Microsoft? have announced that with effect from September 1st, 2019 Skype for Business will no longer be delivered with their Office 365 suite of applications. From that date onwards, all new Office 365 customers will instead, be delivered Microsoft Teams.

At $8.5B, Skype was one of Microsoft’s highest value acquisitions in 2011.

But the application we used to keep in touch with our distant relatives, was never really the competitor to mainstream video conferencing Microsoft had hoped for. Skype for Business was bandwidth hungry and when more than two people/locations were in the video call, the quality was pretty awful.

Determined to compete in the ever developing Unified Communication space, Microsoft have announced that with effect from September 1st, 2019 Skype for Business will no longer be delivered with their Office 365 suite of applications. From that date onwards, all new Office 365 customers will instead, be delivered Microsoft Teams.

Microsoft have also announced the end of support date for SfB, along with their plan to automatically ‘transition’ SfB users to Microsoft Teams in the coming weeks and months. The word is that this transitioning will be delivered through Microsoft updates. So one day you may turn on your computer and find out that you are now a Teams user!!

The great news is that the video conferencing element of Microsoft Teams is everything SfB was not. With high quality video, audio and point to multipoint calling, Teams delivers an excellent user experience to desk top users – including its really cool ‘blur the background’ feature, which is ideal when making desktop video calls in a busy open plan office.

Microsoft are clearly looking to win a lion’s share of the global Video Conferencing market. Because of this, Teams has been designed in such a way, which means it does not natively interoperate with ‘traditional’ room based video conferencing systems (using the H.323 or SIP protocols) from the major and long standing video conferencing manufactures.

If you are running SfB or Teams, perhaps your organisation will be looking at ways to deploy Microsoft Teams into your meeting rooms.

Fired Up Technologies is a hugely experienced Audio Visual integrator with VC/UC experience going back to 1990. Today, we offer a wide range of Microsoft Teams meeting room solutions for huddle rooms, regular sized meeting rooms as well as the largest boardroom.

We can supply systems which can run on SfB today; but these same systems can also run Teams tomorrow. Perfect for organisations looking to move across to Teams in the coming months.

We can design your SfB/Teams rooms to meet your specific application requirements.

? ? ? ? ?Maybe your people want to take their work laptop into the room and access all of the rooms AV tech – with just a single cable.

? ? ? ? ?Perhaps your users want to walk into the meeting room, press one button and get on with what they do best. Or you might want a mixture of both!

We can advise on the best display technologies to suit the requirements of your particular business and the very best audio solutions to suit each type of room. Our intuitive room control systems mean you can totally forget about finding and/or figuring out how to use the various handheld remote controls.

All of this will ensure that your people can forget about the tech and focus on doing business better.

We know that holding productive meetings is vitally important for businesses of all sizes. So if you are looking to deploy Microsoft Teams in your meeting rooms or you are simply looking to make your meeting rooms work better, please get in touch, we’d be happy to help.

I promise you’ll find us really nice people to deal with.

PS. If your organisation doesn’t want to go down the Microsoft route, we have a number of alternative solutions for you too.