Technology Musings

Microsoft [at Teams launch]: Teams is cool! Lots of features! New chat! Users: Yay! Emoji! GIFs! Users: Um, we may be a bit slow here, but how do you Tag a contact for Status Change as we do in Skype? We use presence all the time, presence rocks . Users: Also, it's very slow to update presence for another user, now we come to think of it. Microsoft [loftily]: Oh, you don't need Presence any more, that's old stuff. Look, Teams isn't about Instant Messaging, where you can only message someone who is actively online, it's a Chat application, like WhatsApp. You don't check if someone is online in WhatsApp before messaging them, do you? Users: Yes, but I want to know if someone has read my message - if I can see their presence, I know they have got the message. And, in WhatsApp I may not get presence, but I can get a Read Receipt. Users: Look, when Lync came out, you told us that Rich Presence was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and you were right...

Back in November 2018, Tom Arbuthnot reported that Microsoft had started to automatically upgrade smaller Office 365 customers from Skype for Business to Teams. My own Office 365 tenant has now had this, so I thought I'd share some screenshots of the process. First warning The first notification came through to the Office 365 admin email address on April 9th: Lots of useful links, all the information is there. The 'See what happens next' takes you to a page on the Fastrack web site . You can select to postpone the automated upgrade, but I wanted to see what happened, so I just 'ignored' the communication! User Communication Received On May 3rd (a week before the scheduled upgrade), all users on the tenant received this message: At this stage, if you look at the Teams Admin portal, you can see that Microsoft have enabled the 'Notify users' setting: This means that the Skype for Business client (desktop and mobile) has a banner at the ...