Teams Only Mode with SKYPE for Business Online coexistence

As you all know that Microsoft has decided TEAMS as the future or you can say successor of SKYPE for Business Online.

TEAMS is much more than that, it has features of email, sharepoint , group and much more. Microsoft teams will completely replace the SKYPE for business Online in future.

As of now many organizations are running SKYPE and TEAMS at the same time, ours is also one of them with more than 30000 Skype online users.

We were running our setup in ISLANDS mode – (users can run Teams alongside Skype for Business as two separate solutions that deliver similar and overlapping capabilities such as chat, calling, and meetings. Teams users also can take advantage of collaboration capabilities such as teams and channels, access to files in Office 365, and applications.)

We have started running a small pilot where we have changed some of our users to TEAMS Only mode. -(Use this setting if you want your users to use only Teams. Note that even with this setting, users can still join meetings hosted in Skype for Business.)

I can say that whomever we have changed to this mode is satisfied with just only few issues that we know MS will resolve in future releases.

How to change SKYPE online user to TEAMS Only mode ?

Use below Powershell command to change user to Teams only mode.

Grant-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy -PolicyName UpgradeToTeams -Identity VSukhija@labtest.com

How to revert the user back in case you do not want to continue with TEAMS only mode for him ?

Use below Powershell command to remove the assigned TeamsOnly policy from the user.

Grant-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy -PolicyName $null -Identity VSukhija@labtest.com

How to check the status if migration to Teams Only worked ?

Get-CsMeetingMigrationStatus -Identity VSukhija@labtest.com

Note: on the client side check mark –> Register Teams as chat app for Office

(This settings allows Teams to share presence information with office applications)

Ones this is completed, after 1-2 hrs user is fully switched to Teams Only mode.

When user will open SKYPE below is the screen that will be displayed.

Interestingly when other users tries to connect the Teams only user from SKYPE they will be able to communicate with Teams only user but will see the below message.

There are still some things that I think are essential which we and our Pilot users think are missing for example:

Distribution list expansion/Addition not available in contacts.
Multiple windows not available when chatting with different people.
Switching to chats o windows while Teams meeting is in-progress, shrinks the sharing session to a small window.

There are other small issues as well that we have faced but on a whole its a nice rich experience with Enterprise voice, TEAMS meetings, Sharing content.