Users can start a meeting with up to 250 participants from within a chat on the Teams application. While Microsoft Teams has been built from scratch as a collaborative platform, Skype for Business is essentially a communication platform with features for collaboration thrown in almost as an afterthought. The most telling differences in the Skype vs Teams comparison are in the collaboration features of the two applications. This threading feature is helpful in Group Chats where the active threads appear at the bottom making it easier for keeping track of the context. So, if your colleague mentions your name in their comment, simply clicking on the resulting notification will take you to the record where you can reply in-line. Microsoft Teams introduces threaded conversations allowing users to participate in multiple conversations inside a single tab. Besides, there is greater flexibility in setting up chats based on purposes like departmental segregation, project or user-specific channels. Microsoft Teams users can include GIFs, stickers, and apps to chats apart from the files and emojis along with their messages. Microsoft Teams takes it a notch further. Skype for Business clients had several improvements over Lync when it came to instant messaging.
Users can find all their chats as they happened whenever they open the window for the specific group or user on any device they use. This happens without the dependence of Microsoft Teams on Outlook. All conversations are available from the beginning of history until and unless they are specifically deleted. With Microsoft Teams, that is no longer an issue. It could be particularly annoying for Skype for Business users when they accidentally closed an important chat window and lost the context of ongoing chats with their colleagues. The saved conversations can be found in the dedicated conversation history folder in Outlook. While the conversation can still be saved, it requires Outlook to be the default mail client. If you are (were) using Skype for Business, you would have noticed that chats would disappear once the window is closed. Perhaps the first difference that Teams users notice while comparing Skype vs Microsoft Teams is that their chats are autosaved in Microsoft Teams. The architectural upgrades allowed Microsoft to enhance the capabilities of the Teams application and tilt the Microsoft Teams vs Skype comparison in favor of the former while preparing the latter for its sundown. The architecture allows integrating several new capabilities while improving the overall user experience. This platform is built around the cloud architecture that makes the application highly customizable, scalable and secure while optimizing bandwidth consumption and minimizing disruptions.
It is under these circumstances that Microsoft had to build a brand-new communication and collaboration platform, now called Microsoft Teams.
Although Skype evolved significantly since the time it was launched, there could only be so many improvements made to its aging architecture. Microsoft wanted to build a collaborative platform that can work seamlessly with applications in the Office 365 suite. Why Did Microsoft Develop Teams When Skype Existed?īefore we make the comparison between Skype vs Teams, let us understand why Microsoft decided on moving from Skype to Teams. We compare Microsoft Teams vs Skype to identify the improvements in the former. It is around this time that other communication tools started catching up threatening the virtual monopoly of the Microsoft application, and Teams came along. The application continued to evolve after it was acquired by Microsoft and went on to replace Microsoft Lync as the enterprise telecommunications application in the form of Skype for Business. It became the benchmark for video calls that could be made to anyone around the globe with only an internet connection. When Skype came into existence way back in 2003, it practically revolutionized the way we would communicate.
Microsoft Teams vs Skype – Comparison in 2020