There are several companies that are going through this journey and a transition of different capabilities across the enterprise on Collaboration and today, we have Microsoft Teams as the hub for teamwork. It's a little background on unified communications at Microsoft with Skype for business as the foundation. There is a statistic that three billion minutes of voice across Skype for business and a billion skype meetings per year and growth is really taking off. Customers are really taking advantage of the value that unified communications bring and taking those siloed applications that used to be in their individual areas and unifying them and making them work together really is making people more productive it's improving communications it's making communications more intelligent.
Conferencing and instant messaging and live communication have become a vital part of any organization, doesn’t matter how big is the organization. When Microsoft acquired Skype and that's the consumer piece of the business and the plan was to take some of these best practices for Skype consumer and transform those into what they offer for Skype for business and Teams
Microsoft Skype for business came out in 2015 and here we are today with Microsoft teams and a good way to think about what is Microsoft teams it's all of the intelligent communication capabilities that you receive from Skype for business so that's instant messaging chat conferencing really its real-time communications and bringing that together with collaboration so now you can collaborate not only from a communications perspective but let's say you want to share a file let's say you want to work on a file together with multiple team members so there's co-authoring all this is hosted on the backend of SharePoint so you get all the wonderful capabilities of SharePoint which can bring this all together as Microsoft teams and as Microsoft frames at the hub for teamwork so we all know the modern workplace is changing there are more social tools you know that are being used at work. There is business required by the different business groups people have more devices that they don't just have a single desktop that was you know assigned to them from the IT department they've got Macintosh's they got tablets they've got multiple iPhones, how do we make all of this work across mobile devices and how do we take advantage of the social tools from a collaboration perspective. When you plan for teams just keep in mind it's not just a technical planning events there needs to be some business planning because this is a people-focused solution so you need to make sure that who are working together you have to take into consideration they're diverse there are five generations of people, you're going to have young Millennials working with the older workforce and you know you're going to see certain types of groups of people that have different requirements and the workforce that's been out there may prefer a telephone with some phone numbers whereas somebody who's a millennial may you know not to prefer dial numbers and we just want to dial by name but you need a solution that can meet both of those requirements and the big stat here seventy-two percent of workers will be working remotely by 2020 which is not that far away.
Collaboration and communication tools must be unified and also need to be secure they need to run on any device on any network and that's how they've been designed so team-based collaboration more people are working on teams eighty percent of employee time on average is spent collaborating, so this is going to be a very important tool that you need to make sure that you plan accordingly and you need to make sure that people grasp the capabilities they know how to use these capabilities and they can really improve their collaboration capabilities across their organization so bringing intelligent communications life so one of the key takeaways is Microsoft teams is going to become the core communication client so many of you have seen the presentation what to use when I think one of the reasons why teams, as has come out, is there so many different ways of communicating there's email there's Yammer there are office 365 groups there are all these different methods there's instant messaging and you know what do I use when well this is going to fix all that this is going to give you a single client that will be the front end to all of your communications whether it's instant messaging scheduling conference calls sharing documents with a team all this is brought together on the back end.
Will talk more in my next article...