written by
Celine Verloigne

[Action required] – You need to migrate from Skype to Microsoft Teams

2 min read

Dear colleagues,

To slow down the spread of the coronavirus, countries all over the world are taking drastic measures.

At BESIX, those measures are reflected in an unseen number of employees who are teleworking. In order to guarantee the continuity of our company, it’s important that this can continue as smoothly as possible. We advise you to stay in contact with your direct colleagues as much as you can, so as to boost your morale and your efficiency.

Skype is one of the tools which helps to facilitate this. Unfortunately, we’ve noticed that Skype’s capacity isn’t up to the frequent usage of so many colleagues worldwide. This creates instability and even temporary crashes.

Our IT-services have been rolling out the use of Microsoft Teams, which replaces Skype, for a while now. Microsoft Teams is a collaboration tool integrated in Office 365, a new, cloud-based product by Microsoft Office. In order to compensate the overuse of Skype, our IT Department will now accelerate the rolling out of Microsoft Teams.

Our IT Department will migrate your account from Skype to Teams on Sunday 22/03. To enable this, they need your help.

What do you have to do?

  1. You need to download Microsoft Teams before IT starts the migration. You’ll receive an email from IT later today with the instructions on how to download Microsoft Teams. Do this today or tomorrow. It will take ten minutes of your time. If you’d already like to do this now, you can find the instructions attached.
  2. Explore Microsoft Teams’s functionalities by watching the how-to’s and tips and tricks you’ll find in the mail you’ll receive from IT.
  3. On Sunday 22/03, the IT-department will migrate your account from Skype to Teams. You do not need to do anything. Your laptop/computer does not need to be switched on.
  4. When you restart your laptop/computer on Monday 23/03, Skype won’t work anymore. Use Teams to start chatting with your colleagues or to do conference calls.
    If you’ve planned a Skype meeting after the migration, you can replace it by a Teams meeting. If you were invited to a Skype meeting, follow the instructions you will be given by IT to join a Skype-meeting while using Teams.

We wish you a lot of courage during these uncertain times. Work together as much as you can, but at a safe distance. If we’re strong together, we will undoubtedly get through this.

What is Microsoft Teams?
Microsoft Teams is a collaboration tool which is integrated in Office 365, a new, cloud-based product by Microsoft Office. Teams does not only replace the chat functionality of Skype, but also the video- and audio meetings with one or multiple people. On top of these functionalities, Teams allows you to work with your colleagues on files and projects. It allows you to produce, manage and share them with other teams and the cloud-based design ensures that they are available anywhere and at all times. Lastly, Teams also offers an online version of your favourite Office-apps, like Word, Excel, Powerpoint and OneNote. Security-wise, Teams has the advantage. All documents are saved on secured cloudservers, limiting security risks we incur by using external online tools such as WeTransfer, GoogleDrive, Dropbox, and others. Because Teams is hosted in the cloud, we can guarantee 100% uptime, 24/7.