Skype for Business Online Being Retired in July 2021

So....the news we've been expecting for a long time has finally been announced - Skype for Business Online is being retired in July 2021.

Not a huge surprise, we all knew it would happen at some stage, but two years away should be long enough for any business using Skype for Business Online to be able to get their migration to Microsoft Teams planned and executed. If you want to know about the options for migrating to Microsoft Teams, the migration routes are explained here.

It's important to note though that Skype for Business Server (the on-premises version) is not affected by this announcement.

What else has been announced?

There are some other snippets in the Microsoft announcement:

  • Dynamic E911: this is a big deal for US-based organisations, and is an improvement over what is currently offered within Skype Online. In the US, if you call the emergency services, your call needs to be routed to one of over 6,000 Public Safety Answering Points, or PSAPs, depending on where you are. Right now, this can be configured with Microsoft Teams using Calling Plan, but only in a static manner, that is, your call will be routed to a particular PSAP based on your configured location for your DID number. So if your configured location is New York but you're on a work trip to California, your call will still be routed to New York. With dynamic E911, Teams will be able to work out where you are located and route the call correctly. This is now promised for the end of 2019.
  • Retention periods down to 1 day: again, for some customers, this is a Big Deal. Some customers' legal departments do not want yet another place where data can be stored which needs to be included in any Discovery request. It's a big issue because Skype for Business doesn't really store 'chat' data (it's just sent from one client to the other), so there never was anything to 'Discover' (it was just stored on each client, and you could easily configure the client not to keep chat data). Again, this is promised for the end of 2019.
  • Teams to Skype Consumer interop: possibly something of an edge case, but clearly enough customers made enough noise to Microsoft that they have now promised to deliver this by first quarter 2020.
  • Contact Centre Integration and Compliance recording: this isn't a new announcement as it was actually announced earlier this month. There's no specific timeframe for this as yet, however.

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