Skype for Business Online

Microsoft announced at Ignite that you can soon manage Teams through the Teams and Skype for Business Online Admin Center. Office 365 administrators will welcome this because it means that they can manage teams without being a member of those teams. And they can avoid PowerShell, which is a pity.

Online meetings are becoming an even more regular part of daily work life as many of us move to ‘work from home’. Whether you are a small business or large corporation, online meetings can enable teams to work remotely more effectively and maintain a sense of community and connectedness.

If you work with Teams through PowerShell, you’ll know that you sometimes need to open the Skype for Business Online module. It’s a royal pain in the rear end to deal with two inconsistent modules. It would be much neater if everything was gathered into one coherent module. However, that’s not going to happen much before Skype for Business Online retires in 2021. In the interim, here are seven sets of policy cmdlets that you’ll probably need to use to assign policies to multiple users at one time.

This month, it’s all about Teams as Microsoft pushes its users away from Skype and tells its salesforce to take a look at PBX.

Microsoft announced that the MyAnalytics app is available to any Office 365 user with an Exchange Online license. Also, Teams and SharePoint signals are soon to be included in the MyAnalytics analysis and dashboard. Expanding the user base is a good idea, but the really big news is the expansion of MyAnalytics to cover a much wider breadth of Office 365 activity.

In news gently leaking out, Microsoft says that new Office 365 tenants with 500 or fewer licensed seats will have to use Teams. These tenants won’t have the option to use Skype for Business Online. Then again, you have to ask the question whether they want or need to use Skype for Business Online? Existing tenants aren’t affected by the news.

To make things easier for Office 365 tenant administrators, Microsoft has released four new administrative role for Teams. You can now assign these roles to other people and have them take care of areas like Teams general admin or the more complicated area of voice and audio meetings and calling. It’s a sign of increased maturity in the Teams product.

Office 365 has a new admin center for Teams and Skype for Business Online. It’s still early days for the TSBAC, as I like to call it, but you can see where Microsoft is going as it unifies the disparate parts of Teams and Skype for Business Online into one uber-admin center to beat them all.

At the Ignite conference in Orlando, Microsoft confirmed that they will transition Skype for Business Online to Teams over the next year or so. Here’s how the transition will happen.