Microsoft will retire the Skype for Business Online (PowerShell) Connector on February 15, 2021. Office 365 tenants need to check scripts to replace the connector with the Teams PowerShell module, which contains the necessary cmdlets to connect to the policy management endpoint. Once connected, scripts can interact with objects like Teams messaging and meeting policies.
Teams and Skype consumer users can now chat together if the Office 365 tenant configuration allows. Text-only chats and VOIP calls are supported. Teams users have the opportunity to see what Skype consumers have to say before they accept a connection. It’s all part of making sure that Skype for Business Online users can move to Teams without losing connections.
The Skype for Business Online PowerShell module is not well liked. It works differently to other modules and has some oddities, including the ability to disconnect sessions after 60 seconds and fail to reconnect. The new Enable-CsOnlineSessionForReconnection helps to keep sessions going, so that’s one small but irritating oddity off what could be a long list.
On July 30, Microsoft announced the retirement of Skype for Business Online with effect from July 31, 2021. Two years seems like a long time to prepare, but it’s amazing how time passes when you’ve got lots to do. Microsoft, ISVs, third-party consultants, and customers all have lots of work to do to prepare for the transition.
The Teams Admin Center has been renamed to remove any reference to Skype for Business Online. The console now includes a set of new Teams usage reports. The reports differ from what’s available in the Office 365 Admin Center and aren’t quite as powerful, but we can expect Microsoft to improve and refine these reports over time.
Would background blurring make a real difference to your video meetings? If it does, then try it out in Teams meetings, but only if you have a recent PC that supports AVX2.
The news has emerged that Microsoft won’t provision new Office 365 tenants with Skype for Business Online unless they have more than 500 users. Any smaller and the tenant gets no choice but Teams.
Microsoft has released four new administrative roles to help Office 365 tenants manage Teams. It’s a good thing and we were able to include the news in the September 20 update for Office 365 for IT Pros.
During transitions, things sometimes don’t go so smoothly. Such is the case if you want to enable or disable guest user access to Teams and find that the setting to control the access is no longer available in the Office 365 Admin Center. But PowerShell can control the setting, so that’s the solution to the problem.
Apparently, Slack is now worth $7.1 billion. That’s a lot of money for a company that faces huge competition from Microsoft Teams, especially with the ever-increasing size of the Office 365 installed base.
Grrr. It’s been that kind of day. While chasing a Teams bug (about which more another time, once I have a consistent repro case), I needed to log on to Skype Online PowerShell. We use the Azure baseline policy that forces MFA for all admin accounts in our tenant; I just updated Chapter 3 of …
Read More ““Unable to discover PowerShell endpoint URI” when using MFA with Skype Online”
On August 24, Microsoft announced that their roadmap to bring the functionality and features from Skype for Business Online to Teams was complete. It’s always good news when you see a plan coming together, but it’s also important to understand that a world of difference exists between an announcement and being able to move an organization’s communications workload.
Need some Visio shapes to build presentations or plans featuring Teams or Skype for Business Online? Here’s how to get a copy of the stencil.
The Office 365 MyAnalytics application is to add Skype for Business signals (and then Teams) to the set of data it processes to derive insights about the time users spend on different activities.