Problems with IM from Teams to SfB

[Kenn Christensen]

There is something fishy going on here.

We have a SfB solution in office 365.

1:Currently the Coexistence setting is Islands (decription reads: users can use both skype for business and teams app)

2: I have 2 external contacts in each their SfB organization

3: My Testuser can IM both these external users from SfB, however cannot IM the external users in teams.

4: When trying to search in teams for each of the external contacts, I get an error saying "we cannot setup the conversations, because the 2 organizations are not setup to talk to each other"

5: If I change my Coexistence to Only Teams, the problem remains the same, but now I cant even communicate with the external contacts because my SfB client is disabled.

All of this is pretty straight forward I guess however this is the strange part!!!!!

I have a friend who is an administrator of another Office 365 Solution. Their Coexistence setting is set to Teams only, and has been for months.

1: If one of his users tries to IM my 2 external contacts from above, they dont experience the same.

2: If they try to search for external contact nr 1. in teams, they get a message saying "user@externaldomain.com was not found

3: if they try to search for external contact nr 2. in teams, they are able to IM the contact with out any issues.

4: In the admin.teams.microsoft.com we have compared each to 365 subscriptions, every single setting is identical

I have no idea whats going on

Could someone please help with this issue, or try to help me understand what is happening?

? Why are my office 365 solution and my friends office 365 solution are behaviouring different?

? Why are we being told to move to Teams, if this makes it impossible to communicate with organizations who is still using SfB

All help, advise or troubleshooting would be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards

Kenn Christensen

1. Skype for Business and Teams are both cloud based

2. AD is synced from On-prem, all accounts are local

3. Org default is "Islands" and My personal default is "Teams only"

Here is what I am seeing

I am only able to see presence of people who have Teams turned on, when I create a new Message to someone they do not get it unless they have Teams open.

A skype user is able to see my presence, they are able to IM me and I am able to respond.  I am able to see their presence once they initiate the IM and I see two entries in my Teams client one of them the one they never receive and then one with Skype logo on it.

What I want is to be able to see Skype presence in Teams and be able to send IM's to skype users if they are not signed into Teams.

[#2]

@Kenn Christensen hard if you aren't the admin. Try messaging another domain, e.g. my test account at dustin@hawkinsav.club should work.

[#3]

@Steven Collier 

that seems to work, If i search for dustin@hawkinsav.club in my teams client I can look you up, no error. do you run Teams or skype for business?

same happens with both test users, both the user on teams only and the user on island mode.

What does this tell me? :( that the 2 other external domains I have been testing with has some kind of setup that I cannot communicate with?

[#4]

You sound like you keep switching your test users and testing right away. These upgrade modes take over 24 hours to update routing in some cases and since you switching between clients to test that tells me it’s not taking full hold because once you are teams only you can’t use Skype anymore.

Anyway. Seems you’ve also discovered other endpoint issues with who you are testing with. They must not have their external settings set for teams and Skype and or maybe they have the domain restriction setting on.

In theory you should be able to talk to all Skype endpoints from teams even on-Prem when everything is configured on both ends properly.

[#5]

@Kenn Christensen Teams Only, but it shouldn't make a difference as all federation is using the SfB Interop gateway.

By any chance are these external addresses guests in your AAD already, e.g. been invited to SharePoint etc. When you search for them are they found from the directory or do you need to Search Externally ?

[#6]

@Chris Webb 

I am not switching test users around. I have 2 test users in my environment. 1 that is set to Teams only and 1 test user that's set to island. They have both been like this for weeks.

Should I not be able to setup the test like this? the idea is I dont change any settings right now, anywhere, im just testing. I have not changed a setting in my entire office 365 setup for 1+ week now.

but when testing with Steven and dustin@hawkinsav.club - I just try to send a chat message from each of the 2 test users to see the different results.

My entire org (except 1 of the test users) are set to Island mode. so when testing with test users that's basicly a test that could be done from any user.

Testing with my Teams only test user is where I want to go, or at least I think that's where I want to go.

Kind regards

Kenn Christensen

[#7]

@Steven Collier 

I have to search for both of them externally.

[#8]

You literally just said you tried changing here ;)

“ But if I take the same user and change coexisisting setting and change to teams only I should be able to chat from teams to the external skype for business user. but that does not work”



Bottom line here is Islands mode shouldn’t be expecting a working result from using Teams to chat externally. Mark that use case off your list. We can focus on any users set Teams only messaging externally if that’s not working ;)

I always come back to this coffee in the cloud video covering interop and external chat below. Watch it. It’s great and maps all this out cohesively. Then let’s figure out any Teams Only mode user issues if you are having problems there.

https://youtu.be/2eQ6s547fF0

[#9]

@Chris Webb 

Sorry Chris :) that was just a figure of speech, or me saying it wrong. I didn't change coexisting setting on the user, I just try with the other test user instead, a test user that has a different setting.

[#10]

10-4

[#11]

Thing about this video it says you can do external chat from islands to Skype buts I’ve seen mixed results and try to tell users in islands mode to always do your external chatting via Skype client.

[#12]

@Chris Webb 

But my main goal on this was to switch away from Skype for Business and only use Teams. I thought that what was Microsoft is planning for everyone.

If I let my organization stay on island mode, then no one will start using teams, people are so used to it. So I think only way is to force users to Teams.

But if that involves my organization having issues with chatting with external organization users that's still on the Skype for business platform (island or one of the other coexsisting settings) then I dont see the point to be honest.

[#13]

@Kenn Christensen You should definitely consider setting the org-wide setting to SfbOnly and move the users who are ready for Teams to TeamsOnly. We have about 9000 users in TeamsOnly and the remaining 16000 users in SfBOnly (through org-wide setting) and we haven't heard of any issues communicating with external users (either in Teams or SfB).

One thing to test is to really make sure you have closed down the Teams client app properly (right-click the icon and choose Quit) and then restart it again.

[#14]

@Par Linderoth 

I would like to do it the way you are doing it.

Have you had any Teams only users report to you that they were unable to contact external users? like im experiencing? From Teams only users to external Skype for Business only users to be more precise.

Kind regards

Kenn Christensen

[#15]

@Kenn Christensen I haven't received any reports regarding these issues so I am very confident that it is not a general issue between Teams and SfB. 

[#16]

That’s why I said to stop focusing on islands and look into your teams only user. For the most part you shouldn’t have issues. But there are some cases where admins may not have their external users setup correctly and or hybrid modes not configured properly here and there but overall I haven’t had issues either when using teams only. As previous responder said. Your best bet if external is your biggest concern is not to use islands anywhere.

[#17]

Hello,@Kenn Christensen 

Nice to meet you like this.  It is my understanding you thought the skype user was someone other that who it should have been.  Any way the Ryzen host is now MININT-46Horkb.

[#18]

I was never using skype
my email was though