Migrate Skype Meetings To Teams: The Best Method

Techieberry
5 min readJan 18, 2021

The strategies in this post help you to migrate skype meetings to teams.

Before I get started, here are a couple of things you can do:

  • We have written the tutorial for Microsoft teams basics which is really interesting to learn.
  • We have also written posts to improve your Microsoft 365 Teams experience for better productivity. Check out the tips and tricks mentioned here.

Let’s dive right in.

A tenant or a user account has to be moved to teams only mode before migrate skype meetings to teams. If for some reason, you are in islands mode but trying to move skype meetings to teams you will get an error. If your tenant is not in teams only mode, follow the below steps.

How to change the coexistence mode for individual users?

  • Go to “Teams Admin Center
  • Select “Users
  • Search for an account and click to open their properties
  • At “Teams Upgrade” click “Edit
  • Change their coexistence mode to “Teams only” and turn OFF“ Migrate this user’s meetings to Teams
  • Click “Apply
  • Allow a few hours for this policy to apply

How to set entire tenant to Teams only?

  • Go to “Teams Admin Center
  • Select “Org-wide settings” and select “Teams upgrade
  • Change Coexistence mode to “Teams only
  • Turn Off “Notify Skype for Business users that an upgrade to Teams is available” based on organization requirements.
  • Click “Save
  • Allow for a few hours to apply these changes.

I figured I would check PowerShell and sure enough, you are able to easily do this to change the mode for individual users.

Grant-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy -PolicyName UpgradeToTeams -Identity user@user.com

Once ran you can look at your user and you will notice the user has the policy now assigned.

Use the following command if you’re interested in moving the entire tenant to Teams only. This means all users will be moved to Teams only.

Grant-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy -PolicyName UpgradeToTeams

How to access and use these commands?

Connect to Skype for Business Online module and after you enter your password to connect, you will now have access to all the commands to manage this and many other items with Skype/Teams.

How to migrate skype meetings to teams?

Let’s assume you have followed the above steps and your users are in teams only mode but their skype meetings are available on their mailbox. Now, we take help of Meeting Migration Service will help convert your meeting links over to Teams Meetings.

The Meeting Migration Service (MMS) updates a user’s existing scheduled meetings in Outlook and migrate skype meetings to teams. The system is automated and will run under the following scenarios:

  • When a user is migrated from on-premises to the cloud (whether to Skype for Business Online or to TeamsOnly).
  • When an admin makes a change to the user’s audio conferencing settings
  • When an online user is upgraded to Teams only, or when a user’s mode in TeamsUpgradePolicy is set to SfBwithTeamsCollabAndMeetings (TAP customers only)

By default, the MMS is automatically triggered in each of these cases, although admins can disable it at the tenant level. In addition, admins can use a PowerShell cmdlet to manually trigger meeting migration for a given user.

  • Connect to Skype for Business Online powershell
  • Execute the command “Start-CsExMeetingMigration -Identity “UPN HERE”
  • Allow for a few hours to complete the migration between skype for business and teams.
  • To check the status, use the command (Get-CsMeetingMigrationStatus -Identity “UPN HERE”)

TotalMeetings — This has a number of skype meetings which was available on a user mailbox.
SucceededMeeting — This has total number of successful meetings that converted to teams meetings.
LastMessage -Complete migration status of the user.

The meeting migration service cannot be used if any of the following apply:

  • The user’s mailbox is hosted in Exchange on-premises.
  • The user is being migrated from the cloud to Skype for Business Server on-premises.

In these situations, you can use the Meeting Migration Tool to migrate skype meetings to teams. You can get all the details here how the Meeting Migration Services tool works.

How to migrate bulk users from skype meetings to teams?

It is recommended to migrate 1000 users at a time so that to avoid a tenant load. You may use the concatenate option in excel to create batches and execute them using the powershell.

Migrate skype meetings to teams limitations

  • Only future meetings which was organized by a user will be migrated.
  • If a mailbox had expired skype meetings, it will remain the same.
  • If a meeting had organized by a different user, it will not migrate to teams meetings.
  • If meeting invites had more than 250 participants, you cannot migrate them to teams meetings and a meeting invite has to be recreated to fix.
  • Only meetings scheduled using the “Add Skype Meeting” button in Outlook or Outlook on the Web will be migrated. If the meeting organizer copied and pasted the meeting information from an old meeting, the meeting will not be updated.
  • Meeting content created or attached (documents, whiteboards, polls, etc.) will not be retained after MMS runs.
  • Links to shared meetings notes will be overwritten. The content in OneNote will still be there.

Congratulations! Now you know how to migrate Skype meetings to teams. If you have any further questions, please let me know.

--

--