Ignite Live Blog BRK3124 – Skype for Business on-prem customers can take advantage of Teams Meetings

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Microsoft Teams Events Blog articles.

BRK3124 - How Skype for Business on-premises customers can take advantage of Microsoft Teams meetings

 

Session details and video recording: https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/65542

 

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Live blog summary by Tom Arbuthnot

 

If you are SfB Server and don't plan to move to Teams yet, but want to take advantage of the new features of Teams meetings, “Meetings First” could be for you

 

If there is one thing to take away from Microsoft Ignite this year, it's that Microsoft Teams is gaining real momentum and is Microsoft future for Collaboration and Unified Communications.

 

However, Microsoft understands not all customers will move from Skype for Business Server to Teams straight away, due to either financial, business or technical reasons. But does this mean they can't take advantage of new features in Microsoft Teams meetings?

 

In this session, Francois Doremieux, Program Manager at Microsoft and Heidi Gloudemans, Director, Product Marketing at Microsoft went over a brand new option currently in preview. An SfB server user will have their chat and voice on SfB and be able to schedule Microsoft Teams meetings with an SfB and Teams Meetings "better together" experience, optimised to work side by side.

 

What are some of the benefits to customers?

  • Next generation meeting experience
  • Great experience on mobile
  • Latest global infrastructure, codecs and bandwidth optimisations
  • Cloud meeting recording
  • Pre and Post-meeting experience
  • Plugin less meeting join in Browser (WebRTC)

 meetings for everyone.png

What does "optimised to work side by side" really mean?

  • Simplified, streamlined meetings centric Teams experience, Chat and Calling tabs off
  • Same Scheduling experience for users, One button in outlook to schedule, no confusing multiple options
  • Migrate existing SfB meetings, initially with a client-side tool, later with Office 365 service side option
  • Switching between meetings and SfB Calls will put the appropriate session on hold
  • USB devices will work nicely together between Teams and SfB
  • The benefit of using CQD/Call Analytics for troubleshooting quality issues

 meetings first.png

meetings first 2.png

   

Microsoft explained that several companies are already testing this out, including Modality Systems where I work. We have some users that still have business workflows that require SfB, but now they can use Teams for their meetings experience.

 

William Hoelscher at Sprint talked about their experience in the TAP. Sprint is moving fast to Teams with >30k active users. Sprint joined the TAP for Meetings First in late June and already has more than 2000 users provisioned for it, with great feedback from users for both capabilities and quality.

 

TAP customers.png

This session wasn't until the Friday, but for me, it's one of the biggest Microsoft Teams announcements at Ignite. This unlocks a great way for a lot of existing Skype for Business Server customers to get some of the real Microsoft Teams experience and business benefits today with little change to users workflows.

 

If you are interested, you can apply for the Meetings First TAP: https://aka.ms/MeetingsFirstTAP

 

 

 

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