If you’ve signed up for Office 365 after October 2018, then you may be surprised to find that Skype for Business Online doesn’t appear to be included. This change, for new Office 365 subscriptions with less than 500 users can easily catch larger organizations that also sign up for a trial subscription when getting started.
If you’ve been surprised to find Skype for Business Online isn’t in your tenant, then read on. We’ll explain where it’s gone and how to enable it.
Consider going with it – Teams is ready
Before doing anything else, consider using Microsoft Teams instead of Skype for Business Online. Microsoft Teams is the replacement for Skype for Business Online and comes with the next generation of instant messaging, voice and video calling and meetings, along with group chat and collaboration tools.
In its default settings in your new Office 365 tenant, it’s capable of using Federation capabilities to allow you to IM and call users of Skype for Business in other organizations, and you can still use the Skype for
Of course, there are valid reasons why you might need to enable some or all users for Skype for Business. These might include:
- You’ve bought meeting room devices that work with Skype for Business Online, but are still awaiting updates for Microsoft Teams
- You are deploying in a Virtual Desktop (VDI) environment, and require vendor support for their audio/video plug-ins
- You have currently deployed Skype for Business Server on-premises, and need to transition to Online gradually, before moving users to Teams.
If you are sure you do need Skype for Business Online, then read on.
Enabling Skype for Business using the admin center
At the time of writing (November
To perform either of these actions, first navigate to the Microsoft 365 admin center, and select Teams & Skype from the navigation menu:
Within the Microsoft Teams Admin Center, we can either enable Skype for the
To enable Skype for Business for the whole organization, navigate to Org-Wide Settings>Teams Upgrade. We’ll now change the Co-existence mode from the drop-down list.
We can either choose Islands Mode or Skype for Business Only. In Skype for Business only mode, we’ll expect that users won’t use Teams yet. However, in Islands mode we will allow users to access Teams and perform IM, chat
Upon selecting one of the modes, you won’t be able to switch back to the default mode – Teams Only – from the user interface. Don’t worry though – we’ll explain how to do this via PowerShell later.
If you only need to change some users to use Skype for Business, you can do this on a per-user basis. Navigate to Users and select the user you wish to update and choose Edit. Then, scroll down to Teams Upgrade. You can choose Islands or Skype for Business Only or revert to the organization-wide setting.
Enabling via PowerShell or switching back to Teams-Only mode
If you are planning to enable Skype for Business for multiple users, then you may prefer to use PowerShell. If you need to move back to Teams-Only mode, then you will need to use PowerShell to accomplish this.
Management of the Microsoft Teams service (rather than individual Teams) is performed using the Skype for Business Online PowerShell Module. Follow our guide to install it, and then connect to a new session using an Admin account.
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Import-Module SkypeOnlineConnector<br>$Session = New-CsOnlineSession<br>Import-PSSession $Session |
After connection, we’ll use the Grant-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy cmdlet to change the policy. There’s a range of policies available (as described in the cmdlet documentation), but to enable Skype for Business, we’ll use the Islands or SfBOnly policies (which correspond to the policies shown in the user interface above). We can use the -PolicyName parameter on its own to set the organization-wide policy, or specify the -Identity parameter to set the policy for a user:
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Grant-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy -PolicyName Islands |
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Grant-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy -PolicyName SfBOnly -Identity steve@stevieg.org |
Finally, if you wish to move back to Teams Only – and revert to the default settings of a new Office 365 subscription, set the UpgradeToTeams policy:
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Grant-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy -PolicyName UpgradeToTeams<br> |
Summary
New Office 365 subscriptions for organizations with 500 or fewer users now use Teams only by default. You can
At some point, Skype for Business Online will be replaced by Microsoft Teams. If you're not yet using Teams, but want to get started ‘How to get your team ‘on Teams’ explores a practical approach to adoption and Teams management.
Steve is a Microsoft MVP for Office Servers and Services. He enjoys getting hands-on, solving some of the more complex problems associated with migrating to the cloud or to newer versions of Exchange Server.
Oleg K says
December 13, 2018 at 2:54 amPeople provide plenty more reasons in comments here and in other places https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Teams-Blog/What-s-new-in-Microsoft-Teams-November-round-up/bc-p/298527
Frank Carius says
December 16, 2018 at 7:50 pmAre you sure, that this is working? Maybe for a new tenant but one of my playground tenants was migrated and i get the following:
PS C:\> Grant-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy -Global -PolicyName tag:sfbonly
TeamsUpgradePolicy cannot be set because Microsoft has already upgraded this organization.
and
PS C:\> Grant-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy -PolicyName tag:sfbonly -Identity user1@carius.de
TeamsUpgradePolicy cannot be set because Microsoft has already upgraded user “user1@carius.de” or organization to Teams.
Pen Warner says
December 16, 2018 at 10:20 pmBe warned, a client that created a tenant in June had this message when trying to re-enable Skype as they were not ready for Teams yet:
These settings for your organization have been set by Microsoft and can’t be changed.
and Microsoft will NOT allow them to change it… No possible way to use Skype…
John Ward says
June 18, 2019 at 11:24 pmWell I had the pleasure of being automatically upgraded to Teams.
What an awful product and experience
None of my existing SFB chats came through
People trying to contact me via Skype for business via chat – their conversations were sometimes dropped, sometimes not.
Attempting to join a meeting – and I get ‘You aren’t connected to the internet’ – yet I could browse in Chrome.
This product is completely not business ready and has caused my business a lot of missed communications over the last 2 days – totally unacceptable.
I’m now trying to downgrade back to Skype for Business – thus looking up this article – but being told by the admin centre that Microsoft control those settings.
My advice to others – don’t upgrade to Teams. Use an alternative if you can – it’s awful.
Aaron says
June 19, 2019 at 1:16 amEchoing John Ward here; this product is atrocious, we were forced over by MS very much against our wishes last Thursday evening.
It takes up *WAY* too much screen real-estate, and worse, retains chat history indefinitely – which causes the program to run continuously slower as histories build up, not to mention becomes increasingly busy and messy looking.
Never mind the fact that we already weren’t retaining chat logs as brief discussions of clients often involved account numbers, verification, and other restricted data passed between departments, and our own policies strictly forbid the retention of this private information locally.
There seems to be no means of reverting back to Skype for Business, and we have resorted to just emailing back and forth then deleting the email threads until we find an alternative program that allows us the latitude to function that Skype did.
This is ridiculous.