, but what if we do not use O365 groups and have them disabled so noone can create them. Im not seeing 1 feature of Teams that would be anything we would want going forward.
Nothing about the Teams App looks any good. Was this made for Vista??? its ugly! I installed it and there are buttons on the left side for Teams, Meetings, Files. Teams nothing there. Meetings is just Outlook Calendar in a weird view. Files well not sure what the use is for this. Shows my OneDrive contents, why it shows in the app IDK. all seems pointless and useless.
How can this take the place of skype when you can't even message someone on it, the whole point in Skype for us.
I am using Teams Desktop Application from last 10 Months, There is so many features better than Skype! I feel its better than Skype.
- There is chat option
- We can create teams group for collaboration with the members.
We can integrate APP's into Teams.
We can change the Teams application Theme
So many options available with screen-share
Cheers!
Madhu_Tallapaneni Chat isn't available on mine. The Group chat function isn't anything we would be interested in at all. The UX isn't very good, its super big and doesn't scale down to size like Skype. Besides Chat not being avaialble, the UX is the number one issue
BumSkull Even in Free version also chat option available.
https://products.office.com/en-IN/microsoft-teams/free
- There are for sure chat in Teams, and it surpasses Skype as well
I’ll suggest to learn more about it and how it works:
https://support.office.com/en-us/teams
After that, we will happily answer any question for you
Adam- There should be a chat button on the left hand side bar! If it’s not there you should check with admins if they have removed it in a policy
BumSkull I realize I am a couple years late to this discussion but I am in the midst of being forced to remove Skype for Business from all the computers I manage. I am expected to replace it with some strange mixture of Microsoft Teams, Cisco Jabber, and Cisco WebEx Desktop App - I too am baffled as to how Teams is a replacement for Skype for Business especially when it comes to the 1:1 chat and most importantly easy visibility of the 'Presence' of ones immediate coworkers.
Skype for Business allowed me to add our internal departments to the contacts list via their Active Directory Security Enabled Distribution Groups so that the contact lists would update for all users dynamically as those groups were changed on the backend. So each new computer/user I setup, I logged them into S4B and outlook, added all the 'groups' related to their work area in the company so that on Day 1 they had the 'people' they would need to interact with. How else does someone on their first day have any clue of all the people to manually add to their contacts. Plus, to be honest, why would I want my staff wasting their time on busy work like manually adding contact after contact into 'groups' they create themselves? How will they know when a person leaves or starts for the company who works in another location?
Now it seems that my only option might be to create an 'all staff' Team (even though we do not plan to enable any Teams for anyone at all - very old school, no group collaboration - people say they have enough trouble managing their email, texts, voicemails, and phone calls, without adding tons of teams/channels they also have to monitor) but if did create an all staff 'team' it would be just to allow people to click into THREE submenus to 'see' the 'members' list and their coworkers statuses.
It is unclear if these 'groups' update themselves dynamically either or if I will have to manage the membership in Active Directory and in Teams as the admin/owner. I have been researching all these products and options for several weeks now and as far as I can tell the only way to interact with 'groups' that live in active directory is to send a chat to the group - not to add the group to your contacts list to easily populate all contacts within your department at one time for 1:1 chat.
Why would they remove this functionality? Really seems to be a step backward. One of my staff said they have resorted to opening an email, addressing it to the distribution list they saw in Skype for Business, expanding it, and then were disappointed because most people just have a blank white dot now that we have so many options to sign into and hardly anyone is aware what to sign into at all. What a total mess.
Maybe the issue is that, due to security concerns and upper management decisions, we are still a hybrid environment with on-premises exchange servers not email online in the cloud.
