Earlier today, Microsoft announced at Ignite 2017 that their collaboration software Teams would soon include Skype for Business features in it. Their new Office blog shares more details about the upcoming integration, and it’s now clear that Microsoft Teams is set on the course to replace Skype for Business in due time.
Until then, the tech giant is continuing to build up its business collaboration tool with a list of upcoming communication features. Today, a public preview released Dial-In Conferencing with more to come such as PSTN calling, call hold, call transfer and voicemail. etc.
Microsoft’s vision of business meetings are aimed to be streamlined through one tool, and that looks to be Teams. As stated in the blog post:
- Before a meeting, Teams will surface relevant documents and rich information about the participants to help you prepare.
- During the meeting, the conversation can be captured, transcribed, and time-coded, with closed captioning and voice recognition for attributing remarks to specific individuals.
- After the meeting, the cloud recording and transcript can be automatically added to the relevant channel, so conversations, documents, notes, and action items can be reviewed, indexed, and searched by the entire team.
As we noted earlier today, Skype for Business isn’t on the chopping block just yet. The press release notes that it will still remain available for customers not yet ready for Microsoft Teams and that a new version is to be released in mid to late 2018.
