The Keynote at last week’s Microsoft Inspire 2018 conference featured Microsoft’s Ron Markezich, Corporate Vice President of Office 365 Marketing, who told partners that “we have parity between Skype for Business Online and Microsoft Teams.” This has been a key factor in Microsoft’s Intelligent Communications strategy, according to Ben, and a key milestone for existing Skype users that are wondering about switching to Teams.
Microsoft first launched its Teams product in Q1 2017 as part of the Office365 product, primarily to enter the collaboration space dominated by Slack. Teams is available to Office365 subscribers and will seamlessly allow integration of core O365 features like Word, Excel and PPT, making it easy to share content within a space. And whereas Skype was built upon the now legacy Lync infrastructure, Teams is built upon newer unified communications capabilities, which will enable Teams to provide updated core collaboration capabilities and provide the platform for “Intelligent Communications.”
At Engageware, we know all about Intelligent Communications, because scheduling is at the core of most communications – especially when communicating with your customers and leads. In fact, as the leading provider of Intelligent Online Appointment Scheduling solutions, Engageware is especially looking forward to working with Microsoft Teams and incorporating the capabilities into our featured integrations with other communications systems including Webex, GoToMeeting, Zoom, and Join.me.
Engageware’s Scheduler for Salesforce is the only scheduling solution with a Dynamic Conference capability that allows meetings to be booked with a unique meeting link, created in real time for each separate meeting. This is a critical feature for most sales users because it prevents customers and leads from accidentally joining a meeting early and interrupting the conclusion of another call.
“In Sales, it is critical to manage the conversation as best as you can to ensure that you’re driving towards a favorable outcome,” said Randy Bernard, Vice President of Sales at Engageware. “If you have a busy schedule and a call runs long, or your next call shows up to a web conference early, the train gets easily derailed and now you’ve got to re-establish the relationship with two parties. Having the dynamic conference capabilities within Scheduler means just one less thing that we need to worry about, and we can focus on our conversation without interruption.”
Microsoft Teams is being adopted quickly with more than 200,000 businesses getting onto the new product in the last year. More are expected to use the product now that there is a free version available with core Office365 subscriptions. The Engageware team will continue to work with key vendors and products such as Microsoft Teams and provide integrated solutions to make it easy to meet with your customers, and we anticipate adding Teams to our list of dynamic conferencing solutions once Teams provides API capabilities to do so.