It’s the final countdown!
You will remember in March we announced that Skype for Business would be retiring – well that time has come for all remaining Skype users to say goodbye.
From the end of July the Skype product will be end-of life and from the 9th July the infrastructure it sits on will be out of support. This means that we now require to move forward with the decommissioning of Skype.
Continuing with an unsupported product on unsupported infrastructure would bring many security vulnerabilities and is not an acceptable risk or way forward for the organisation.
On Monday 5th July 2021 access to Skype will be removed. This has been replaced with MS Teams
MS Teams rollout has been happening across the organisation for some time now. With almost 98% of all corporate users migrated over to either Cloud M365 Office Apps and/or the Client M365 Desktop Apps, most are already actively enjoying all the benefits of MS Teams.
MS Teams is not just a replacement for Skype it is so much more, the capabilities go far beyond Skype, it will enable staff to chat, video call, collaborate on and store documents all within the one product and offers a completely new agile way of working.
As we move to the retirement date of 5th July, you will initially not notice any change, however we will be providing weekly updates on what is happening and what you can expect to see as we move closer to the end date.
If you are not currently using MS Teams take this opportunity over the coming weeks to learn more about it and its features and prepare yourself for life after Skype.
Do not worry if you have not been migrated and still use Skype currently. The DW team is currently contacting anyone who has not been fully migrated to M365 to make sure that they have access to MS Teams.
For more general information, advice, and support for the entire Microsoft product suite:
- Join the Working with Microsoft Office 365 Yammer group.
- Visit the Office 365 training pages on LearnNL.
Thank you for all your patience as we work hard to decommission Skype in the easiest way possible for all users and enable our new improved products for the future.