Ignite 2019 - BRK3232 - Plan and implement a successful upgrade from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams

Presented by: Debbie Arbeeny, László Somi

Session summary:

Explore the end-to-end Skype for Business to Teams upgrade experience, inclusive of technical and user readiness considerations. This session offers guidance for a successful upgrade as well as shares best practices and tips for avoiding common pitfalls when planning your upgrade. Hear from a customer who successfully completed their upgrade leveraging change management fundamentals and adoption resources to enable their users to embrace new ways of working.

My Notes:

Shadow IT is something that needs to be handled. No one will go out to get their own operating system or their own email system, but for communications they will. This will create a disparate communications environment in the organization.

Often a technology migration is either or - you can be on Windows 7 or Windows 10, you can use Office 2013 or 2019 - with Skype to Teams it is different in the way that you can run both clients side-by-side.

Setup a team in Teams to plan your upgrade, eat your own dogfood!

https://aka.ms/SkypeToTeams

Pilot your helpdesk by simply calling them up asking them questions.

Set good measurable goals, for example measure the current usage in Skype and set the goal to be more usage in Teams.

When deciding the path to take think about feature overlap (or not) between SfB and Teams, moving all users at once or in smaller groups (affects interoperability) the speed of the moving operations.

Teams side-by-side with SfB (Islands mode) is recommended for SfB Online users, SfB on-premises users could consider some of the other modes separating some features (meetings, collaboration.)

PSTN calling is only available once the user is in Teams only mode.

For the actual move use Move-CsUser -MoveToTeams if you have SfB 2019 or SfB 2015 CU8, this will move the user to Teams and convert all meetings to Teams meetings.

Three steps to build a user-readiness plan

1. Understand the end-user - how will Teams help them?
   Business goals are not necessarily user goals.
2. Assess users propensity to change - how much other change is ongoing?
3. Identify the relevant readiness channels - awareness, training and support - communicate!

FedEx came on stage and talked about their journey to Teams. FedEx moved from SfB on-prem and migrated 90,000 users over 8 weeks. "Teams is a platform" that FedEx is now continuing to build on.