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Businesses Communications Microsoft

Microsoft Teams is Replacing Skype for Business To Put More Pressure on Slack (theverge.com) 135

Posted by msmash from the fighting-back dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft Teams isn't even a year old, but it's about to replace Skype for Business. At Microsoft's Ignite conference in Orlando, Florida today, the software giant is revealing that it plans to kill off Skype for Business in favor of Microsoft Teams. Skype for Business took over from Lync, Microsoft's previous business chat app, back in 2015. Microsoft's original Teams launch made it look obvious that Skype for Business would eventually disappear, given the fact that Teams integrates most of Skype's functionality already. Microsoft says it has been building a new Skype infrastructure that has been "evolving rapidly," and it will serve as the enterprise-grade service for voice, video, and meetings in Microsoft Teams. A new Skype for Business server will be available in the second half of 2018 for customers not ready to move to Teams, but Microsoft is pushing Office 365 users will to move over to Teams as the key communications client instead of relying on Skype for Business.
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Microsoft Teams is Replacing Skype for Business To Put More Pressure on Slack More

Microsoft Teams is Replacing Skype for Business To Put More Pressure on Slack

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  • This is the exact opposite of what they should do. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lordpidey ( 942444 ) on Monday September 25, 2017 @10:44AM (#55259297) Homepage
    Replacing a fully functional product that a company probably spent a lot of money hiring people to implement and integrate with the company network with another product just seems moronic.

    If I were a buisness that used Skype, I'd be pissed off and probably change to Slack, rather than change to Microsoft Teams.

    • Open source to the rescue! Use Diaspora. (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If you need a communication platform for your team that's open source, then Diaspora [wikipedia.org] is surely the way to go. It's written in Ruby using Ruby on Rails, and the code is on GitHub [github.com], so it's using cutting edge technologies.

    • Re:This is the exact opposite of what they should (Score:5, Interesting)

      by spiritgreywolf ( 683532 ) * on Monday September 25, 2017 @11:10AM (#55259517) Homepage Journal

      I've been using Teams for a little bit at two of my clients - and I have to say Microsoft REALLY needs to improve the efficiency of Teams before they go fully replacing Skype. As soon as I run the fat-client app whether on Windows or Mac, it's a resource suck as bad as anything I have seen. It's like a really sad, slow version of Google Wave.

      • I'm not familiar with Teams, but Slack is dreadful in the area of resource usage as well.

        It currently hogs 1.5GB of my memory, with just 4 teams (of which 1 is defunct and not used at all) and absolutely nothing fancy going on (one or two images shared each day is about it).

        • Yup. It's that bad and there is like zero traffic on it with one team. Just to have a presence in memory drags the machine. They really do have performance issues with it they need to address before expecting corps to deploy it.

          Even if they said "Just go virtual" you'd still hear an ESX farm scream in terror as a group of people logged into their virtual desktops in the morning!

      • Hardly surprising given that Teams is an Electron application [thoughtstuff.co.uk]. This is also why #Slack is such a resource hog - it consumes about 1GB per Team because each team runs in its own extremely inefficient browser process.

        I understand the desire for Write Once Run Anywhere but surely there are better platforms to use than Electron.

    • Re:This is the exact opposite of what they should (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Junta ( 36770 ) on Monday September 25, 2017 @11:14AM (#55259547)

      I would say they should have named it 'Lync' again. Skype for business has been the most confusing thing to talk about, because it has *zero* to do with Skype, except in the minds of MS marketing people.

      As a result you can't just say 'Skype' because people won't do the right thing, you always had to say 'Skype for Business' which is a misleading mouthful.

      • I would say they should have named it 'Lync' again. Skype for business has been the most confusing thing to talk about, because it has *zero* to do with Skype, except in the minds of MS marketing people.

        As a result you can't just say 'Skype' because people won't do the right thing, you always had to say 'Skype for Business' which is a misleading mouthful.

        I'm on a project now that involves a large S4B deployment and this is me at every single meeting. Skype for Business is stupid name so everyone just says Skype, then the discussion turns to original recipe Skype and some people already use 'Skype' so why are we deploying it again. Cue the explanations, rinse repeat for the last nine months...

    • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      They're not "replacing" anything. They're:
      1) adding Teams functionality to Skype For Business, because SFB is a functional product and Teams is new functionality,
      2) rebranding SFB as Teams, because SFB is a clunky name and everyone has hated the name since it replaced Lync, and
      3) releasing a non-cloud server called Skype For Business Server, because there are large enterprises that want to host their own stuff for various legitimate reasons.

      This announcement has the following impact on everyday users/IT wor

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by garcia ( 6573 )

      We have O365 and Skype here at work and we prefer Slack to S4B in every way. In fact, we're evaluating other options for conferencing because S4B sucks when trying to operate with those who are not using S4B externally.

      I fully understand why Microsoft is trying to go down this route, as evidenced by our lack of faith in their offerings; however, I am not certain it's going to do much to help them "win", especially when people are already paying for their O365 subscriptions and having to double up and use ot

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dan667 ( 564390 )
      microsoft has a long history of this. I remember netmeeting. It was great and it worked great. They replaced it with something I have forgotten and in a couple of weeks everyone stop using it as it did not work. If they had built up netmeeting they might have never needed to buy Skype. Looks like they are repeating the same pattern decades later.

    • Re:This is the exact opposite of what they should (Score:4, Informative)

      by SoCalChris ( 573049 ) on Monday September 25, 2017 @11:26AM (#55259655) Journal

      Have you ever used Skype for Business? It's a shitty app, and won't be missed in the slightest. If they just shut the entire fucking thing down today, I'd be thrilled.

      It can't keep conversations synced across devices, if you've got multiple instances open (For example on your PC, a remote PC and your phone) it will randomly send a conversation to a device that you're not using and you won't see it until later, it freezes for about 30 seconds every time you get a new conversation, the audio cuts out constantly, when connected with bluetooth headset if and other app plays a sound Skype for business just completely shuts down all audio until the other sound is done.

      The entire Lync/Skype for Business team should be fired.

      • Yep. We had Skype for Buisness, and a bunch of rogue Slack instances. Skype for Business is just so clunky in comparison. Finally management broke down and got a Slack license. I'm sure they'll move us to Teams eventually, I hope MS doesn't screw it up. Especially Mac and Android support. Not holding my breath.

    • If I were a buisness that used Skype, I'd be pissed off and probably change to Slack

      If I were a business that used Skype, I'd wait and see and assess what it means, before jumping the gate and racing off in some unknown direction powered entirely by my own lack of information.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Skype from what I can figure out - it seems to be pretty much Lync with a revamped chat window.

        It's not even revamped, it's just Lync rebranded. It has nothing to do with original recipe Skype.

    • Yeah good luck with that. Companies are the biggiest MS fanboys who killed the superior Novell Netware, Unix, and other products to one unifying Microsoft solution hoping it would cut down on costs and save them money.

      Teams is Skype, Sharepoint, some chat application, and Slack?? I never even heard of it before. Has anyone else?

      It is not from Microsoft so it will be ignored by the enterprise since MS has a similar option. Everyone uses Teams and Planner is the new rage so far this year

    • > Replacing a fully functional product that a company probably spent a lot of money hiring people to implement and integrate with the company network with another product just seems moronic.

      I don't know any decision that MS made that was not moronic.
      They're surviving by luck and circumstances (Windows and some of its products like Office) are already so prevalent that they cannot basically fail, at least not easily because all the apps are made for it.

      But their innovation and decisions are probably the s

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Even our Cisco chat tool is just XMPP underneath. It makes it easy to integrate into a host of services. IBM's "Sametime" is also in libpurple. I've used both and they're fairly good. At the minimum I can at least use my own chat client.

  • ...rebrand it "Microsoft Slack", and call it innovation. I guess that model doesn't work anymore, or they just don't have the cash/prestige/fear-factor to buy whatever they want anymore?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by orlanz ( 882574 )

      Well... they did buy Skype 6 years ago so probably the model doesn't work anymore. But I don't think it ever really did thou.

  • Microsoft Extinguishes Successful Products (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I wonder when Microsoft will figure out that changing the brand of their products every 2 years and killing off products just makes customers confused and kills any momentum they may have had previously.

    To make it better, they add 15 license models making it impossible to know cost or how to pay.

  • Downhill again (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Lync was pretty good. Then they replaced it with Skype - made it a little bad. Then Skype for Business; worse. Then MS Office 365 Skype for Business which is horrible. Can't wait to see what Teams will be like

    • Lync was never replaced by Skype. It was rebranded Skype for Business. Lync/Skype for Business was always lagging functionality found elsewhere. Slack has just come on MS' radar as a target. The problem for MS, is that they know they need to compete, but don't really know why. Which is why they keep changing focus.

  • And so it begins... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by hyades1 ( 1149581 ) <hyades1@hotmail.com> on Monday September 25, 2017 @11:01AM (#55259425)

    An office suite program is integral to the efficient functioning of just about any business. So now, predictably, Microsoft is using its newest version of Office to leverage other applications into accepting more and more of its programs. Identify what "Teams" does that "Skype for Business" doesn't (especially with respect to how much of your business will reside on Microsoft servers after the change), and that is the amount by which Microsoft has increased its hold on your company. I have no idea what those differences might be, but I have little doubt they exist.

    Companies that opted for Libre Office are starting to look smarter and smarter, while those that took the easy route and "upgraded" to Win 10 and Office 365 ("All Your Cloud Are Belong To Us") are probably going to regret their choice sooner or later.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Powerpoint and VBA are the big reasons the world can't switch to LibreOffice.

      One would think Powerpoint is low hanging fruit. And, after 20 years of VBA, I'm surprised there isn't an opensource equivalent.

      • Prezzi is a good (not perfect) replacement for most people wanting to do presentations.

        • Excellent point. It seems to me both Powerpoint and Prezzy have stayed pretty much the same for quite a while now. I'm not sure whether that's because they are pretty much doing their job properly, or because nobody's really interested in developing them further.

          I would think that if the latter situation is true, then the Open Source application would be more likely to see further development when there's no really compelling business case to be made to invest resources in such a project.

    • Microsoft is using its newest version of Office to leverage other applications

      High time traveller. Welcome to 2017. You must have missed a lot in the past 15 years.

      (Personal advice: Go back. Things made more sense then).

      • I bet a lot of people call you a condescending prick, and politely request that you fuck off and die.

        Perhaps you should accept their well-meant advice.

        • Not really, a lot of people have a sense of humour and the humility to see how stupid their statements are.

    • Companies that opted for Libre Office are starting to look smarter and smarter,

      Keep dreaming. For all it's foibles, MS Office still shits on Libre Office if you are in any business with more than one person...

  • MS has this way of seeing how far they can get away with intrusive, user-unfriendly products. From XP (via WGA) to Windows 8 (tiles aka ad server) to Windows 10 (which collects more data than ever before with very limited ability to protect your private). With the MS purchase of Skype (thanks owners for selling customers out), it's no exception. One day we will get wise and tell MS where to stick it and go to linux/macos. Until we do MS will keep doing this because by continuing to use them, especially when
  • Remember when Microsoft bought Skype and people worried about the future of Skype as cross platform. Now Skype has been sucked in to Office365. Only Offrice365 is being extended.

    • Errrr no. Skype is still Skype. The thing in Office 365 is Lync, with a name and a logo change. (even then only partial, it still is listed as lync.exe on my system)

  • Microsoft needs to make up its damn mind about this.

    We support several flavors of Lync and are transitioning to Skype for Business and NOW they are going to change it again?

  • MS has purchased / absorbed a competing / NIH product an later crippled / killed it? Hoping this does not become a trend.

  • Lync, then Skype, then Jabber, now Skype again. We also use Webex for meetings. I swear, it's always the corporate IT guys jockeying for something. Once they finally settle on something, then MS changes their direction.

    Excel and other MS applications are getting slower and less stable.
    This push to the cloud is getting quite annoying.

  • Has it been two years already? (Score:5, Funny)

    by sootman ( 158191 ) on Monday September 25, 2017 @01:03PM (#55260317) Homepage Journal

    Time for a chat client name change!
    * Messenger
    * Communicator
    * Lync
    * Skype for Business (as opposed to "Skype for Pleasure"?)
    ... and those are just the ones that are still in my Applications folder! I think there were a couple besides those as well. And those are just corporate clients -- I'm not even talking about MSN Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, etc etc etc. And some were for both, before there was a big division between corporate and regular IM clients. ("MSN Messenger" came with Office X for Mac.)

    Oh yeah, NetMeeting -- anyone else remember that?

    And I'm sure I'm still forgetting one or two more.

  • Seems like every time Microsoft touches something, it gets worse. Adding Microsoft to just about anything seems to equate to adding malvertising bloatware, and create no way for any decent feedback. I suppose the only question I have, is "when do they screw this up so badly, they buy Slack and kill that?"

  • I'm honestly all for (Score:3)

    by bravecanadian ( 638315 ) on Monday September 25, 2017 @02:45PM (#55261207)

    Microsoft replacing a bunch of their duplicate services with one service to rule them all... I just wish they would decide on one and stick with it for a while.

    The constant renaming and shifting strategies from NetMeeting to Groove to Yammer to Lync to Skype to Teams is getting kind of annoying.

    That and their general problems with naming products.. geesh..

  • Is that AI thing in Microsoft Teams safe for users who /mostly/ work in VPN protected environments and encrypt a fair amount of data, email etc.?

  • Not even close (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I work in an almost exclusively Microsoft shop and we've been using Slack for over a year to collaborate. Recently we tried Teams because it's nice to be able to use your Windows domain credentials for everything, instead of having yet another set just for Slack.

    Teams didn't last one day, hell it didn't even last one HOUR, before we went back to Slack. Teams is so far behind in functionality - even basic functionality - that at this point it isn't even a competitor to Slack. For example, to upload a file in

  • 15 mentions of Microsoft on the front page ..
  • As a user of that crappy app, I welcome the change
  • I for one have a Skype for Business implementation that spans the globe. I have sites in Africa, UK, Brazil, Mexico, Germany Chile, and the US. All of my sites are tied together with Skype for Business. I have SIP trunks to every local PBX at every location so that I can call for free to any of these locations and they can call me. It is EXTREMELY cost effective and versatile. And it just WORKS.. So now they get teams.. It literally is copying a bunch of SKype for business features and really the only

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