On Tuesday, Microsoft announced that Skype for Business Online would not be operational starting July 31, 2021. The company included a reminder for its customers to start migrating to Teams now if they haven’t already.
Microsoft announced that it was retiring its Skype for Business Online on July 30, 2019. That gave customers two years to move to Teams.
The company’s alert is a reminder that in six months, Skype for Business Online will be gone. Microsoft acknowledges that customers are at varying stages of migration to Teams. The pandemic also caused some delays. However, the deadline stays the same.
Work in progress
The Microsoft Teams team wrote in a blog post saying that it doesn’t matter where you are on the journey from Skype for Business to Teams. It is crucial to ensure that organizations are on track to upgrade to Teams before Skype for Business is retired and access to the service ends.
Some of the organizations are not too far along in upgrading to Teams. Understandably, 2020 was difficult. However, Microsoft assures them that they still have time to move.
The company also notes that many customers have upgraded from Skype for Business Online, Skype for Business Server, and hybrid deployments to Teams in a few months.
Teams is the future
In 2018, Microsoft claimed that Teams had reached ‘feature parity’ with Skype for Business Online. Since that time, the software giant has improved calling features and doubled down on the new video-meeting and collaboration features that the pandemic called for.
The Teams userbase grew during the pandemic. In 2019, it had half a million organizations globally using Teams. In October 2020, Microsoft said Teams had more than 115 million daily active users, indicating it is the future.
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