Microsoft Begins Rollout of Skype Federation in Teams

There is one feature that I have been waiting to be brought to Teams that has been on the roadmap since July – the ability to chat with Skype contacts inside of Teams. Starting this month, Microsoft will begin rolling out that functionality to all customers.

The feature will be fully deployed by the end of April and you will be able to chat and call Skype users – you can add users with their email address. This will be the bridge needed to make it possible to communicate across the company’s two communication applications.

The reason this feature is helpful is that working with users who are outside of an organization can still be a bit cumbersome inside of Teams. For example, Petri has a significant number of freelance contributors to the site and we typically use Skype for communication; this requires me to jump between applications for communication which is a frustrating experience.

Yes, we could setup all of our contributors with access to Teams but juggling these permissions and the frequent additions and deletions from the role created a workflow that was not ideal for us.

One important thing to point out, as Mary Jo notes, this feature will be disabled by default inside of Office 365. This is the correct approach as most large corporations likely don’t need this functionality and I suspect that this feature will make it easier for smaller sized businesses to adopt Teams.

While not everyone may be excited about this update, it has been high on my priority list. The only thing left to do is to keep refreshing our tenant to see if we are lucky enough to be early in the rollout targeting.