Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year you’ve no doubt heard of Microsoft Teams. 

Recently Microsoft announced that they are now retiring Skype for business.  This has been a core application of Office 365 for several years.

If you are standard users of Skype (home version), there’s no need to worry.  This is not going anywhere.

Their decision to retire Skype for business was not an easy one.  But with the popularity of Teams, it makes sense for all users of Office 365.

The date has been set for July 31st 2021.  This gives business many months to plan a migration from Skype for business to Microsoft Teams.

If you’ve recently dealt with Windows 7 end of life and the upgrades that took place, then you’ll know that it took quite some effort to upgrade machines from 7 to 10. 

Luckily for Skype, it’s just an application and not the entire operating system.  So this means there will be considerably less cost associated with migrating to Teams.

There are some gotchas though which mainly encompass phone systems.

If you have a purely online version of Skype for business that links into your VOIP phones, then you should check with your provider to make sure these will still be supported.

On the other hand, for larger enterprise customers with on-premise (not cloud) Skype phone systems there’s plenty of time as they are not retiring the on-premise services until October 14, 2025.

From an application and desktop point of view, the main change will be to the redundancy of the Skype for business Office 365 app.

Hence, Microsoft has already enabled a migration path in most Office 365 tenants which allow both Skype and Teams to co-exist.  Within this, there’s an option to switch users fully to Microsoft teams but still receive calls and messages from Skype for business users.

If you would like help to plan out your migration from Skype to Teams, please book a call with me today.

Please email info@connectservice.com.au or call 1300 766 455.