Microsoft has announced a new Teams experience for Windows, replacing the existing version with a faster, cleaner Teams app.

The new version seeks to dramatically improve user experience, introduces powerful-AI based tools to more users, and addresses performance issues that have crept into Teams since the platform’s astonishing success during the Covid-19 pandemic – which saw rapid adoption by organisations around the world and an explosion of new features.

Microsoft estimates the new communication and collaboration app is now twice as fast, but uses approximately 50% less system memory, completing initial loading in under 10 seconds compared to over 20 seconds in ‘Classic’ Teams in independent benchmarked testing.

Part of that extra speed – in loading, scrolling and searching – has been achieved by tidying many of the extra controls that have been added to teams, simplifying the design for a ‘cleaner’ viewing window. Users who need access to multiple accounts will also find it easier to switch between work environments.

Microsoft are also highlighting the extensive integration of ChatGPT AI tools in the form of Copilot – which debuted for Microsoft 365 a few weeks ago. Within Teams, AI assistance will be able to summarise meetings, write chat or documents on your behalf, and answering questions mid-discussion flow.

While we’re not quite convinced about 3D avatars (!) the new Teams can highlight when individuals were speaking, automatically break long meetings into key ‘chapters’ for video review, redesigns Teams channels to feel more like the gathering point they’re intended to be, and use AI mid-chat in a way that has untold potential.

Overall the new design is more visually impressive, with customisation options that are available in public preview now, and available to Microsoft 365 users later in 2023.

For Microsoft 365 Expertise and support, please contact our team today.

As a New Year dawns, we check out some of the best new features that have been quietly added to recent Microsoft Teams updates ready for 2023.

Scheduled Send

One of the very best features of Microsoft Outlook now comes to Teams, with the addition of ‘Scheduled Send’ on messages – allowing a participant to drop a message into a chat or channel at a later time if they choose – perfect for coordinating across time zones or just getting ahead of the curve.

Teams also now supports quick-send video/audio note messaging much like many popular personal messaging apps, with audio note already available to send from the Teams mobile app.

Live Translation of Captions

This one has to be seen to be believed, but Microsoft Teams can now filter auto-generated captions through Azure Cognitive Services and translate these live on screen while the end user is speaking – a fantastic feature for organisations and businesses working internationally.

Real-time translation is currently available to trial across 40 spoken languages, although Microsoft have confirmed this will require Teams Premium licensing in the near future.

Instant Polls

Unlike most 3rd-party poll question apps, 1-click Instant polls can now be created and launched within a Teams meeting – allowing your attendees to respond to a simple binary choice easily.

The poll creator can also choose whether or not each vote is anonymous, and whether the results are shared with other attendees within the meeting.

Video goes 7×7

Teams Meetings previously supported a maximum of 9 video displays (3×3) on one screen, with users forced to choose a ‘Large Gallery View’ to access more. Now that limit has been raised to 49 (!) videos (7×7), allowing for some truly massive meetings!

Search Conversation History

A particular favourite of ours: Teams Search now returns the user to part of an entire conversation, not just the searched-for message itself.

This helps you revisit old conversations much more easily, without endless scrolling or loading, and finally means Chats can be a valid replacement for mountains of internal email.

Popout Shared Content

With an additional button, shared content in meetings can now be moved to a satellite pop-out window (much like chats) that can be moved freely like another window.

This handy addition becomes especially useful where you have secondary or tertiary displays in a conference room, and need to place certain windows on specific screens.

Emoji’s Go Wild!

Reactions were always a useful way to acknowledge or respond to a message from a colleague, but the reaction function has been expanded beyond the Facebook-style menu of emotions to incorporate all available emojis. Users can now effectively save their favourites, for a handy go-to reaction that fits their personality.

Suggested Replies

Microsoft Teams now also uses AI to take a stab at what your likely reply is going to be, and offers it up as a quick-response button.

Not entirely accurate but certainly interesting, this becomes more useful where simple responses like ‘Yes’ or ’No’ are needed from a mobile Teams user, for whom typing might be inconvenient.

@dditional People

Using the @function now adds people into Chat’s directly (with a prompt for sharing conversation history), saving the need to add people manually. Handy!

More to come….

Microsoft have also teased a refresh of Teams Channels, including a new ‘top-down’ format and increased branding, which brings them closer into line with both SharePoint Online and a number of popular social media apps such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Check it out below!

For Microsoft 365 expertise and support, please contact our team today.

Advanced meeting room spaces that support hybrid working have become popular in recent years (no prizes for guessing why) and are big asset to partially or wholly remote workforces.

However many organisations find the hardware choices bewildering – so before choosing a conferencing kit for your meeting room, here are three key questions you need to ask:

Where’s that call coming from?

If you’re a devotee of either Microsoft Teams or Zoom, it’s easy to believe the entire world uses the same meetings software.

Stop and consider this for a moment and it should be immediately obvious there’s a problem here. Not all of your customers or suppliers will have standardised on the same choice as you necessarily – and that’s not even to mention rival platforms, or indeed traditional phone calls.

More modern Microsoft Teams Rooms devices also provide native support for scheduled Zoom meetings &/or Cisco Webex, and HDMI override that’s compatible with alternatives like Google Meet. We already escaped the world of restrictive hardware a decade ago, so let’s not go back there. Instead, it’s sensible to plan for a conference room setup where people can both make and accept calls in a variety of platforms, to cover all bases.

Connected to what?

How will the end-user actually make the call? This is important to think about – there are really three options here:

• From a fixed PC/Mac in the room
• From a device the user brings into the room with them
• From a dedicated conference suite that tracks its own scheduled meetings

Option 1 helps eliminate some common hardware problems like getting the right cabling/adaptors, but it’s likely to prove a bit restrictive the rest of the time. Option 2 gives users great flexibility over using the room, and can be paired with wireless hardware – as well as falling back on some other advantages of laptops, tablets or smartphones: like the user bringing their own calling platform and display, and familiarity with their own audio settings.

Option 3 goes a step further so that the room already understands what meeting is happening when, and often supports ‘single-touch’ join from a console or touchscreen. This is best for enterprise environments where the video/audio largely doesn’t change, and what you really need is for the conferencing software (Teams or Zoom) to control who is actually using the meeting room, and when.

But what’s the room like?

Don’t forget the practicalities – this isn’t just about the technology, but also the physical space.

How big is the room, and how is the seating arranged? Will a conference phone cut it, or do you need satellite microphones to make sure audio is captured? Where are the power sockets? This will determine how your plans overlap with the device choice. Monitors are often easier to use than projectors, particularly as more screen-sharing is taking place.

Camera angles are important if your room is large, although audio always takes priority – most of the time it’s more important that everybody can be heard clearly, rather than be seen.

Need IT support and communications expertise? Speak with our team today.

Microsoft Teams has taken the world by storm, but it’s not just for office workers. Teams can also be deployed to powerful effect in many other working environments – including for field staff.

One of the lesser-known features is Teams Walkie Talkie Mode, whereby staff can transmit audio via special single-press mechanism that doesn’t require conventional dialling. This lets a frontline worker transmit either directly, or into a channel, in a similar fashion to when using a walkie talkie.

There’s a number of key advantages here – it means warehouse, shop-floor and field staff can carry fewer devices, and walkie-talkie mode’s ‘big button’ is also more glove-friendly than many touchscreen apps. Companies may also appreciate having to purchase less single-use hardware to begin with.

Because Teams already runs over data connections (usually Wi-Fi or 4G in the case of mobile devices) the range on Walkie Talkie Mode is also infinite, unlike their namesake devices.

If your field staff already have rugged Android devices, from providers such as Zebra or Samsung, these can even integrate single-press keys to drive Walkie Talkie Mode, even if the device screen is off.

Microsoft 365 ‘Field’ licensing is also available at lower cost, with a restricted toolset, allowing companies to safely and cost-effectively rollout Teams access to a wider pool of users. Walkie Talkie Mode itself is available as an additional app that can be enabled in your Teams Admin Centre, and controllable using security permissions administered by your administrator or Microsoft 365 Licensing Partner.

Lineal are a Microsoft 365 Gold Partner – for IT support and expertise, please contact our team today.

Microsoft, continuing the trend of growth in online communications during the COVID-19 pandemic, has informed on social media that their telecommunications app Microsoft Teams now has over 145 million daily users.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Microsoft Teams amassed an estimated 32 million daily active users – with an increase to 75 million users as the reliance on digital tools from the need to work at home dramatically amplified.

The figure is estimated to be about a 26% growth since October 2020 where there was an average of 115 million active users daily. This rapid growth in users has been paralleled with the expansion and inclusion of new features to the telecommunications app including the continual development of Teams Connect which allows the user to share channels with anyone internally or externally to their organisation, virtual meeting whiteboards and background effects for working at home environments; to name a few.

In relation to its competitors, Zoom revealed they had 300 million daily participants and Google Meet displayed 100 million daily participants. It must be noted that both these apps do not record daily users individually, but rather daily participants which implies that a single user could be logged several times if they attend multiple meetings during one given day. However, all these apps have undoubtedly experienced a rapid upsurge in user counts throughout 2020 and 2021 regardless of their user calculation systems.

CEO Natya Sadella states that the “digital adoption curves aren’t slowing down. They’re accelerating and it’s just the beginning”.

Future plans for feature incorporation into Teams include the interoperability with the new Microsoft Mesh, powered by Azure, which promises to be the office meeting’s digital leap into mixed reality technology combining both the physical and virtual world into one shared interactive environment.

For the Teams app itself, Microsoft has promised a host of new capabilities including end to end user encryption for one-on-one voice calls, ability to lock meetings to prevent unauthorised guests from attending and business branded lobbies where admins will be able to add custom logos to their Teams experience.

Microsoft Teams have added Breakout Rooms to online meetings to support group collaboration.

Breakout rooms act as small satellite virtual meetings, and can be used to temporarily divide a larger meeting into smaller teams for workshop exercises or brainstorming sessions.

The feature has been a popular request among Education users, as successive Covid-19 lockdowns forces more academic institutions to adopt remote-teaching.

Teams supports up to fifty simultaneous breakout rooms with custom names, assigning individuals to specific rooms, organiser announcements across rooms, and automatic closing of rooms back into the meeting.

The additional control is still marked as ‘Preview’ while the feature is being rolled out to PC and Mac users.

Lineal are a certified Microsoft Gold Partner – for Microsoft 365 expertise and support, please contact our team today.

Microsoft have previewed an exciting new set of Teams collaboration features in the June 2020 update.

Those on the more experimental Preview Build will be the first to receive the option for large Gallery View – expanding the video meeting grid to 7×7 for a maximum of 49 participants in a meeting. The maximum possible meeting attendance is also set to be increased to 300 participants.

With Schools around the world attempting to push ahead with e-learning, there’s also a new ‘Class Insights’ dashboard designed to monitor pupils’ engagement. Microsoft is promising ‘virtual breakout rooms’ – with centralised control via an organiser who can direct smaller groups to their own meetings and recall them to the main meeting when ready.

Multi Window support will allow users to create satellite calls, chats and more in external windows for better productivity – likely to be especially welcomed by those who use more than one display.

For those speaking English, live captions in meetings will be available in Preview Build to support extra accessibility.

Assigning Priority status to certain chats will allow users to receive custom notifications on important or urgent items. On the security side, external the PSTN numbers of dial-in users will now be masked to guest-attendees, and ‘screen-lock’ is compatible between Teams phones and the desktop app.

Teams phone hardware is receiving a host of new UI features, and for those interacting with more personal users, Teams calling has become inter-operable with the Skype app. This will allow more public facing communication between business Office 365 tenants, and those with Outlook.com acounts, Microsoft 365 consumer/student plans and similar.

The Free Teams Trial will also have one of its key limitations, the ability to schedule meetings, removed in a bid to encourage users to get the most out of one of the platform’s strongest features.

Microsoft have increased the pace of the Teams development cycle, as millions of users around the world need greater functionality for remote working.

Lineal are a Microsoft Gold Partner – for Microsoft 365 expertise and support, please contact our team today.

Gamma Communications have officially launched Teams Direct Routing, allowing organisations which use Microsoft 365 to make Microsoft Teams your phone system.

Teams Direct Routing is a simple monthly bolt-on to Teams-enabled Microsoft 365 licenses, that allows the user to make or accept normal voice calls via the UK phone network.

But what about the actual… phone? Yes, end users can use either the Teams mobile app for their smartphone on iOS/Android, or their PC/Mac – however hardware manufacturers are surprisingly close behind: with Poly and others announcing hardware officially approved to operate a Microsoft Teams based phone system.

Poly CCX Series Teams Phone Handsets

This makes Microsoft Teams a compelling choice as a full-business phone system, with call-routing, voicemail and many the other features commonly associated with work phones – available ‘through’ Teams.

Each user’s overall license package comprises three parts: two Microsoft elements including the user’s Microsoft 365 license that includes Teams, the ‘Phone system’ (PBX) bolt-on, and one from Gamma – the Teams Direct Routing Bolt-on itself.

All this is backed by the remote-working flexibility of Microsoft 365’s cloud infrastructure and Trust Centre – better yet, the monthly cost of extending Teams in this way is a tiny fraction of the upfront cost of buying a traditional business phone system and unifies the user’s other key work communication tool (email) under a single account, calendar, and set of security permissions.

With a user-base of over 70 million daily active Teams users, Teams itself is a workplace juggernaut given extra momentum by the important need for home-working driven by Covid-19. Although Microsoft themselves also offer direct routing call plans that integrate with Microsoft Teams, these do not include the numerous extra functions extensively supported by telecommunications suppliers, such as flexible number porting, extra control over redundancy and business continuity plans, and other related considerations needed to better ‘manage’ an organisation’s communications.

Gamma, whose popular Horizon system operates nearly half a million UK business phone seats, are also giving every sign that Teams Direct Routing will also be the more cost-effective choice when compared to Microsoft’s own call plans.

Teams Direct Routing is likely to prove an extremely popular choice for companies seeking to modernise, and ‘get the most’ out of Teams. Take our advice: this one is going to be big.

For more information on Microsoft 365 and Teams, click here.

For more information on Microsoft 365 licensing, click here.

For more information on how Microsoft Teams can be deployed as a full phone system, please contact our team today.

Microsoft Teams will soon gain the ability to display video-call participants in a 3×3 (9-person) grid, among other new Teams features.

The new teams features improve on the current limit of a 2×2 (4-person) grid – one notable limitation when compared with popular rivals such as Zoom.

Other features being added include custom-backgrounds, a ‘raise-hand’ feature similar to that used in Citrix GoToMeeting webinars, audio-sharing and call recording for 1-1 direct calls. The iOS version on mobile/tablet will also gain Teams’ background blur feature used to obscure the caller’s surroundings.

Recognising perhaps that Teams is still new to many workplace settings there has been a revised focus on hardware for new teams features: ‘Teams Certified’ audio/conferencing devices are now available, and the new Teams push-to-talk ‘walkie-talkie’ mode designed for field workers is currently in preview.

Playing catchup with Teams’ dramatic surge in popularity – to over 44m daily users and 1000% more calls during lockdown across the globe – Microsoft are also overhauling the Teams Admin centre to give admin users more visibility and control over meetings, usage and group policies.

Lineal are a certified Microsoft Gold Partner. Learn more about Microsoft Teams, or contact us today.

This week Microsoft Teams gained 12 million daily users, bringing the total to 44 million globally. During the past few days, Microsoft have raised cloud computing capacity by 600% to support this surge in demand for remote-working tools.  

If it’s all new to you, or you’re working from home for the first time – never fear! Lineal have assembled some of the best online Microsoft Teams resources to help users of all levels. 

We’ll update this ultimate guide to Microsoft Teams to include valuable new videos, examples and training materials as we discover them. 

The Basics 

• Microsoft Teams Quick Start Guide: https://download.microsoft.com/download/D/9/F/D9FE8B9E-22F5-47BF-A1AB-09539C41FCD0/Teams%20QS.pdf 
• Welcome to Teams [VIDEO]: https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/video-welcome-to-microsoft-teams-b98d533f-118e-4bae-bf44-3df2470c2b12?wt.mc_id=otc_microsoft_teams&ui=en-US&rs=en-GB&ad=GB 
• Introducing Microsoft Teams [VIDEO]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKU-FMzZFF0 

Intermediate 

• Getting Started with online meetings [VIDEO]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bl-P0Jrs3g0&list=PLXPr7gfUMmKxuxmc5ZKF-6Zhi4IoNn1c6 
• Simple Microsoft Teams Video Training Online: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/microsoft-teams-video-training-4f108e54-240b-4351-8084-b1089f0d21d7
• ‘Everyday Etiquette in Microsoft Teams’ (Credit: Matt Wade/Chris Webb – AtBot/Avepoint): https://avepointcdn.azureedge.net/pdfs/en/Etiquette-in-Teams-eBook.pdf
• Learning sections of Microsoft Teams: https://support.office.com/en-us/teams 
• Microsoft Tips: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/tips/home 
• Download Teams for mobile via Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.teams&hl=en_GB via Apple App Store: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/microsoft-teams/id1113153706 

Experienced 

• What’s New in Microsoft Teams? Release Schedule: https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/what-s-new-in-microsoft-teams-d7092a6d-c896-424c-b362-a472d5f105de 
• Microsoft Learn Courses: Teams – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/browse/?products=office-teams&resource_type=learning%20path 
• How to use Screenshare/Powerpoint during meetings [VIDEO]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISSDppQnyiE&list=PLXPr7gfUMmKxuxmc5ZKF-6Zhi4IoNn1c6&index=6 
• Managing Calendar in Microsoft Teams [VIDEO]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwUGAgiWaXI&list=PLXPr7gfUMmKxuxmc5ZKF-6Zhi4IoNn1c6&index=2 
• ‘Teams on Air’ Series [VIDEO]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU0nqhSrCkU&list=PLXPr7gfUMmKxeNajnxxy1QK4J6uXDgJ9Z 
• Guide to Teams Security Permissions: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/team-owner-member-and-guest-capabilities-in-teams-d03fdf5b-1a6e-48e4-8e07-b13e1350ec7b 
• Microsoft 365 Blog: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/blog/ 
• Microsoft Trust Centre: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/trust-center 

Lineal are a Microsoft Gold Partner – for expertise and support, please contact our team today.

We recently attended the 2020 Gamma Communications Roadshow at Stamford Bridge – hearing the latest business telecoms and technology trends from across the UK. But what do businesses need to be aware of?

Clock Ticking for ISDN

BT will officially turn off all ISDN services by 2025, with the ‘stop-sell’ order coming as early as 2023.

With UK businesses just getting used to putting ‘2020’ on paperwork, this is no longer a drill – if your phone system uses ISDN, your business needs to begin preparing to switch to a digital services such as SIP or better still, a hosted VOIP platform.

There are perhaps as many as 1.5 million ISDN channels still in use by businesses across the UK. Gulp.

Ultrafast Fibre Rollout Gathers Pace

Superfast broadband (‘Fibre to the Cabinet’ or FTTC) prices are falling all the time, but the big story of the decade is likely to be the steady roll-out of ultrafast ‘Fibre to the Premise’ to many more businesses – to around 40% availability over the next few years.

Salisbury is the first single-year rollout ‘test’ area trialling complete fibre infrastructure (booking a new copper line in the Salisbury area is likely to be rejected).

Interested in fibre for your area? Perhaps you should speak to your friendly neighbourhood IT provider…

Not all 5G is born equal

We’ve known for a while how the smallest of the UK’s four mobile networks (Three Mobile) is arguably in the best position to deliver data, although it’s now becoming clear Three has an enviable technical advantage over some of the other major providers – and is even using the cheeky marketing slogan: ‘If it’s Not Three, It’s Not Real 5G’.

The reserved spectrum range favours Three to such an extent that EE/BT, O2 and Vodafone have all submitted strongly worded complaints over preferential access. Gulp.

Microsoft Teams Telecoms Emerges

Among Gamma’s most exciting news was the announcement of a Direct Call Routing service for Microsoft Teams – which effectively plugs into the back of Teams and Microsoft’s ‘Phone System’ PBX add-on, to turn your Microsoft Teams software into a fully fledged business phone system.

Until now Microsoft’s Teams platform has been a strong option for video/audio conferencing, screenshare, instant messaging and collaboration – but have always lacked the more robust business call-handling feature-set of true phone systems, or suffered from a shortage of physical handsets. With both of those challenges solved by Gamma and the Teams app available on a variety of devices, it’s easy to imagine Teams phones appearing on desks.

Direct Routing for Teams is expected from April 2020. The final pricing is likely to be somewhere in the region of between £15-25 a month per user (including Microsoft Office licensing) – finally unifying telecoms under the same single user account as Microsoft Office 365 hosted email, files storage, office apps and collaboration software. Watch this space.

For communications services and expertise, please contact our team today.

Office 365’s Microsoft Teams has grown and grown to become far more than a simple work chat or video conferencing app.

As new features are added to the collaboration suite all the time, you could easily miss the best of the new updates – so we’ve collated some of the most interesting cool tricks for Teams:

Blur background

Homeworking? Taking an important video call with a less than formal background? Unless you want to end up in a viral video clip like BBC commentator Professor Robert Kelly, Teams has got you covered with simple controls to mask your immediate surroundings from a video call.

With a simple toggle, Microsoft Teams will detect your face in the foreground and blur the remainder of the screen, to spare everyone the embarrassment of your favourite coffee shop or messy home office.

Screenshare to Mobile

Teams has had the ability to optionally share your screen with other attendees in the same meeting for some time, choosing to show either the whole Windows desktop or restricted to a single window (such as a presentation.)

However, Microsoft have also recently added this feature for iOS/Android, allowing attendees to enjoy the full Teams experience on the move.

Viewing a desktop on a mobile can be an eyesight challenge, although it’s especially handy to be able to view a shared Powerpoint presentation in Private mode – and skip back through slides without interrupting everyone else’s flow.

Join by proximity

Join by proximity allows Teams to detect meeting that’s physically located nearby. This seems like a peculiar idea to begin with, but is actually designed for more open ‘meeting’ situations – such as conference venues or hotdesking environments: making individuals’ screen space as collaborative as the room itself, or extending a spontaneous group meeting into a virtual one.

Teams will prompt within the meeting room lobby if any existing rooms are available nearby via Bluetooth, allowing the user to apply to join the meeting with audio muted, and without an original Teams invite. The meeting room organiser must accept via a Meeting Room control unit for security reasons, to ensure only welcome attendees join the meeting room.

Proximity join is available from May 2019, including on mobile versions of Teams.

Integrate Interactive Tabs

One of the best untapped features of teams is the ability to add custom tabs (click ‘+’) into each chat channel which allows for the creation of something entirely custom.

Among our favourites are embedded maps, OneNote notebooks, diary, Sharepoint files, and Microsoft Power BI’s impressive data visualisations.

Of course, Channel admins can also add from a category simply marked ‘website’ – via which any responsive web service with a valid SSL certificate can be deployed neatly through teams for the look-and-feel of a more integrated desktop.

Get Notified of Availability

Status indicators mean its easy to tell if a contact is unavailable to chat, but right-clicking on a contact now offers a handy ‘Notify When Available’ option which performs the basic requirement of call back – allowing Teams to prompt you of contact availability the best time.

Microsoft Teams is available with Microsoft Office 365 Business Essentials licensing and above.

Lineal are a Gold Microsoft Partner – for Microsoft Office 365 support, licensing and expertise, please contact our team today.

Microsoft have announced their plans for combining Skype for Business and Microsoft Teams, setting out how the two communications platforms will merge in a new Microsoft Teams roadmap.

As Lineal predicted just a few weeks ago, Microsoft will indeed align the two apps under one heading, named Microsoft Teams, from Summer 2018.

Microsoft Teams, a super-smooth instant messaging and group sharing app for business, will go head to head with rapidly expanding collaboration app rivals like Slack and Basecamp, but will incorporate the enterprise business telephony and conferencing abilities (including PSTN calling, video conferencing and group screen sharing) from the hugely popular Skype for Business.

Consistent across Windows and Mac client versions, on mobile and in the cloud – the new teams roadmap details ‘Messaging’, ‘Meeting’ and ‘Calling’ changes to the app for Q4 2017 through to Q4 of 2018.

On the Messaging side all new planned features (for example contact groups, chat between the two apps and Skype for Business contact import) will be available by the end of Q1 2018, although Meeting and Calling additions are more gradual.

Certain Meetings features, such as browser-based meetings via teams and audio conference calls will be available by Q4 of 2017, although power uses will need to wait until Q2 of 2018 for more advanced features such as recording, powerpoint share and PSTN fallback.

Call queues, out of office support and transfer to PSTN call tools will be running by next Summer, with call park and shared line appearance delayed until Q4 of 2018.

Users can already run both Skype for Business and Teams side by side, although Microsoft will increasingly push users in the direction of the latter. Extra help materials for organisations making the transition can be found here.

Both Teams and Skype for Business are already included at no extra charge to Microsoft Office 365 Business Premium customers, although many do not even realise the leading communication apps are available to use.

While the combined product is likely to be an extremely powerful and flexible business tool, Microsoft’s challenge for the Teams roadmap will be to make Microsoft Teams as much of a household name as the Skype brand.

Lineal are a Microsoft Gold partner – contact us today for Office 365 support.