Seamlessly upgrade from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams with SXiQ

A hub for teamwork

Microsoft Teams is a feature-rich toolkit designed for the modern mobile workforce. As the Meeting and Calling functionality becomes available within Teams, your end users can schedule and access meetings and make calls right in the same place that integrates their conversations, documents, and applications. Microsoft Teams helps you realize your collaborative vision and the full business value of your Microsoft 365 investment.

Skype for Business to Teams Upgrade

SXiQ has a long history delivering successful Office 365 and on-premises Microsoft solutions for customers, providing solid technical and business recommendations with an eye toward the needs of your user base. Whether you are planning an upgrade from Skype for Business on-premises or you are already running Skype for Business Online and want to ensure you’ve planned out your upgrade to Microsoft Teams properly, our team can ensure your efforts will be successful. We leverage proven tools and processes for identifying the key elements of your upgrade. Our years of experience working with a wide range of organisations will provide a seamless upgrade plan, minimizing any disruption to your employees.

Our proven process for the upgrade to Microsoft Teams delivers the following:

• Workload Analysis and Assessment
  • Work with your business decision-makers to evaluate how your workers collaborate and communicate.
  • Understand the communication needs and wants of your end-users.
  • Identify and document the existing scenarios that your end-users and teams face and map them by workload to persona.
  • Work with the business to prioritize their needs from a communications perspective.

• Information Technology Requirements and Goals
  • Work with your IT decision-makers to understand the existing calling and meetings technologies, how it is used and how it is managed.
  • Discuss ways that the current state can be improved to meet the changing needs and expectations of end-users.
  • Through the technical environment evaluation, we’ll determine the roadmap for blockers and mitigations to deploy Microsoft Teams for meetings and calling.

• Deployment Roadmap for your upgrade from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams
  • Receive a customized deployment roadmap based on the findings from the workshop with the business decision-makers and IT decision-makers.
  • Understand the recommended path forward for moving to a Microsoft Teams environment.

Our Upgrade Planning Methodology

SXiQ provides a three-day workshop for customers who want to make sure they have a defined deployment roadmap and are ready for a smooth transition to Microsoft Teams. The workshop will focus on three key areas.

• Assessment – Understand the technical environment.
• Analysis – Calling and Meetings workload analysis.
• Roadmap – Coexistence and Deployment Roadmap.

By the end of the workshop, you’ll receive a customized overview of upgrade considerations, an environmental assessment, a map of your team’s personas and capabilities, and a roadmap with a prioritized, actionable plan to guide your upgrade.

Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams Upgrade Planning Workshop

We’ve helped take the guesswork out of upgrade planning via a proven, end-to-end, upgrade success framework. As customers are not “one-size-fits-all,” organisations may have specific requirements when it comes to implementing this change. To offer added flexibility, we have organized this framework into two tailored upgrade paths:

• Upgrade Basic: Targeted for smaller organisations or those with out-of-the-box deployments, Upgrade Basic is a ten-step checklist designed to quickly upgrade an entire organisation to Teams.
• Upgrade Pro: Targeted for larger organisations or those with customised deployments, Upgrade Pro includes pre-, during-, and post-upgrade phases to accommodate the move to Teams over a period of time. Upgrade Pro offers detailed resources across both technical and user readiness to assist in conducting a pilot, using Skype for Business and Teams in co-existence, and driving user awareness.

From Discovery to Operational Excellence

The first step of our process for an upgrade to Microsoft Teams is to determine the current state of the environment and bring up any blockers or challenges to get to end state. We then look at workload and persona alignment, and alignment with your business and IT on your strategy for collaboration and communication within your organisation. Our goal is to bring you to operational excellence in the shortest time possible and with minimum disruption.

A few things that we’ll be looking together as part of the upgrade journey include:

• Network planning, that consists of bandwidth planning for usage of Microsoft Teams for onsite and field workers, in multiple locations.
• Technical designs, including a roadmap with the agreed priorities for the rollout of Microsoft Teams according to your requirements.
• Change adoption, that maps the current state to user personas and end state based on workloads and capabilities.

And as needed, we are able to conduct Proof of Concepts of the solution within the readiness sessions, to get business and IT decision-makers familiar with the capabilities of Microsoft Teams and set the upgrade project for success.

If your organisation needs help to make the upgrade to Teams, get in touch.