What's salvageable from Skype for Business deployments, and why is Microsoft putting the kibosh on a lot of third-party voice/video access to Teams? Having attended InfoComm last month, I was once again reminded how large the global audio/video market is. Among the hundreds of vendors displaying wares on the show floor were some well-known companies, including BlueJeans, Crestron, Lifesize, Pexip, Polycom (now Plantronics), StarLeaf, and Zoom, among others. It occurred to me that this would be a great time to find out what these vendors are doing to integrate their solutions with Microsoft Teams. All of them have Skype for Business integrations, but we've heard from Microsoft that third-party devices and solutions won't integrate with Teams in the same way. InfoComm provided an opportunity to speak directly with some vendors and get a consolidated view of how this integration will occur. Little did I know that approaching this topic was going to end up being complicated and controversial. Some Necessary Historical Context To understand the context for current and future integrations with Teams, understanding how Microsoft has handled integration with Skype for Business is helpful. Microsoft opened the kimono, so to speak, with respect to the protocols, signaling, and audio/video codecs used in Skype for Business. In fact, Microsoft published a specification for Skype for Business audio and video, then left third parties to implement their own communications stacks to enable some form of integration. This need for serious development work made integration difficult, but a number of vendors were able to use the spec and create useful solutions. Read Full Post>> Read other top posts trending on No Jitter: Team Collaboration: Weighing Security Concerns Not All Teams Are Built the Same No Jitter Research: 2018 Team Collaboration Survey |