Microsoft Teams now ready to replace Skype for Business, Microsoft says

By Dan Thorp-Lancaster
published

The year-long process of bringing Teams up to feature parity with Skype for Business is now complete.

Late last year (opens in new tab), Microsoft revealed that it planned to make Microsoft Teams its primary communications platform for businesses, supplanting Skype for Business over time. However, before that could be done, Microsoft had to make sure Teams was up to snuff with all of the existing features that Skype for Business users take advantage of.

Today, the company announced that process is complete (opens in new tab), and Teams is ready for business, so to speak.

Microsoft brought attention to a number of new features that it has brought to Teams in recent weeks, including unified presence, cloud-based meeting recording, direct routing, and many more. "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," Microsoft says.

For the time being, companies won't be forced from Skype for Business to Teams, but Microsoft is encouraging teams to make the move now. To ease the transition, the company has release self-serve guidance (opens in new tab) for upgrading to Teams, along with upgrade tools (opens in new tab) in the Microsoft Teams & Skype for Business Admin Center, which are expected to be rolled out to all Office 365 customers over the coming weeks and months. Further, Microsoft says it will offer automated upgrades to Teams for organizations that don't have the IT resources available to manage things themselves.

Dan Thorp-Lancaster
Dan Thorp-Lancaster

Dan Thorp-Lancaster is the Editor in Chief for Windows Central. He began working with Windows Central as a news writer in 2014 and is obsessed with tech of all sorts. You can follow Dan on Twitter @DthorpL and Instagram @heyitsdtl. Got a hot tip? Send it to daniel.thorp-lancaster@futurenet.com.

14 Comments
  • Does it induce desktop/app screen sharing?
  • Teams already supported screen share.
  • Only if there is a call meeting, where in Skype you can share desktop without making a call
  • That is a problem that needs to be addressed. The other thing is skype for business is bundled with office 2016. They need to put out a revision on their volume license portal of course they will not though and they will give me headaches trying to deploy it to 200+ systems..
  • Still waiting for a store version that supports the free tier.
  • This is not quite correct. Skype for Business ONLINE (the one in Office365) is ready to use the Teams client. Skype for Business (Lync 2013/etc.) is NOT ready to use Teams as a client.
    That will take a bit more upgrading from MS and they have incentive to drag their feet on it because they want to force their Enterprise customers into Office365 subscriptions and away from Full Office 2016 and Exchange and Lync/Skpye for Business systems on-Premise.
  • yeah, teams is definitely not at feature parity with the skype for business client install that comes with Office 2016
  • Sweet baby jesus… finally they are killing skype. It's long overdue...
  • They killed Skype a long time ago, it is just hanging on. the problem is they may scrap it for business use, but for consumer use it is still about and being updated but for the worse.
    MS seems to do the same as other messaging services, just add more and more on to it and make it worse than it was.
    With Skype I just want to use it to speak to people, maybe send the odd file and that is it. Skype for consumers will be around for as long as people keep using it, but that is getting less as people change to other services.
  • They need to integrate presence with Outlook + solve the missing notifications bug for groups. Otherwise it beats Skype for Business handley.
  • Teams has many performance and memory hogging issues. We use it, but it's not quite fullfilling the promise yet. Reminds me of the windows Phone 8.1 to 10 switch. Will they ever fix the core stuff? I hope so.
  • The features are good, but the implementation on Windows is as a webapp and so memory consumption and performance are terrible. They really need to do a proper WPF/UWP/Xamarin version that doesn't rely on web technologies.
  • Teams ready to replace Skype and it's only half baked. Situation MS-normal. They just cannot get anything right and ready for market. Shabby.
  • I downloaded the Teams Client for Windows 10 S. Seemed like it was a UWP app and it looked real nice... but after putting my business email in it wouldn't let me access it anymore, so I didn't actually get to try any of it out. Anyone have this working? I would love a fairly light client as opposed to Skype for Business 2016's 2GB install... just need messaging, calls, and screen sharing really.