You need to move to Microsoft Teams Now!

Microsoft has made no secret of the fact that Skype for Business Online will cease 31st July 2021. And whilst the temptation may be to remain with a platform that you are familiar with, there's no better time to make the transition to MS Teams and experience the service upgrades it will bring.

Whilst there is a host of collaborative solutions out there, Slack, for example, MS Teams is head and shoulders above its rivals. And whilst Skype for Business edges to retirement, MS Teams should not be viewed simply as its successor, but instead as a move to a more agile, future-proof collaborative working solution.

Over 327,000 organisations worldwide have now adopted MS Teams and its strengths don't just lie in collaboration and communication tasks, but in its ability to provide users with auto-provisioning. This can have real benefits for organisations that deal with customers daily, freeing staff up to deal with more complex issues that require human intervention.

MS Teams has a host of benefits, whether your business is a large scale multinational setup or a smaller single-site organisation, adopting MS Teams will empower your workforce.

Integration

MS Teams and Skype will continue to function alongside each other until Skype end of life. This means you can choose who, and when to upgrade. This gives you the flexibility to upgrade individuals, teams or whole organisations to MS Teams. This can be particularly useful in establishing training for teams, the phased approach means that existing users can train new users and help support the process.

Scalable

MS Teams is a scalable solution that allows businesses to easily upgrade or add more licences when necessary. This flexibility can have real cost benefits to business, meaning you only pay for what you need.

Meetings

One of the biggest benefits to MS Teams is the ability to hold meetings. high-quality audio-visual meetings that can be recorded are of a huge benefit to any organisation. Recordings can easily be shared with other users and MS Teams cognitive services mean these can even be held in different languages with the ability to auto-translate and transcribe.

MS Cognitive Services

As touched upon previously, Microsoft offers a host of cognitive services in their Teams package. 

- Auto-translation services

- Speech recognition

- Facial recognition

- Machine learning

These are just some of the services available along with a developers platform to further enhance and develop these capabilities.

API, SDKs and App Integration

MS Teams is heavily committed to integration with third-party apps and is one of the key benefits for adoption. There is a dedicated developer platform available on the Microsoft website and a vast array of apps available for integration including Zapier, Hootsuite, Twitter and Lucid Chart.

Currently, third-party bots, connectors, and extensions are supported in Teams and there is  a large ecosystem of add-ins available in the Microsoft Teams app store.

Calling

One of the huge benefits of MS Teams over Skype for Business is the integrated calling capabilities which are immediately available to all users.

An addition of a Microsoft Calling Plan can be added which will allow users to both make and receive UK, International and mobile calls even with non-Teams users. TeamsLink from Atlas Support is the perfect solution to enable full collaboration that is custom-built for your business.

ROI

As with all business decisions, ROI should be one of the considerations. Microsoft is so confident that Teams indicates a real ROI with a short-term pay-back that they have commissioned an independent paper demonstrating this.

There are further cost reductions available by implementing calling via TeamsLink, in some businesses it will be possible to move all calling to MS Teams negating the need for expensive hardware and telephony systems altogether.

With benefits spanning cost control and improved employee collaboration, it's easy to see why forward-thinking businesses are making the move from Skype for Business to MS Teams today. A constantly expanding and evolving platform that truly encapsulates the collaborative workplace that continues to grow with your business.

Why Atlas Support?

Atlas Support has over 2 decades of voice technology experience. Partnered with Microsoft, Atlas Support offers a platform that provides the ultimate collaborative communication through MS Teams and TeamsLink.

We have a dedicated internal development team who are committed to providing our customers with the best solutions available. As well as our own developers, we also partner with best-of-breed vendors that provide Microsoft Certified handsets that directly run Teams on-screen, giving you the freedom to choose how you roll out teams to your users.