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- Welcome to Microsoft Teams Essentials for IT.
Today, we'll look at the top considerations
and options to help you upgrade
from Skype for Business to Teams.
Whether you have already made the decision to adopt Teams
and need to transition users from Skype for Business,
or you're trying to get ahead
of the Skype for Business Online retirement in 2021,
in the next few minutes,
we'll help you think through your upgrade path.
Microsoft Teams comes with
built-in upgrade options and interoperability.
This applies whether you're coming
from Skype for Business Online, using on-premises servers,
have a hybrid configuration, or an enterprise voice plan.
We offer flexibility in coexistence paths,
where you can simultaneously run Skype and Teams
to support an incremental shift between
the two environments based on your organization's needs.
Regardless of the path you choose,
if you follow our guidance as you make the transition,
no user will miss a chat message
and meetings will always be accessible,
whether that's from Skype or Teams.
We also have a built-in gateway inside of Office 365
that facilitates interoperability
between Skype and Teams during your transition.
This gateway is completely managed
by the service for your convenience,
so it doesn't require deployment
of any server or client applications or hardware.
I'll explain this more later.
And for smaller organizations that do not have hybrid
or on-premises dependencies
and are using Skype for Business Online only,
it's worth mentioning that Microsoft offers
an automated upgrade for your Office 365 tenant.
We will notify you in advance in the message center
and via email if your tenant has been selected.
This is a great benefit
if you don't have dedicated IT staff.
You can learn more about this
at aka.ms/TeamsAutomaticUpgrade.
That said, regardless of where you're coming from,
it helps to understand the transformation that occurs
when shifting from Skype to Teams in your organization.
Microsoft Teams is more than
a like-for-like replacement of Skype.
It enables the evolution of collaboration.
While both environments support
messaging, calling, managing contacts,
and hosting online meetings, Teams goes beyond
these capabilities to deliver chat, video, calling,
and collaboration capabilities
into a single hub for teamwork.
That said, one of the biggest differences
is under the covers.
Teams is built on a modern platform for audio and video,
and uses the latest cloud infrastructure
on Azure for optimized global coverage.
This brings a number of performance and networking benefits.
For example, meetings get started faster
and call quality in Teams is 40% better
than Skype for Business based on user ratings.
As an admin, this means you can expect fewer help desk calls
related to meeting experiences and calling.
Also, because Teams is cloud native,
it benefits from ongoing innovations,
such as whiteboard sharing, background blur,
and inline translation,
which add to the richness of the Teams experience.
And best of all, for you in IT,
we give you a comprehensive admin experience
for day-to-day management, security, and compliance.
You can get a full overview of the end user
and IT admin capabilities of Teams, including security
and compliance benefits, by watching our previous
Essentials episodes at aka.ms/microsoftteamsforit.
To begin your upgrade strategy, it helps to understand
the end user benefits of Teams
and to have a vision of what teamwork
should look like for your organization.
That's because upgrading from Skype to Teams
is more than just a technical upgrade.
Users need a reason for change
if we want them to embrace the change.
For the most part, aside from specific
architectural considerations, the rate at which
users adopt Teams will impact your timeline
and influence the success of your upgrade the most.
To help with this, as you start your Teams rollout,
you can track Teams usage in your environment
with built-in usage reports
and dashboards available in both
the Microsoft 365 admin center and the Teams admin center.
Managing change across your users
is imperative to any successful adoption strategy.
An important step is taking into account which features
of Skype are in use by different user groups,
whether that's chat, meetings, or calling,
and to assess how well these users will adapt to change,
but don't try to do this alone in IT.
Getting the right sponsors
and stakeholders on-board upfront will ensure alignment
and accelerate your efforts.
You'll wanna extend your planning and pilots by identifying
and including other stakeholders,
such as executive sponsors,
a project lead to keep track of training
and rollout milestones,
and a champion that can share user feedback.
These measures will help strengthen
your adoption efforts and upgrade path.
In fact, we'll go deeper in this topic
in our next Essentials episode.
In parallel, you'll need to make sure
that you've covered the technical prerequisites
to get your environment ready for Teams.
As referenced in earlier episodes,
you'll need to have OneDrive,
SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online running.
Note that while we do support Exchange running on premises,
you'll need to do additional work to configure it,
which you can learn more about at aka.ms/ExchangeTeams.
Ensuring that you have the right network capability
is another consideration
to get set up for the best user experience.
If you're already running Office 365,
you are probably ready.
There are some important aspects here,
such as making sure that the locations where you want
Teams available have optimized internet access.
We also have recommendations for the right
network configurations, such as having common TCP
and UDP ports open.
You can learn more about this at aka.ms/TeamsNetworkPrep.
And our network planner tool that we showed you earlier,
can help you to tune your performance even further.
Now, if you're coming from Skype on-premises,
it may take you a while to shift to SharePoint Online
and Exchange Online, but don't worry.
As I'll explain, there are options for you to still
pilot Teams while you work through those migrations.
That said, a critical next step is to set up
directory synchronization with Azure Active Directory.
User accounts in Skype for Business Server
need to also be present in Skype for Business Online
for interoperability with Teams to work.
Of course, if you're already using Office 365,
you'll likely already have this in place.
Next, to light up interoperability, a hybrid configuration
with Skype for Business Online needs to in place.
You'll need to use PowerShell for that
and you can learn more about the steps
at aka.ms/TeamsSFBHybrid.
Then with both services online, chat
and calling traffic between Skype
and Teams is automatically transferred
via our gateway service under the covers
as you upgrade users to a Teams-only experience.
Once you have your user adoption
and technical foundation established, you can choose
an upgrade path that is inline with your adoption goals.
In our experience, it's best to plan
for a period of time where Skype
and Teams coexist until your organization,
based on your technical
and user readiness, is ready to discontinue
the use of Skype and shift to Teams only.
Speaking of which, let me now walk you through
the coexistence options available to you,
whether you're online, on-premises,
or have a hybrid configuration, and when to use them.
You can access your coexistence options
under Teams Upgrade Policy in the Teams admin center.
There are two main paths represented
by our implementation modes.
These help you control the user experience
as you upgrade to Teams.
The first path is where you give your users
overlapping capabilities across Skype
and Teams, which is implemented via Islands mode.
Because chat, meetings, and voice-over IP calling
are available in both clients,
your users can get familiar with Teams while still being
able to access all the features from Skype at the same time.
That said, to avoid user confusion,
your user training should focus on when to use which.
And the second path is where
you can pick select capabilities.
Here, chat and calling is kept in Skype for Business
and you can decide which service,
either Skype or Teams, can schedule and host meetings.
Teams, in this scenario, will continue to provide
collaboration capabilities, like channels
and file collaboration.
This path is useful if you need more time
for technical readiness or have specific user needs
that you have to support during the transition.
For example, if you still have a complex enterprise voice
deployment on-premises, more on that in a moment.
As you determine which modes to implement
on your transition paths, these can be set globally
for your entire tenant or per user.
So let's go through the coexistence
implementation modes available for these paths.
By default, if you do nothing with Teams
except to assign a Teams license to a user,
the coexistence mode for your tenant will be set to Islands.
This is our recommended approach to start with,
and as mentioned, this mode is what lights up Teams
and Skype, side-by-side, with overlapping functionality.
As you implement this mode, as an IT admin,
you can begin to inform users that Teams
is coming while they continue to use Skype.
You can turn on a notification in the admin center
to expose a Try Teams button within Skype.
When clicked, the button launches
the Teams app for the user.
One important note here is that by design,
there is no interoperability between
the two environments in Islands mode.
Neither Skype nor Teams are aware of each other.
Teams communications stay in Teams,
while Skype communications stay in Skype.
By default, PSTN calling connectivity and federated chats
and calls to users on external domains
will continue to be routed to Skype
until you update your coexistence mode to Teams only.
More on PSTN calling and Enterprise voice in a moment.
Next, once you see that your organization is ready,
you can turn on Teams only mode, which means
all incoming calls and chats land in the Teams client.
In fact, if you have PSTN calling configured,
users will now receive all incoming voice calls
and PSTN connectivity is enabled
with a calling pad that lights up in Teams.
On the other hand, if the same user
is invited to meeting by a Skype user,
they will click to join the meeting from Teams
and get automatically routed to a Skype meeting experience,
ensuring that they can still
collaborate with colleagues inside
and outside their organization who are not on Teams yet.
Overall, because Islands mode allows users
to familiarize themselves with Teams
while not giving up on what they know with Skype,
this can accelerate your path to Teams-only mode.
Of course, as mentioned, there may be a number of reasons
why the side-by-side Islands mode may not be an option
for you and select capabilities makes more sense.
Here is where establishing interoperability
between Skype and Teams is critical.
Remember, you'll need to make sure
that you have your hybrid topology set up first.
To light up select capabilities, you have two modes.
First, Skype for Business with Teams collab mode.
This is the mode that ensures that calls, chats,
and meetings are always routed to Skype for Business.
Teams in this scenario is specifically used
for team collaboration with channels,
file sharing, and more.
And second, Skype for Business with Teams Collab
and Meetings mode, also known
as our meetings-first approach,
which is the mode that you'll want to select
to ensure that only chats
and calls are initiated and received in Skype,
and that meeting scheduling, hosting,
and collaboration capabilities is handled by Teams.
Now, as I mentioned, you can apply any of these modes
to a whole tenant or targeted to specific users
in the Teams admin center.
You'll want to use PowerShell if you have a large number
of users that you want to assign specific modes to
and we have a range of cmdlets that enable you
to perform bulk actions, such as setting user notifications.
This allows you to mix
and match modes depending on the Teams
upgrade strategy for your organization.
If you're wondering how we migrate your data
and meetings, like interop, for the most part,
this happens behind the scenes.
Let me start with how we migrate your data.
Contacts are copied from Skype to Teams
in one or two phases, depending on whether you're starting
from Skype for Business Online or Server.
First, if you're coming from Skype for Business Online,
at first logon to Teams while in coexistence mode,
user contacts are copied from Skype into Teams.
Second, once you've kicked off Teams only mode,
we perform another sync from Skype to Teams
to bring in new contacts added since the last sync.
This will make Teams the primary source
for all your contacts.
If you're coming from Skype for Business Server,
this will be the first and only time
that the syncing of your contacts will occur.
Now, for meetings migration, providing that you have
Exchange Online deployed, we can migrate upcoming meetings
from Skype for Business Server or Skype for Business Online
into Teams with the Meeting Migration Service.
If you're incrementally moving individuals
to Teams-only mode, meeting migration
is enabled by default and runs automatically.
If you switch your whole tenant over to Teams-only mode
in the org-wide setting, you'll need to use
PowerShell to kick off meeting migration.
Now, let's address enterprise voice migration
with PSTN calling, which requires some
additional considerations as you upgrade to Teams.
There are two voice options to enable integration
between your PSTN or voice over IP services.
The first is via a Microsoft calling plan.
If you're using a phone system
and a Microsoft calling plan where Microsoft provides
your phone numbers directly, once you enable
Teams-only mode, traffic is routed to Teams automatically.
The second is via direct routing.
Here, there are two primary options.
If you have an on-premises session border controller device
that connects directly with your PSTN trunk line
from your telecommunications provider or ISP, you'll need
to route the connection to your Microsoft 365 Online tenant.
Or if your direct routing is done offsite
by your Telco provider via the session border controller,
you will need to work with them to direct PSTN traffic
to your Microsoft 365 tenant.
So that was an overview of the top considerations
for your upgrade from Skype to Teams.
You can learn more at aka.ms/SkypeToTeams.
Additionally, we have instructor-led workshops
that you can attend at aka.ms/SkypeToTeamsPlanning.
Of course, keep checking back to watch the series
on Microsoft Teams for IT, where next,
we'll go deeper on how to implement
your Skype for Teams upgrade
and end user training here on Microsoft Mechanics
at aka.ms/MicrosoftTeamsForIT.
Thanks for watching.
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