Skype for Business Online retirement - Extendable past 31/07/21

By -

With the imminent retirement of Skype for Business Online (SFBO) on July 31 2021, some of my customers have had concerns that they still rely on having users in SFBOnly mode for things like Attendant Console. As there are still delays in API releasing from Microsoft, the release of this software to General Release is unlikely to happen by this date.

NOTE: this does NOT affect Skype for Business Server (On-Premise) as this is still supported into the future..

Luckily, Microsoft have realised this too and are now offering to extend SFBO retirement date on a per tenant basis. This means that if you have users enabled for SFBO in your tenant, you should get notified in the coming days in the Teams Admin Center (TAC) that; Good news! Your Microsoft Teams upgrade has been scheduled. (Like the screenshot below)

And as you can see they are allowing a Request extension option for us. 

You should go ahead and click on this if you do require SFBO after July 31st.


Go ahead and fill in the request and Submit request

You will also see the following:

Note: Related services such as third-party audio conferencing and Skype Meeting Broadcast won't be extended beyond July 31, 2021.

We are then notified in the TAC that Your request has been received and we should "Check back tomorrow for next steps..."


We were then notified that we are now keeping SFBO until October 20 2021!


Obviously you should move any users not dependent on SFBO straight to Teams and then only have these few users to move once the API has been released and console updated!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Unassigned Numbers in Microsoft Teams using Audiocodes SBC

By -
Image
Unlike Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams does not natively support the handling of Unassigned numbers in the system. So if someone leaves your organisation and you remove the number from them and someone tries to call it, the call will drop. Technically, Teams will return a "404 Not Found" back to the SBC and back on to the telco. What we can do here is to then assign the 404 error to a Route, change the Destination Number (to a call queue or to your main Reception number for example) and route it back to Teams. To do this there are a few simple steps: Step 1 – Create an Alternative Reasons Set Step 2 – Configure existing Teams IP Group to use the SBC Alternative Routing Reason Set Step 3 - Create new IPG Step 4 – Create a new route in IP-to-IP Routing Step 5 - Manipulate Numbers Step 6 – Test  Step 1 – Create an Alternative Reasons Set The first thing we need to do is create an " Alternative Routing Set ", we find this under Setup >> Signaling & Media &
Read more

Communicator ports used for communication

By -
Image
We came across an issue with a segmented network with multiple VLANs separated by numerous firewalls. Each VLAN was considered a separate LAN. Rules must be opened on the firewalls to allow video and audio traffic to work inter-VLAN. By default ports 1024-65535 TCP/UDP are used which is pretty much all of them bar 1023 ports - this is a big hole. So instead we can limit the ports used from the client and then on the firewall just open up these ports - minimum 20 ports. Media Port Range This section describes the minimum media port allocation requirements for the client and server. The default UDP/TCP port range used by the Office Communicator 2007 client is 1024-65535. The Real Time Media Communications stack in Office Communicator 2007 allocates the media port dynamically in this range. In order to maintain an adequate level of performance, you can specify a smaller port range for Office Communications Server to use. To control the specific range of ports that need to be open on
Read more

Teams Device Health Monitoring and Reporting

By -
Image
 Microsoft have snuck in a nice new feature into the Teams Admin Center (TAC). We now see a new Notifications and Alerts  menu tree and below this Rules. When we go in here, we find only a single Default  Device State Rule with no option to create any new rules (yet at least...) When we edit this rule, we can see that we now have an option to monitor specific devices (think meeting room devices, collaboration bars etc.. here) Under Device users  we click on +ADD  then enter the name of the account, or accounts if you are monitoring multiple devices, associated with the device, such as the resource account. Then under Actions  we can choose either Channel alert  - to have a nice alert sent to our Teams Channel   OR Webhook  to use webhooks for alerting. Finally ensure to select Active  then Save. Once set up this will take maybe 15 mins to replicate and set up. Then once a device has gone offline, the alert will be sent "Immediately", however it seems to take between 5-10 mins
Read more