Admins! Be sure to log into your Microsoft Teams Admin tenants at https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/dashboard and make sure you are ready for the Skype for Business to Teams upgrade!
All of your users after this time will no longer be able to use Skype for Business and must use teams. Red flag!
I was setting up a conference room account and noticed this message on my Teams Admin Center, that
"Skype for Business users in your organization will be upgrade to Teams on Sep 8, 2019. These users will receive a notification on Aug 25, 2019 about this automatic upgrade."
This was slipped in somehow, hard to believe it was not announced or anyone else has caught this yet. Skype for Business and Teams are two very different user experiences, and Microsoft emailing our users saying “you got 2 weeks to upgrade or else…” and all of our existing scheduled Skype meetings would have been a nightmare over the Labor Day Holiday weekend and have a heavy impact on productivity.
Our teams tenant operates with both Skype for Business and Teams (What is called “Islands” since its not really a hybrid):
Since we are still using Skype for Business for meetings and communication (But Teams for documents) we are not ready to upgrade, and want to postpone it.
Simply click Postpone and give a reason, you are automatically approved:
However, the message comes back at 61 days!
Click away on the left nav, click back to Dashboard, (91 days now..), postpone, and repeat.. My comment each time is “2020 guys…”
Finally, I get to 241 days, a far enough time for me to worry about an “auto upgrade” based on our internal upgrade plan of 2020:
I get an email each time as well
When I am ready, I can go in on my own and swap from Islands to Teams Only, I don’t need this auto upgrade and communication stuff since we have a Change Management process for Office 365 changes.
As a Microsoft Partner, I cannot believe our tenant was about to be automatically upgraded to Teams in 31 days. What a nightmare the weekend after Labor Day would have been.
Skype for Business will be discontinued in 2021, but we are going to migrate to Teams 100% next year as an organization. Our users will need to install the Teams Client, setup any meetings on Teams and use that over Skype for Business. However, we have a plan to get there and 31 days is not the answer.
Was anyone else’s tenant “railroaded” into this upgrade? Share your thoughts below in the comments or on Twitter, https://twitter.com/eschraderMB/status/1159950837558288384