Office 365: Finally, Microsoft Announced End of SFBOnline

You have been working in Microsoft technologies, have been using skype for business and skype for business online.

I have used both Microsoft skype for business and IBM same time, I felt IBM same time was better so it is a welcome move of realizing that skype for business (OCS, Lync) didn’t do the best.

Even though we have started using Skype for Business 2019 on-premises (initial mainstream support planned through January 9, 2024), we might here its end as well.

SFB Online July 31, 2021


This seems a real push from SFB Online to MS Teams by Microsoft because MS Teams still does not find external contacts and MS teams does not offer any contacts migration from SFB Online. So at least I am not interested in migrating to Microsoft Teams.

In the following link Microsoft announced that Skype for Business Online will retire on July 31, 2021. This might be extended but for now this is the date.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/faq-journey

If you are not concerned about skype contacts then you don’t have to worry about this migration and you should immediately migrate to #MSTeams because #MSTeams is better product than SFB Online.

When MS Teams was released, I did multiple meetups in Los Angeles in January of 2017. https://www.meetup.com/LAExUG/events/236473404/

Later MVP Balu Ilag wrote the book on MS Teams which was reviewed by MVP Vikas Sukhija and Former MVP Myself. If you are interested in learning through a book then here is the link of our book.

https://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Microsoft-Teams-Understanding-Chat-Based-ebook/dp/B07F58RMS9

MS Teams is being compared with Slack which had impressed me in 2015 and I guess LinkedIn is still impressed and using Slack even after few years of becoming Microsoft LinkedIn.

MS Teams is great collaboration application which is going to be use more in an enterprise environment where you are willing to do a central management of Identities in Active Directory and use Single Sign On.

Feel free to reach out to us at info@GoldenFive.net if you need help in MS Teams migration, adaption and Training.

Prabhat Nigam
CEO @ LAEXUG Foundation | CTO @ Golden Five Consulting | https://www.linkedin.com/in/prabhat-nigam/

CTO @ Golden Five | CEO at LAExUG Foundation

Prabhat is 3 times Microsoft MVP Award winner. He is MBA in Information Technology and he is working as a CTO at Golden Five Consulting which is a Microsoft Gold Partner, MSP, T1CSP, and Education partner. He helps in designing, implementing, managing and supporting solutions for private messaging cloud, mergers, a collaboration between different messaging software and other migration & deployment projects for the following technologies Office 365, Azure, AWS, Exchange, SQL, ADFS, MFA, FIM, MIM and Directory services. He has worked for all big IT giants either as an employee or contractor where he has led the Global teams. He has started his career as Technical Consultant in Exchange 5.5 with Microsoft PSS and his exchange love never stopped & continued with 2000/2003/2007/2010/2013/2016/2019/O365. At one point in time, he was the only person to support EDS customers when Microsoft had closed all the supports for 5.5 and now for all old legacy Exchange versions.
He used to blog at MSExchangeGuru.com, manages multiple LinkedIn and Facebook Groups. He also Owns MSExchnageGuru YouTube channel where he uploads all his records technical sessions. Don’t forget to check his PowerShell scripts which are making admins life easier. Prabhat can be reached at PN@GoldenFive.net.

Leave Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *