Update! Presence now respects a user's coexistence mode

It would be great if there was a way to control users being sent an message in teams when they have not been migrated yet. If we have users in Teams Only mode and they send an IM to a user who is offline in S4B, they  receive an email that someone tried to message them in teams and click here to join teams. This is not the functionality we want to see happen and is killing out piloting of Teams. Users who are Skype only and haven't launch teams need to receive messages in Skype only, not teams. Teams only users need to know that message sent to users on skype will only go to users on skype and not try to have them launch Teams. This causes confusion and has caused pilot users to no longer want to use Teams in fear that the users they are trying to IM will not receive the IM in skype properly. Teams is a great replace for skype, but to get the business to buy in and pilot the product we need to make sure that they know that messages sent to users will be received in the correct tool. Islands mode is not a valid option for this as users do not want to run 2 tools. It is to confusing and complicated, considered a hassle limiting adoption for pilots users.  

Rahul Kayala - I thought I would like this update; however, now my SfB-only users are complaining they are showing up as completely Unavailable in Teams vs what I expected was for their Skype presence to appear in Teams.  If you end up with the Skype-version of someone in Teams, it does show their Skype presence... but not on the Teams version of them.  

UPDATE:  Now that I'm moving people to Teams-Only mode, the Skype users are complaining that the Teams people are now showing as Offline in Skype.  This just really doesn't sound like what this blog post was supposed to fix.  Please help clarify.  Is my only option to go back to Islands mode?

UPDATE:  Or... is it just that the changes mentioned in this blog post just haven't hit my tenant yet?  I'm hoping that's the answer.  If so, please clarify when we should anticipate this change being fully rolled out.  THANK YOU!!  :-)

Deleted - Yes, this change has been rolled out to all tenants earlier today. Please note that it may take up to a day for the update to take affect for some users!

ChrisWebbTech - Glad you're liking it! Thanks

Kevin Oliver - Our solution was to move the Org-Wide setting to SfBOnly, then Teams users to TeamsUpgrade (Teams Only).  This has most-definitely helped... except for the issue I'm having above.  But I don't think it's supposed to work that way based on how I'm interpreting this blog post, so I'm awaiting confirmation of this before deciding what to do next.

Eug It should be rolled out to everyone so that you can still set it via Powershell. I did a blog long while back with the commands and how to install / use the Skype Online power-shell module. to set it. 

https://webbtech365.blogspot.com/2018/08/cannot-set-users-or-tenant-to-teams.html

ChrisWebbTech- Thanks.  So to confirm, if I've communicated with someone in Teams, my conversation with them is forever in Teams? Take a user who was Islands before we realized Islands is awful and we needed to set everyone to SfBOnly… if I communicated with them from Teams while they were still Islands, I (as a Teams user) am never going to be able to chat with them and have it land in SfB on their side, right?

Also, do I understand from your response that I *should* be able to remove a conversation that's with a SfB user (aka has the Skype icon)?  Because I definitely don't see a remove/delete/etc. option in the menu.  The only difference between SfB and Teams conversations is the menu on a Teams conversation has "Manage Apps" in addition to Pin, Add to Favorites, Mute, and Hide which appear for both.  

Sorry to go a little off the topic of presence, but the article makes it seem like this is pretty straightforward.  Our experience with the Teams/SfB interop has been anything but straightforward. 😉

Hi All - I had a weird problem. I moved all users to TeamsOnly mode a few weeks back even though our tenant didn't have the option and using the powershell command to grant the upgrade policy org-wide. This worked fine and our SkypeforBusiness deactivated and diverted us to Teams. However, we noticed that we only had one-way presence with external contacts where we could see theirs, but nobody could ours. After a lot of reading tweaking settings, I noticed that two-way presence worked if I granted the upgrade policy to each user invidually:

Grant-CsTeamsUpgradePolicy -PolicyName UpgradeToTeams -Identity username

I hope this helps someone and saves them a few hours.

Is this rolling out now and to all tenants? 

This is fantastic news. Thank you!

Rahul Kayalawill this deployment have any impact on how the Presence icon works in Outlook? specifically, provide the ability to easily start a Teams chat instead of Skype chat.