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

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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!

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