Wow…you look great! (on MSFT Teams Video)
Over the last 12 months we’ve been rolling out Teams internally across all 34 Arkadin countries. As expected, user adoption and willingness to embrace Teams over the last year has varied initially based on user persona, use case and allegiance to Skype for Business (as the known/proven tool). Now, 12+ months in, almost everyone at Arkadin is using Teams for chat, shared workspace and meetings (in varying degrees).
What’s been interesting (and was not initially anticipated) has been the overwhelmingly positive, loud feedback about the awesome video quality in Teams. Responses have varied from “wow, this is great” to “you look great” which is usually followed by a joke like “I mean, as good as you can look”.
It’s true, the video quality in Teams meetings and 1:1 calls is fantastic. Regardless of device (laptop, mobile or room system), Microsoft has stepped up the video quality in a big way and made it clear that Microsoft Teams is here to compete in the high-quality video meeting space. Where I personally really notice the difference is the video quality on mobile when in a meeting or 1:1 call. Using my iPhone 8 and the Teams mobile app, the video (and audio) quality is unreal on both WiFi or 4G.
If you’re thinking about testing out or enabling Teams for 1:1 or group meetings, here is a helpful link from Microsoft to start planning/evaluating network readiness: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/prepare-network.
With Microsoft’s big improvement on video, I’m curious to see how video-first services (e.g. Zoom, Bluejeans) handle this direct threat that also brings a complete productivity and workplace suite to the party.
Video quality and ease-of-use are quickly eroding as differentiators for the 3rd party services and my money is on Microsoft long-term. There will certainly be an interoperability discuss for the foreseeable future where the 3rd party video apps have a niche, but enterprise video deployments are looking better and better for Microsoft with Teams.
