My (automated) journey to Teams-only...

Back in November 2018, Tom Arbuthnot reported that Microsoft had started to automatically upgrade smaller Office 365 customers from Skype for Business to Teams.

My own Office 365 tenant has now had this, so I thought I'd share some screenshots of the process.

First warning

 The first notification came through to the Office 365 admin email address on April 9th:



Lots of useful links, all the information is there. The 'See what happens next' takes you to a page on the Fastrack web site. You can select to postpone the automated upgrade, but I wanted to see what happened, so I just 'ignored' the communication!

 User Communication Received

On May 3rd (a week before the scheduled upgrade), all users on the tenant received this message:




 At this stage, if you look at the Teams Admin portal, you can see that Microsoft have enabled the 'Notify users' setting:




This means that the Skype for Business client (desktop and mobile) has a banner at the top warning about the imminent upgrade. You can't customise this message (to put a date, for example) but it's a useful extra warning to back up any email communications you may have sent:



 D-Day is here!

May 10th arrives........but nothing happened (well, actually lots of things happened on that day, but not to my Office 365 tenant). In fact, the final push seemed to be more than a little late!

 

But it happened in the end....

 This is what Skype for Business came up with when the final change came:




And in the Teams Admin center, the Dashboard showed the actual date that the change happened:




The follow up

 On May 23rd, somewhat belatedly, I got this email:



Not sure why I didn't get that when the actual migration happened - that would have been more logical. The 'Access Teams Resources' link takes you to https://support.office.com/en-gb/teams.

So......not quite sure why it was late, but it happened in the end.

Would I trust the automated process in the 'real world'? I'm not sure - it was late, so that's not really acceptable in the real world, with no message or apology as to why it was late, but that might be a one-off. My tenant isn't typical, but perhaps for a smaller customer, it might work. The automated communications are fairly clear, if users follow the links to get the relevant training. In practice of course, you would follow up with more extensive communications, training and other user adoption processes.

Location: London, UK

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