Use same presence as Skype for Business
Angela Sze
shared this idea
Good news. The feature, Unified Presence (aka same presence as Skype for business) is rolling out.
The feature update has started rolling out to customers.
PLEASE NOTE: Not everyone will receive the update at the same time.
You can read more about the March releases on the Teams Blog – https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/What-s-new-in-Microsoft-Teams-April-update/ba-p/179801
Thank you very much for all your feedback.
-Warren
537 comments
Comments are closed-
Anonymous
commented
Unified presence is a great objective but use the changes to thoroughly rethink the concept across Teams SfB (as its features populate teams) and Outlook. A single event in Outlook could include difference presence phases. A simple example. I need to block off a chunk of time for a meeting but I will also be driving there I don't want to have to create 5 difference events for - driving there, meeting - lunch break - meeting - driving back. I might only want to be busy during the first meeting, available during lunch, and do not disturb while driving. Also the ability to quickly set up a status with a timer. I have got an ad hoc discussion. I am not available to talk right now but I think I will be in 15 minutes allow me to show that on my calendar with the minimum clicks and / or using Cortana. In short deeply think through the whole issue of how real life availability works in a modern workplace and make presence / status reflect real life. One final point - current ETA from Bing maps plus some configurable buffer - updating calendar so that my presence stays do not disturb until I have arrived when I am driving.
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JW Walton
commented
Thanks Warren, this feels like a step in the right direction. Like several others, I would like to point out that most users I talk to want the "Available" presence to automatically show (assuming it hasn't been manually set to something else) when working on a computer and they don't have an Exchange meeting or are not on a SfB or Teams conference call. In other words, Teams should not show someone as "Away" just because they are not interacting with the Teams client. Or put yet another way, the presence logic for Teams should follow the logic pattern of SfB.
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Anonymous
commented
Is this really the best solution, the one we were all waiting for? Why not just use the same logic as that currently in S4B - it works.
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Anonymous
commented
Warren - will this work for users homed on both SfB Online and SfB Server?
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Niels Plekkenpol
commented
Great news, thanks for the update! Looking forward to it!
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Johan Elmqvist
commented
What's important is that the Teams status is set in the same way as in SfB, i.e it reflects my activity on my machine (not if I am active in the Teams app). Synchronising with SfB seems unnecessary if the same logic is used for both apps. SfB is something we want to move away from anyway in favour of Teams.
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Martinus Hamers
commented
Thanks!
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Anonymous
commented
@Warren please let us know if your changes to Teams will also not require it to be in the foreground to consider you Green / Active. That is a massive problem and a barrier to adoption at my company and it looks like many other companies.....
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Mike Stanley
commented
When will I be able to use Teams only and IM people in my org who are still using the SfB client? Shared presence sounds nice, but I’d like to use Teams only.
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Rob Grafrath
commented
It's nice to get an automatic red/busy status, but your update does not address the issue of accurately showing yellow (idle/away) verses green (active/available). What's the word on that? Currently the only green users are those who currently have Teams open in the foreground, but nobody works like that; we minimize it to our tray, so everyone is always yellow. If your solution is for users to manually switch between green and yellow then it falls short of SfB; in SfB we never had to manually specify our status unless we wanted to switch to "do not disturb" or to hide by manually setting it as "away". In default/automatic mode, SfB accurately detected activity on the desktop and switched user status between yellow and green.
Bottom line: SfB had it right. Do it *exactly* like them.
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Jeff Sieben
commented
This is great news! Please make sure you get the "near realtime" updating based on an Outlook Calendar. Currently, doesn't update quickly enough.
Keep going MS.
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David B.
commented
Are you saying that Teams will now reflect our presence the same way that SfB does? IOW, it's not just for when I'm in a meeting or when I manually set my status. Inaccurate presence in Teams is a serious roadblock to users accepting Teams as a legitimate replacement for SfB.
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Alpesh
commented
A must have feature especially when diverse teams work together.
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Greg J
commented
if there is one thing that is stopping us from fully transerring from Skype for Business to Teams it is this feature. Our organisation is structured around working from home and we have a heavy reliance on the accuracy of the presence indicator. The Skype for Business presence indicator works pretty well, along with being able to set our current loction (ie home or office). Teams for us would be so much better with these 2 features.
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CB
commented
Would it be possible to have an "out of office" or "away message" or some kind of automatic response for times when you know you can't take messages?
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Michelle Beaumont
commented
Add an out of office feature. I have been contacting someone through teams in the office when I am field based, and only when I emailed them realised that they were out of the office - this would be helpful to have on teams.
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Ulf
commented
Are we really supposed to wait for a halfway decent presence functionality until sometime next year? We don't need the other 1M lines of code from SfB, but just 10 that cover "when user is active (mouse/keyboard) anywhere" then don't set status to "Away"!
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Rob Wilcox
commented
Any update on this?
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Josh Engelhart
commented
This is a huge issue for us as well. Alot of times I'm "available" just not actively inside of teams. It should be set up the same as skype so that there is a pc idle time before displaying away etc.
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Jeff Gould
commented
Rolling Skype for Business into Teams is a BIG mistake! Everyone in my organization uses Skype for Business but only about 35% use Teams and it will stay that way for the foreseeable future. Teams is not an efficient form of communication it leads to fragmented conversations and leaves users "hunting" for info. Having to read through all the flotsam to get to the meat of something is not efficient(sorry got off topic there). Teams currently messes with presence info for S4B and I won't roll it out further until its fixed.