Teams Roadmap Update

The Teams Microsoft-hosted collaboration service is adopting the capabilities of Skype for Business Online and over time will become the primary Office 365 unified communication technology. A roadmap released by Microsoft in Oct. 2017 lays out an aggressive timeline for Teams development, and the company aims to provide functional parity with Skype for Business Online by 2019. Features including telephony support and expanded interoperability with Skype for Business Online were released in Dec. 2017, meeting most initial roadmap milestones. However, several key features for enterprise customers are not slated until mid-2018 and have interdependencies that might lead to delays.

Features and Capabilities

Microsoft Teams is a hosted service that is offered as part of Office 365, which users can access via a Web interface as well as desktop or mobile client applications. It provides team collaboration spaces centered on persistent text-based chat and acts as a hub for users to access a collection of features and services that are associated with each team, including the following: