Before my vacation I overheard a colleague saying that Skype is a perfect product and that she couldn’t understand why Microsoft is putting all their energy into Microsoft Teams. My spontaneous reaction was a little bit chocked and a little bit “omg”, but I calmed down and realized that everyone can’t have my burning interest for Microsoft Teams and know all the sweet things with Microsoft Teams🤓.

In this this blog post I would like to share some of the reasons why I love Microsoft Teams so much more than Skype for Business and maybe convince those of you who are still pro Skype.

Reason 1 - Microsoft Teams helps me save time with the use of tabs

Skype was for talking and that’s basically it. Microsoft Teams is so much more than only talking and adds on a lot of layers that makes collaboration and communication easier and more fun. I’ve written about tabs before but something as good as tabs deserves more airtime as they free up a lot of time for other things 😉.

I met one of my best friends at an old employer and the best time of the day was lunch, back then we talked back and forth about where to eat for lunch every day. With Microsoft Teams we would have been able to add a tab with a website with our favourite lunch places. No need to open the browser, go to a website, locate the menu etc. with a tab the information is only one click away in our chat.

Adding your most used files as tabs is also something that saves so much time 🥰. For projects I love the add the project timeline as tabs.

Reason 2 - Microsoft Teams helps me remember where my files are when I don’t

As I’ve already written Microsoft Teams is so much more than just talking, it’s a place to start your day and where you can find most of the things you need to get started. Sometimes you’ve had a long weekend, been on vacation or you’re simply tired and you forgot where you put that file you worked with before. You just can’t remember where you put the file or what the name of the file was. Then we have the Files app that you can find in the left side navigation in Microsoft Teams!

In Files we have a bunch of different ways to find files but now I want to talk about Recent.

Recent shows all the recent files you’ve opened as long as they’re saved somewhere in your Office 365 tenant. The nice thing is that the file doesn’t only have to be saved in a team or shared in 1-2-1 chat as long as it’s saved in your OneDrive or any SharePoint site it will appear here if you opened it.

It’s a perfect place to look if you simply can’t remember the name or location of the file. So besides that Microsoft Teams makes it possible to work with files it also helps us find files and that’s surely something Skype can’t do.

Reason 3 - Microsoft Teams lets me decide what I want to focus on

Something I hear quite often is that it can be hard to filter our what you want to hear and what you don’t want to hear in Microsoft Teams as there are so many teams and even more channels – a big information overload. I’ve said it before, and I say it again – I think that the fewer channels the better – but sometimes (oh well almost always) that’s not the reality.

There are several things you can do for your focus and reduce the information overload. In a previous blog post I’ve written about how you can pin channels to get your favourite channels at the top of the team view. You can also decide to hide a complete team and you can also set specific notifications settings per channel which gives a big granularity in how much information to receive.

Compared with Skype there is a lot more information available in Microsoft Teams, I believe it’s really important to make an active choice on what to show and how your notifications should be set. It’s not fair to complain if you haven’t made any changes.

As time passes by your number of teams will probably grow, I think it’s great that you can decide what to focus on.

Reason 4 - Microsoft Teams lets me stay up to date with the latest – when I want to

Ok my three reasons above for why I think Microsoft Teams is so much better than Skype has actually not a lot to do with Skype as those features aren’t comparable, but I wanted to end with something comparable 😇.

Let’s talk about the Skype for business app, it was awful (at least for Apple) and a 0% pleasure to use - the Microsoft Teams app is a whole other story. I won’t talk about all functions, only my favourite part in the Microsoft Teams app and that’s quiet hours. Quiet hours let’s me have the app and stay up to date during my work hours but lets me get a pause from the notifications when I’m not working. With quiet hours I can decide when to pause all notifications from Microsoft Teams during specific hours and days.

Perfect! So, I can have the app but be off from work when I should.

🌙🌙🌙

In summary Microsoft Teams is so much more than Skype for business and that can sometimes be frightening, but if you learn all those small tips and tricks, you’re in for a great journey and you will never look back.