In my previous post I talked about what I feel an organization should be doing during the SfB to Teams transition. In this post, I’ll cover what an IT department should be doing to support the organization.

There are several things that an IT department needs to consider when moving from Skype for Business Server to SfB Online or Teams. The biggest by far is shifting from servers – and the associated maintenance and operations – to a focus on the network. In particular, we’ve been spoiled by 1G and faster LANs with SfB on-prem. Fantastic network performance on the LAN meant we could run a bit looser, not needing to worry about bandwidth or QoS. With SfBO and Teams, that’s a different story. You should be looking at:

Internet bandwidth – is it enough? Is it symmetric, so that upstream traffic doesn’t suffer?

QoS – While it’s true that the Internet doesn’t do QoS, you can certain have your firewall prioritize traffic based on DSCP values. You should also have it classify and mark inbound traffic from the Internet, so that it’s prioritized by the rest of your network.

Subnets – Like SfB Server, SfB Online and Teams use subnets and their associated locations in a couple of spots: e911/emergency calling locations, and for Call Quality analytics and reporting. If you don’t know your exact subnets (NO SUPERNETTING!), and the areas they serve, start documenting this. If you have subnets that span locations, plan to remedy this. Spanning floors is sorta okay in a small building, but inter-building spanning is a bad thing. While e911 dynamic location isn’t turned on yet (it’s complicated, and involves life safety. And lawyers), you’ll want things ship-shape when it is.

Policies – Teams uses many other O365 services, and they include a variety of policies for things like naming, compliance, and deactivation. You need to understand what these are, and how they work, so that you can support your organization in making sound decisions. And because at the end of the day, if you don’t, you’re the ones who will have to clean up a mess of Teams with bad names and no expiration or lifecycle.

Internet Connectivity – Centralized Internet is a bad thing for Teams and SfBO. This forces traffic from branches to have to transit your WAN ($) to a central Internet breakout, then off to the Cloud. The extra distance traveled also leads to quality issues. Central Internet breakout is sorta okay in a municipal area, worse within a country, and terrible between countries. If your security department is arguing against this, you can always configure policies to allow Teams traffic locally and send Bob and Sally’s web traffic to the central breakout.

Become friends with this webpage that details the URLs and IP ranges for various O365 services.

You should fire up the bandwidth calculator often. And maybe do a Network Readiness Assessment.

How about a handy Network Assessment Tool.

And who doesn’t want Success with Teams? So get started with Skype and Teams!