Screen sharing in Teams/Skype for Business interop

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 for Business. And, it's due to rollout by the end of August 2019.

This will make a big difference to users who are already in a 'mixed mode' but also, has an impact on the route to Teams for those customers planning that transition. As I wrote a while ago, there is a decision to be made about how to get to 'Teams only', and this change makes that decision much more evenly-balanced, in my view.

External Users too

This change also impacts when working with external (federated) contacts too: if you are communicating with someone outside of your organisation, today whether they use Teams or Skype, that communication is limited, and you cannot share your desktop from Teams: you can from Skype, in fact: it initiates a Skype meeting link and the link is sent in the chat to the Teams user. Now, Teams has the same functionality, so clicking on 'share' now offers to create a meeting link.




Until full native Teams federation comes, that's a useful improvement (and of course it will continue to be relevant when communicating with Skype users).

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