Skype for Business Future ?

[David Kamp]

A partner company indicated his new accounts all required Teams to use Skype.

his "new" users, when signing in for the first time received a message "Your organization is now using Microsoft Teams!" and would not allow them to sign into Skype.

 Will "Skype for Business" be retained or are we being forced to use Teams?

We are in the Cloud with Office 365 Tennant space, no On premise Skype servers.

David

[#2]

@David Kamp yes, Teams is the upgrade to Skype for Business.

At the moment all organisations can choose if they want to upgrade to Teams Only. For smaller organisations <500 users Microsoft are notifying admins that they are to be upgraded, but allowing them an opt out.

Overtime they will push to bigger organisations, and perhaps become more insistent on people upgrading. Officially there is no deadline set, people move with consent as they want the new capability.

[#3]

We may be Forced to go to a third party Chat program.

Teams is too big of a Security and Support issue for our limited staff.

Are others opposed to Teams?

David

[#4]

@David Kamp In what way is it a security risk ? It meets and exceeds the controls in Skype for Business.

I've not heard of anyone else considering anything else, it's a very positive upgrade to a far more modern platform.

[#5]

We have an obligation to secure patient information and demographics. When Teams gives everyone the ability to share almost anything with anyone, the possibility of a user mistake could be very compromising.

[#6]

@David Kamp 

1. You don't have to create Teams, you can just use it for chat and meetings.

2. All files are either stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, so whatever policies you have set there are applied. For example you might use a DLP policy to prevent people sharing documents with patient information.

3. We can also now apply DLP to chat messages as well, limiting key phrases and comments as appropriate.

4. Services like Microsoft Information Protection allow you to label and encrypt documents, ensuring only authorised people can view the patient data.

LOTS of Healthcare organisations use Teams, there's a whole forum here dedicated to them here. You'll find a wealth of information including features that are being built specifically for them such as priority notifications (crash calls), support for medical image formats, annotations on images, team templates and a full FHIR integration for patient records. @Mike Gannotti leads that function and might be able to point you in the right direction. 

[#7]

@Steven Collier @David Kamp David, if you check out our Healthcare and Life Science site https://aka.ms/HLSBlog as Steven mentioned we are primarily focused on the healthcare space and cover Office 365 extensively. If you can join us there we are happy to answer questions.