At Ignite this year it was announced that automatic Teams upgrades will begin November 1. 2018 for SFBOnline organisations (without enterprise voice)
Microsoft has already started offering automatic updates from Skype for Business Online to Microsoft Teams for their direct customers. Starting from November 1. 2018, Microsoft will extend this offer to partner-associated customers, administrators will be given advanced notice via email and through the Office 365 Message Centre.
And this morning November 6. we got the upgrade message on our own tenant.
Yeah i know its in Danish – but you get the picture 🙂
And those of your running tenants with less that 500 users – better start preparing.
If and how this will affect your org depends on how you use SFBOnline today – example, if you run Enterprise Voice automatic upgrades will NOT be offered.
- Organizations below 500 employees who are currently looking to deploy Skype for Business Online will now only be able to deploy Teams.
- Any organization currently on Skype for Business Online (without Enterprise Voice) can continue using Skype for Business. However, starting November 1st, these organizations will be upgraded to Teams over the coming months.
- Organizations not interested in automatically upgrading can contact support on how to disable or postpone the upgrade.
- Organizations currently on Skype for Business Online with Enterprise Voice functionality can continue using Skype for Business, these organizations will not be moved to Teams starting November 1.
- Organizations over 500 employees currently looking to deploy Skype for Business Online will still be able to but may want to consider Teams as it will eventually be the primary communications tool in Office 365.
So what now – should we panic ?
No definitely not – you should upgrade 🙂 The thing to do as an admin is to get up to speed ASAP on what this change means for your users and your organisation – and get ready to do the upgrade.
Luckily Microsoft has provided TONS of info, guidelines tips and tricks nicely packaged in a small user friendly framework
This Breaks down as I see it into these main areas of focus:
- Define the people that need to be involved in planning and executing the upgrade.
- Define the scope, timeline and key success factors.
- Ensuring technical readiness – both on endpoints and on your corp network
- End-user readiness – training and awareness.
- Executing the upgrade steps in a controlled matter
- Measure your KPI’s on usage, performance and user involvement.
As mentioned Microsoft has made ready a whole bunch of resources, I will highlight a few.
All are accessed through the link in the notification email.
During the whole process user involvement is key and from early info on the upgrade to actually ensuring that they embrace and adopt Teams – use these great email templates.
Understand the different journeys and modes to use during the upgrade:
Make sure to train yourself and your admins / Superuser early
Make sure the network is ready (assuming you already run SFBOnline it probably is)
The actual upgrade:
Monitor the quality
Thats it for now, as always happy Skype’ing.. or Teaming i guess. 🙂
