Introducing Microsoft Teams!

[Laurie Pottmeyer]

Today, at an event in New York City, we announced Microsoft Teams—the new chat-based workspace in Office 365. Microsoft Teams is an entirely new experience that brings together people, conversations and content—along with the tools that teams need—so they can easily collaborate to achieve more. It’s naturally integrated with the familiar Office applications and is built from the ground up on the Office 365 global, secure cloud. Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available in preview in 181 countries and in 18 languages to commercial customers with Office 365 Enterprise or Business plans, with general availability expected in the first quarter of 2017.

Check out the Microsoft Teams Community at http://aka.ms/msteamscommunity - join us!

[#2]

We have enabled this for our tenant and so far so good. It looks pretty promising since we are still looking on how to push out Groups adoption. I'm just curious how it integrates with Skype for Business though. I know it's built around it, but it doesn't seem to be directly integrated with SFB. It appeared the Teams portal held a separate instance of any chat conversion when conducted within Teams. Even when changing presence in both the Teams instance and the SFB instance, it seemed to be disjoint. We are in a bit of a different situation though because we are running Hybrid Exchange and SFB is hosted on premise. So we have had weird situations with integration on a few things, LOOKING AT YOU MFA! Thanks!

[#3]

I currently have a SfB client.  Does Teams federate or interop with my current client?

-Chris

[#4]

Hi @Chris Rivera - Visit the Microsoft Teams Community here for some great Q&A - and to ask any other Microsoft Teams questions you might have: http://aka.ms/msteamscommunity - also there's a FAQ that has some great information located here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Frequently-asked-questions-about-Microsoft-Teams-%25E2%2580...

I'll tag @Kaushal Mehta (LYNC) here who might be able to speak to your specific question.  Thanks!

[#5]

Thanks for the post Christopher.

I'm looking for the same thing regarding whether Teams can federate with SfB.

Any updates from anyone else?

-Chris

[#6]

I couldn't agree more, I'm confused about where the two products are going... Teams duplicates many of the features of SFB and is yet another client to manage. We now have two presence indicators, two places to video/screen share, inconsistent features across two platforms and no clear direction on where enterprise voice will live. Our company still requires standard PSTN for some users, how does this plugin? What about Exchange, GAL, calendar integration to meeting rooms and other productivity features...? Is there a future for the SfB clients? We just received a semi functional mac client, does this put that product at risk? Keen to know more.

[#7]

@Chris Rivera 

1) Teams and SfB users in the same org can send messages to each other. There are some topology limitations here though so please wait for your company admin communication

2) No presence interop in this release

3) No cross app meeting join in this release

4) Lync/SfB onPrem/online isn't required for teams client/product to function. No EV in this release; SfB is your go-to client for reaching PSTN numbers