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
529 comments
Comments are closed-
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.
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Justyn Davidson
commented
Thank you for the update! I don't see anything about making any of the bug fixes with Presence as they relate to Teams (without S4B integration), which is where we will continue to be for the foreseeable future. No acknowledgement that these are even bugs indicates that they won't be addressed any time soon, rendering Teams basically unusable for a distributed organization. I really do appreciate the update; as a MS alum it's nice to know the roadmap is in place and has some timelines. Unfortunately it doesn't help with the viability of Teams as a collaboration solution for my company. We will need to start heading in a different direction (hopefully not Spark) but good to know that now rather than later.
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Andy
commented
Ideally the status as well as the presence state should work the same as Skype for Business.
We update skype status with what we are working on as we start new tickets and this functionality does not even seem to be in Teams. -
Anonymous
commented
Truthfully i hope you don't use the same presence as you used in SFB - 'presence' has been a big issue for us as a team moving from slack..
My team works remotely primarily and when you're not using Teams it automatically sets their status to Away - which means if I want to as my team a question i've actually got no way of telling if i'm going to get a timely response or not and has actually stopped me rom posting the message i.e. I'll wait until they're online again. Which is exactly what i don't want.
In slack presence is on/off primarily which acts as a flag to say "hey - I'm working now. I'm here if you need me" which mean i'm happy to post and I know i'll get a response today. Recently they introduced 'status' which can give some additional context.
Personally i believe it's a mistake for a tool which is supposed to bring people together through digital collaboration to use 'automated' presence detection which relies on you being with in the app (which most people aren't).
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Darren Sully
commented
No teams for us until this is sorted out..
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MiiiAptyltd
commented
With announcement at Ignite about Skype for Business being rolled into Teams I'm assuming this will just be a matter of time. Hopefully some of the quirky shortcomings of S4B can be smoothed out in future as it becomes part of Teams.
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Jeff Sieben
commented
Slack is great, BUT one thing it lacks greatly is the concept of presence. I loved Skype/Lync for keeping sync with Outlook Availability through Office 365. That's an essential feature of Teams needed to compete with Slack.
I was telling our Operations VP (140 employees here) about Teams, and Teams appears to have presence embedded (ie. Green for available, yellow for unavilable, red for busy), and it said she was available, but in fact here Outlook 365 calendar had meeting (and they're connected).
Presence didn't show well to the VP.
Big things make product essential.
Small things make product amazing....keep pushing to get the big and small things right.
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John Black
commented
You have to take what was said at Ignite and process it through a sales/marketing filter. Having been on the other end of preparing for those kinds of events/announcements at a previous company, I can attest to the careful and sometimes overly-optimistic wordplay that goes on. "Interoperable" might mean "they can be installed at the same time and you can use them together" rather than "the two programs actually interact with each other.
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Riley
commented
I'm confused. At Ignite Lori Wright said that the two clients currently are interoperable, with common presence, messaging and calling capabilities. That would suggest that the two clients already using a common presence, but that is not what we're seeing on our end. Can we expect this to be fixed soon?