Skype and Teams - side by side?

[Rob O'Keefe]

For companies that are active Skype IM users (which in most cases is 1-1 chat), how have people been finding the introduction of Teams? I find it confusing to have two clients open and I think sometimes Skype messages pop up in Teams which is confusing.

We are probably deferring any push towards Teams until this interaction/combination is more refined. I would prefer it all be one client, but I am not sure if we are headed in that direction or not.  I do very much like persistent group chat, but want it part of Skype.

Thoughts?

Rob.

[#2]

I agree, it's an interesting setup we have going here.  My thoughts that I have communicated to my customers (I have no real idea if this is true or not, just conjecture), is that if you use Teams, you live in Teams.  You wouldn't have Skype for Business open at all.  Teams becomes the central communcations hub for you.  No idea how this would work if you use Cloud PBX for your calling solution.

[#3]

We have issues with people sending a message in Teams, and it not being received in Skype.  Is this a known issue, or a configuration issue IT needs to work on?

[#4]

Hello All!

While there was a lot of hope and excitement about the possible integration of Skype for Business into Teams, the reality ended up being that they are not actually integrated. When looking at your calendar in Teams, you will see your Skype for Business meetings, but these are actually pulled from EWS. Also, what little integration that does exist is for Skype for Business Online (Office 365) users only - there is no integration with on-prem. For example, if you are in Teams, your Presence and and chatting capabilites are not at all your Skype for Business Presence and Chat capabilities. However, if you try to chat to a user that is in Office 365, but not yet using Teams, you can actually reach them on their Skype for Business client. That is about the extent of the integration at this stage, though.

Without rambling too much further, and potentially confusing you (as this is quite the confusing scenario), I am going to point you to 2 blog posts. First, this post from @Matt Landis goes into the specific points of integration between Teams and S4B: http://windowspbx.blogspot.com/2016/11/microsoft-teams-user-tip-1-how-does.html

The second post is from @Richard Brynteson. Here he talks about what the actual Teams traffic says about the inner works of Teams' Skype side: http://masteringlync.com/2016/11/07/quick-tip-microsoft-teams-under-the-hood/.

Well, I hope that helps. I know this is not at all what you were hoping to hear, but until Microsoft more clearly states their direction with the future of this integration piece, this is what we are looking at.

Josh Blalock