Skype for Business Online Will Retire in 2021

• Skype for Business Online will shut down on July 31, 2021.
• The service will operate normally until then but will be unsupported and unavailable afterwards.
• All new Office 365 customers will be onboarded directly to Teams beginning Sept. 1, 2019.
• Support for on-premises Skype for Business Server remains unchanged.

Skype for Business Online, a Microsoft-hosted service for chat, voice and video calls, and telephony, will be retired in favor of Microsoft Teams in 2021. This follows Microsoft’s announcement in 2017 that Microsoft Teams would eventually become the client for unified communication and collaboration in Office 365. Support for Skype for Business Server, Microsoft’s on-premises software for unified communication, is unaffected by this retirement. Customers currently using Skype for Business Online should begin planning their migration to Teams.

Two Years to Move to Teams

Microsoft announced on July 30, 2019, that Skype for Business Online would be retired on July 31, 2021, after which the service would no longer be accessible or supported. Skype for Business Online will be replaced by Teams as Microsoft’s hosted unified communication service. While Teams offers similar functionality as Skype for Business Online, it is not a feature-exact replacement. Customers will have to learn new administration practices, plan their migration, and train their employees in order to make effective use of Teams. The announcement comes with two years of advance notice; while Microsoft’s Modern support life-cycle policy promises only 12 months’ notice before a product or service is discontinued without a replacement, it does not address individual features within a replacement service.