MS-700 Managing Microsoft Teams – Upgrading from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams

1. Choosing an appropriate upgrade path and co-existence mode

First off, Microsoft will refer to this as Coexistence. Coexistence involves trying to make the two work together and allow your end users to have the best experience as possible. Now I do want to say that this is a process and you really got to plan it out and take your time and walk through things step by step here. So with Coexistence, Microsoft is going going to try to support both products at the same time and allow you to slowly move and migrate your way to a team’s only based experience. The issue you’re going to run into here is some of the stuff is going to overlap. Some of the features that you’ve got are going to be overlapping together.Now there’s different modes and that’s what we’re going to talk about here that you’re going to be running in regards to making teams and Skype for Business work together.

Okay? And then of course, part of the goal there is when they are working together with these different modes, making sure we understand what the features are that we’re getting with these different modes. First off, the default mode with Teams and Skype for Business is to make them basically just work together. And the issue there is of course is figuring out what’s overlapping, what’s not. Okay? There is another option for doing this as opposed to switching to different modes. It is known as using what’s called the Meetings first approach. So before we really jump in straight into the full blown different modes, let’s talk about what meetings first is. So what is meetings first? Meetings first is what Microsoft calls the Skype for Business with teams, collaboration and meetings.

And the goal here is that essentially when a user creates a meeting, they’ll create the meeting in teams and it sort of focuses meetings on teams. However, when it comes to chatting, calling and being present, that’s all going to happen inside of your Skype for Business. So the goal here is there’s not really any overlap. You’ve got meetings being hosted through teams, so you get the experience of working with meetings, but then you’ve got the other capabilities, chat, calling and the point of presence being managed through Skype for Business. Okay? And so you’re basically just separating. That’s the idea. And so the logic here, they call this the better together scenario and that way it’s very cut and dry. Of course this is going to mean that you got to have your users set up with both applications.

All right? But let’s also focus on the different modes now that we can set our experience up for our users. So the first thing we’ve got is what’s called Islands Mode. Okay? So with Islands mode you’re going to have the team’s client, you’re going to have Skype for Business. And so it’s basically completely separated. All right? So Skype for Business user, the Skype for Business application is going to communicate with other Skype for Business applications. Teams are going to communicate with teams. They are separate. So there’s not really a whole lot of a lot going on here. There’s not really a lot of craziness here. The two are separated, as they call it. They’re into their own island. So that’s what Island Mode is, all right? Now they do tell you to avoid some confusion here, or as they say, regressed Skype for Business experience.

If you got external Federated communications, maybe your PSTN, public switch, voice services, voice applications, maybe Office integration with Hid controls, USB, all of that stuff, all that integration, they tell you that the other integrations continue to be handled by Skype for Business and are not in teams islands. In other words, where they’re going with this is Microsoft is basically saying that your Skype for business stuff that you’ve already got hooked up right now. If you’ve got all the PST invoice services and applications and all that working, you should, for now keep all of that on Skype for business until you’re ready to go full blown into teams. So all of that stuff is not going to be available in teams if it’s in Island Mode.

You’re not going to be able to hook in all the voice services yet, PST and Voice services, head Controls, USB, all that stuff until you’re ready to fully migrate everything. So in Island Mode, team is not going to support that. That’s basically where they’re going with that. All right, again, big thing there is phone system is not available in teams, island Mode. Teams cannot be in Island Mode and support that. Okay? So they tell you you can do enterprise, voice chat, client with Skype for Business and all that, but phone system is not supported in Island Mode. Also with Island Mode, all your messages and calls from Federated users, like people outside your organization are going to be delivered to Skype for Business.

And then from there, if you upgrade to teams only mode, all your messages and calls from outside organizations will then be delivered through teams. So that’s what island mode is. All right? Now, what are the pros and cons for island mode? So first off, Pro, they tell you with Island Mode, you do rapid adoption within your organization. You can get everybody in Island Mode very quickly. Of course, the con here is that your users can get confused, right? Your users got two different clients. They’ve got Skype for Business, they’ve got teams, and they’re different interfaces, right? And they also have no control over which client the incoming call may come through teams. People are going to call teams Skype for Business, people are going to call Skype for Business.

They’ve got both. So it can get confusing. Another thing, pro allows users to learn and get familiar with teams while still having full access to Skype for Business. That’s a good thing. Users are going to be able to get familiar with teams as well as still have access to Skype for Business if that’s what they’re used to. Okay. Collins potential for end user dissatisfaction due to missed messages if the user is not running both clients. So again, they got to have both clients. Another pro, minimum administrative effort to get things started with Teams. This is great if you’re just looking for a quick rollout to get things moving in the right direction of moving towards full blown teams.

Of course, the con here, this can be challenging to get out of islands mode and try to move into teams only mode if your users and those they’re regularly communicating are not actively using teams. In other words, if they’re not real familiar with teams, it’s going to be harder to sort of move them into it. So that’s a con. Another pro enables users to leverage capabilities to enhance teamwork that are not available for Skype for business. And really ultimately teams is considered a superior product because of the features and capabilities it has that are not available to Skype for business. Cons a user who’s using Skype for business on premise and teams will not be able to communicate from teams with another user who is using Skype for business on premises, but not teams.

So in other words, if they don’t have teams, they’re not going to be able to communicate directly with them. Okay, so those are your pros and cons for island mode. Now I do want to add from an exam perspective, you’re taking the exam. Microsoft is not expecting you to have gone through a migration at some point, but they are expecting you to understand some facts here if you’re going to go through a migration. And so some of these pros and cons are definitely something you need to know for the exam. Okay, next thing you’ve got is teams only mode. Now this is a real simple one. Teams only mode. They call this an upgraded user. Okay? With teams only mode you essentially are going full blown into teams for a particular user.

They tell you that you may retain the Skype for Business client to join meetings and stuff. So if you want to keep Skype for Business in place on the machine, that’s fine just in case. But at that point your Skype for Business clients that have basically still got the app are just using it to be able to make calls and stuff, using Skype for Business for people that directly have that particular application. Ultimately though, a team’s only user, their account is associated full blown with teams. So that means all of their presence options, point of presence being available and all that are going to be tied. Teams now no longer Skype for business. So again, the only real benefit there is being able to open up Skype for Business and still be able to make a connection with somebody. But it’s not going to have all that availability information like we would have now that would be moved into teams.

Okay? So an upgraded user can continue to communicate with these people if they want that are using Skype for Business, but essentially it’s going to have limited capabilities. It’s not going to have as many capabilities in Skype for Business that it did, right? What about Skype? For business only mode. Now this is our other big mode. So Skype for Business Only mode, you have coexistence here with Skype for Business and teams together, okay? Your users, you remain in Skype for Business, not Teams for chat, meeting and calling capabilities. And they don’t use Teams for Teams and channels. And that’s important to know. Again, if you are taking the exam, that’s going to be an important fact to know right there, that first little bullet, okay?

Now currently with what they’ve currently rolled out for this feature in Teams and Skype for Business, teams and channels are not automatically turned off for your users by the way. So that can throw things off. This may be something you need to disable and you’re going to use what’s called app permission policies in order to do that. You can hide teams and channels for your users so it doesn’t get confusing since Skype for Business doesn’t support it. Right? Now the other thing that’s of note here is that in this mode, it can be used prior to starting a managed deployment of teams. If you want to prevent users from starting, use teams ahead of maybe having a built in readiness.

Or you can also use it as a way to enable authenticated participation in teams meetings so that people have to authenticate in order to get in. And the great thing about it is it enables authenticated participation in teams meetings for Skype for Business users as well. The main thing though is in order to do that, you do have to have a license for teams. Now what are the pros and cons of this mode of Skype for Business mode? So Pros, predictable routing for the end user. All calls and chats either land in Skype for Business or teams, but not both based on the administrative selection, okay? Con interropt conversations lack support for rich text file sharing screen sharing, and this can be worked around leveraging the Meet Now functionality, but ultimately you don’t get to take advantage of the rich text file sharing screen sharing capabilities. Pro may reduce end user confusion because a given functionality is only available in one client.

So certain functionality is only going to be available in Skype for Business or teams, not both. Cons users don’t have access to teams for common activities that will be performed in Skype for Business. In other words, Microsoft is saying here, hey, teams is superior. You’re not going to get the full capabilities of it if you’re using some Skype for Business stuff here. Some other Pros administrator has increased control over the set of capabilities available to users while transitioning from Skype for Business to Teams allows an organization to use teams meetings for meetings, even if it’s not ready to move entirely to teams only mode. Okay? And then lastly, the presence of a given user as viewed by others is the same regardless of which client they use.

So whether they’re using Teams, whether they’re using Skype for Business, they can make their presence known. Okay? And then the last thing I want to look at here regarding this is there are I want to give you kind of a summary here of some of your upgrade methods. So with Island Mode, prior to being upgraded to Teams, only user must run both clients simultaneously since incoming chats and calls may land in either client. Okay? So that’s a fact you need to remember. And then on the other side of that, for using Skype for Business, chats and calls only land in one client based on the recipients mode. Non upgraded users may run both clients, but there is no functional overlap.

They tell you calling and chat are not available in teams. In the Nyland mode, allows administrators to introduce overlapping functionality chat, meetings, voiceover, IP in both Skype for Business and Teams to your end users, as well as some of the newer capabilities, teams and Channels. Whereas with Skype for Business mode allows administrator to introduce selected functionality of teams to end users like Teams and Channels without providing same functionality that’s also exist in Skype for Business. So the key thing between those two is the confusion factor.

With Skype for Business, you’re setting specific functionality that they get. With island mode. You’re not. Okay? And then lastly, they just mentioned interrupting. So interrupting between Skype for Business and Teams does not exist while both users are in Island Mode, whereas interrupting is required for communication between Skype for Business and Teams. Okay? So you can interrupt between the two if you’re using that. All right? Okay, so hopefully this now helps you understand the different modes that we got if we’re going to perform an upgrade from Skype to business. Skype for business to teams.

2. Notifying Users of the upgrade through Teams Admin Center

Let’s look now at Notifying your users that you are going to be doing an upgrade with Skype for Business teams, okay? Maybe we’re going to switch to Teams Only, for example. So first order of business, obviously, you got to have Skype for Business in your environment. If you don’t, Teams is not going to recognize it. So that’s going to be first order of business. But let’s look over here to the left. We’re on Portal. Microsoft. com. We’re going to click on teams for the teams admin center. If it’s not there, just click Show, all right? It’s going to bring us into the Teams Admin Center, and we’re going to do this through our wide settings. So if you come down here, there’s a little drop down. It says. org wide settings. All right. And then from there, you’ll see it says Teams Upgrade.

So we’ll just click on Teams Upgrade, all right? Now, as you can see, in my case, it’s basically telling me that I’m already full blown into Teams and you are too, unless you have Skype for Business.If you don’t have Skype for Business, you’re not going to see anything there, okay? Now what if you do have Skype for Business? You’re going to come over here to users, all right? And you have all your different users here, and you want to notify these users. If you’ll notice up at the top, it says you can manage audio conferences, settings, the policies assigned to them, phone numbers, and other features for people in your organization that use Teams and Skype for Business.

Okay, so if I was to select some users now, keep in mind I can select up to 20 here, and then from there I can click Edit Settings, look to the right here and scroll down and here you’ll see it right here. Now, again, I don’t have Skype for Business in this environment. So that’s why you’re not seeing everything. You’re seeing that some of the stuff here is grayed out. This is where I would actually set the notification up and set my mode. So in order to go through that process of notifying your users, if you had Skype for Business, you have your mode here and you’re you can select Notify, and your users will get notified that you are going to be moving into teams here.

3. Understanding Meeting Migrations

First off, Microsoft has a service known as the Meeting Migration Service, also referred to as just MMS. Okay? And this service is going to be used whenever you need to make updates to the existing user meetings that we’ve got either in teams or Skype for business. So depending upon if you’re using teams only or you’re still using Skype for business, MMS is going to be used for either scenario. So whenever you go through the process of migrating from say, an on prem Skype server into up to Skype for business online teams only, MMS is going to play a role in this. Another thing is if an admin is making a change to any of the users audio conference settings or any of that, it’s going to be used in that case.

Also when an online user is upgrading say from teams only, or maybe a user mode is being changed from team in teams upgrade policy to say, Skype for business with teams collab and meetings which we talked about previously. So any of those changes that are being made, MMS is going to play a role in it. And of course another thing that can trigger this is if you’re running certain PowerShell commands that are going to involve any of that. Okay, so how does it work exactly? So again, this is going to get triggered for a user whenever any type of migration request that’s made. And what’s going to happen is MMS is going to place the request for a change into a queue. Now one of the issues that Microsoft is kind of foreseen for this is something called the race condition where two different processes are being ran, but they have to happen in a certain sequence.

So to prevent this race condition issue from occurring, microsoft has set a 90 minutes period before this is actually going to happen. So it’ll get queued and it’ll basically sit in the queue, but it’s not going to get processed for 90 minutes. So that is something you really do need to think about when you’re doing any of this is that there’s going to be a time period involved here. Okay, so when it does this, what are the tasks it’s going to perform? So the first thing that happens is it’s going to search that the user’s mailbox has any existing meetings that have been organized by the user and scheduled in the future. It’s going to be searching for all of that information based on what it finds in the user’s mailbox.

It’s either going to update or schedule new meetings in either teams or Skype for business online, depending on what you’re actually trying to do here. And then in the email message, it’s going to replace the online meeting block in the meeting details with the correct information. It will then send the updated version of the meeting to all the recipients on behalf of the meeting organizer. So meeting invites will basically receive a meeting update with the updated coordinates for where they’re going to be going to whenever they click the link for the meeting. Okay, so this is what the MMS is actually trying to do here for you. Another thing here as far as triggering MMS goes. So how exactly does it get triggered? What triggers this MMS to take effect? Well, here are the different cases.

For one, when a user is migrating from an on premise to the cloud, so they’re going from on prem out to the cloud when an admin makes a change to the user’s audio conference settings I mentioned that a little earlier. And then when a user’s mode is being changed, okay, from basically the team’s upgrade policy we talked about island mode, teams only, Skype for business, team collab meetings, whichever you’re going with. Then of course that gets triggered either through PowerShell or the teams admin center, which we saw a little earlier. Also, the PowerShell command you have is called start CSX meeting migration. Of course, that will trigger it as well. So those are your different things. They’re going to actually trigger MMS, and hopefully that now gives you an understanding of what MMS is and how it takes effect.

4. Using PowerShell to troubleshoot Meeting Migrations

Now as far as troubleshooting your meeting migrations, a couple of quick things. First off, Microsoft has an article that outlines the commands that are going to help you do this. Most of it is going to be done through PowerShell. You can find this article if you go to your search engine like Google and search these keywords using the meeting migration service. If you search those keywords, click on using the meeting migration right here. And then just scroll down a little bit and you’ll get to this area here. Check the status of meeting migration. So in order to figure out the status for troubleshooting, maybe it’s taking a while, remember that it can take 90 minutes, all right? And the commands that you’ll be using are going to be through PowerShell, okay? We’ve talked about PowerShell previously.

If you’re not sure how we get these commands and all that makes you go back and watch the PowerShell videos from earlier in the course, okay? But get CS meeting migration summary. This is going to give you a summary of migration. To get full details, you can run this command right here, get CS meeting migration status and then set the start time and end time. All right, so that’s going to give you full details of the migrations with the specific start time and end time. All right? And then to check the status of a migration for a specific user, it’s going to be this little command here. Okay, so this is something important for the exam too, if you’re taking the exam as far as like, troubleshooting meeting migrations goes, they’re going to want to know what’s going to be the command that’s going to help you with finding out the status of a migration and all that.

So it’s going to be this gets CS meeting migration status. Okay, so looking a little further here too, if you want to determine which users are affected. So it tells you here if you see any migrations that have failed and you want to find out which users have been affected, you can run this command here. So it’s getcs meeting migration status and they’re piping that to where that’s actually abbreviated for the command called where object. And then in the curly brace here, dollar sign underscore state is equal to fail. So dollar sign underscore is just calling upon it’s, searching every object that was returned by this. That’s what dollar sign underscore is doing. State is looking at the state is equal to fail.

And then it’s formatting as a table and showing you the user principal names. That’s basically the email address type name that’s there. So it’s formatting it as a table for you if you want to enable and disable. MMS, this is going to be the way you’ll go about doing that. So you can search get CS tenant migration configuration that’s going to show you if the service is running. If you want to change it, you’re just going to run set. Okay, so maybe you want to restart the service. You can stop it and then restart it if you want to enable it, disable it. And so that’s going your way of basically troubleshooting and making sure that the MMS service is working like it’s supposed to.