ROBERT SCHOUTEN

At Ignite (September 24th- 28th 2018) Microsoft announced a lot of new capabilities within Microsoft Teams, making it even a more powerful hub for teamwork. One of the biggest announcement was in my opinion, the announcement of Shifts within Teams. Shifts will bring the features out of Microsoft Staffhub and more into Microsoft Teams. It is announced that, effective on October 1st 2019, Microsoft Staffhub will be retired.

Shifts

In Shifts, managers create and manage employee schedules, and employees can update their availability, submit shift requests, and request time off. These capabilities come right of from Microsoft Staffhub, but now available from within the Microsoft Teams application on all devices.

On mobile devices the Microsoft Teams application will also get a new Home tab. With Home, the so called ‘firstline workers’ can clock in and out, find out about their schedules, information for their day and who is working.

Firstline workers booth

At Ignite, booths were available for each Microsoft product or service with Microsoft product team members available to answer all your questions. For me this is such a valuable place to be during the day when visiting Ignite. There was a Firstline workers booth available and the Staffhub booth wasn’t available anymore. This gave me a nice opportunity to look into more details on the Shifts functionality and ask some questions. Of course, my first question was about the availability. No exact time lines were given, but it is to be expected at the end of 2018. Next to this, I was curious about to whom this new Shifts tab will be available. Will this be available to everyone within Teams? Is this configurable? The answer I got was: the Shifts tab will be available to everyone. Feedback Microsoft got is that not only Firstline workers would benefit from Shifts, other roles within organisations would like to use this kind of functionalities. But, users with an F1 licence will get the Shifts tab installed by default. Other users can add the Shifts App by adding an App from the Teams store called ‘Shifts’. This way, everyone can get the Shifts tab available. Microsoft is planning more functionalities not available today in Staffhub, to be added to Microsoft Teams. Other question I asked was: what about customers using Staffhub today or would like to start with Staffhub? Organisations using Microsoft Staffhub today will be migrated automatically to Microsoft Teams starting in April 2019. Staffhub itself will be available till October 1st 2019. So if you would like to start with Staffhub, my advice would be to wait till Shifts is available on your tenant in Microsoft Teams. If you cannot wait, you could start using Staffhub already and you will be migrated automatically. Be sure to introduce Microsoft Teams within your organisation first!

Happy shifting!