Technology Musings

A new item popped up last week on the Teams roadmap - and it's quite a big deal: Whilst Microsoft want everyone in the world to fully adopt Teams as soon as possible, for some customers, it's not an easy transition: there are complex dependencies, especially on the telephony side, for which there is no quick fix. So, there needs to be interoperability between users who are fully in Teams ('Teams only') and those who are still using Skype for Business. The current interop provides chat and calling, but until now, has not provided for screen-sharing: and for many users, that's a big deal. In fact, I've heard of a number of companies where the IT Department has chosen to be the first group to move to Teams-only: but has then had to roll-back because the lack of screen-sharing has proved too inconvenient. But Microsoft announced last week that the current interop is to be improved to provide screen-sharing between Teams-only users and those running Skype fo...

If you're looking at moving to Microsoft Teams, or you're currently using Skype for Business Online for telephony but are thinking about the inevitable move to Teams, you may be wondering about what your options for handsets are. The situation is evolving all the time, but I've tried to summarise the current (August 2019) situation here. Of course, the question as to why anyone needs a handset - rather than using a headset with their PC - to use Teams or Skype for Business is a question in itself, but personal preference does mean that there is some requirement in most organisations. And of course, not everyone in a business uses a computer, so most environments have at least a few non-personal common-area phones (and sometimes more than a few - I've worked on projects with hundreds of common-area phones). If you need phones for Teams now Today, your choices are to buy phones from Audiocodes, Yealink or Crestron (the Crestron phones are actually by Yealink). The...