Sending and receiving Skype for Business messages through Teams

[Kyle Hikalea]

I was under the impression it would be possible to receive / send messages to Skype users via Teams chat functionality. After logging into my personal email account and attempting to message my Office365 address, no notification / message was received in Teams.

How do I go about configuring this to work?

[#2]

I've successfully sent / recevied messages with a co-worker on the skype for business app and teams, but am not having any luck with a regular skype account to Teams.

[#3]

Skype personal isn't supported, only Skype for business. It's on the roadmap for H2 I beleive.

[#4]

I chat every day with users who are on Skype for Business while using the Teams client. It does work, with caveot: If they have logged into Teams before then you'll get their Teams account and not the Skype4Biz account

However, if you don't open Skype4Biz/Lync and they try to message you, it will show up in Teams and you can reply to them, which will give you two chats per user.

[#5]

The original request is for Skype consumer not S4B, it doesn't support Skype consumer communication.

[#6]

I just wanted to confirm. My team is using Teams, they leave skype closed. We show offline to skype users. If they message us thru skype for business, we should get it in Teams correct? We seem to be having an issue with skype for business users messaging us when we are signed out of skype but we have Teams open. 

What is the answer for this?

Jenn

[#7]

I'm trying to confirm but to my knowledge you can't go from Skype to Teams, only Teams into Skype to start conversations.

Also is your Skype for Business on Prem or Online?

[#8]

Our Skype in online. 

I would much appreciate a confirmation so that I ensure my team is not missing anything.  

[#9]

So the online presence is working as intended since the Interop for presence hasn't gone live yet. Soon Teams users should show as online from Skype for Business. Did you ever try messaging from Skype to Teams users that show offline? if you can't it's cause someone changed your chat defaults for the tenant to Teams, and this causes the "skype chat" option in Settings to be disabled by default. If this is the case this can be changed back to default to allow users to change this option if they want to be able to be chatted with from Skype for business.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/skype/get-csteamsinteroppolicy?view=skype-ps

Anyway, it should work both ways, but that policy can block it in some ways. The presence as stated isn't live yet, but soon it should work so people can use S4B and see if Teams users are online and send them messages regardless of if they are on S4B or not.

So try to see if you can message and receive in Teams, if you can't then you might have to look at the chat policies. But the presence will be launching soon. 

[#10]

Hi,

Did you find any solution for this regarding sending IM to users whos been logged onto Teams but not using Teams and SfB client instead?

[#11]

Interested in this as well. I have a lot of people who I haven't transitioned to Teams so I need to IM their Skype account through Teams, but it only gives me their Teams account to IM.

[#12]

Any updates here. Thanks

[#13]

Teams and Skype for Business interop should now by fully working for everyone, but it relies on the use of the upgrade modes. Read here about how to set them

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/setting-your-coexistence-and-upgrade-settings

The mode set for the recipient defines where their messages go so ...

Teams Only -> All messages from Skype go to Teams

Skype Only -> All messages from Teams go to Skype

Islands -> Teams messages go to Teams, Skype messages to Skype

Legacy -> Like Islands unless a users has never used Teams in which case like Skype only

It should also be considered that all messages from people outside your business are considered Skype messages at the moment, that's how the federation works, so even if the sender is in teams it will follow the route of a Skype message, and end up in Skype unless you are in Team Only mode.

[#14]

Good summary.

[#15]

It seems to me after reading that link and this one, that there does not seem to be a way to facilitate an environment where you have some users in Teams and some users in SfB only where message can be sent from SfB only users to the users in Teams and vice versa. Would that be a correct assessment?

Basically need an Islands setup where the Islands can communicate, but that doesn't seem possible.

[#16]

This is a good summary, but unfortunately my tenancy doesn't show Teams-Only as an option in the list (I can only choose Skype-Only or Islands). I've used PowerShell to set it instead (bases on other forum posts) but that hasnt helped re Skype to Teams messaging.

[#17]

@Deleted Have some users in Teams Only, the others in Skype Only, then each can communicate with each other or people in other companies via the interop service.

The defining feature of islands is that each clients messages stay on the island.

[#18]

I was on the Teams Tuesday call this afternoon and someone mentioned their take on having Teams users message their Skype counterparts. More specifically, these are Skype users that don't have access to Teams yet but If they message me, it would come through on Teams.  I'm assuming in this instance, that if I respond, they would receive it through Skype on their end.  I reached out to my Organization admin and they sent over a few picture of their current setup. 

Based on our current setting of Islands, it does not look like what was discussed during today's meet-up is not possible in our org because of the coexistence setting.  If they did change it to Teams Only, all SFB messages would be sent to Teams.  The obvious downside is that some users are have been provisioned Teams but they are not using it as a daily driver; they're still using SFB.

The downside to all of this is that it significantly slows down the rate of acceptance of Teams. I'm trying to onboard some of my team members for testing but they are still not willing to make the jump over to Teams for a Driver for testing purposes.

Any suggestions/comments would be appreciated.  

[#19]

Hi Steven, Our Teams only users cannot communicate with out sfb users. Based on what you write in this post, this should work. Our setup is the following: We are two users set in Teams only mode, others are in Skype only mode. We can receive messages from sfb user and we can reply to it, but if the conversation is initiated by a teams only user, sfb users will never receive it. Is there something I am missing ? I would like to promote the adoption of teams in my business, but for now this is a real show stopper for us.

[#20]

I'm have the following problem:

Some users in my organization are set to TeamsOnly and some are SfBOnly.
When TeamsOnly users try to use the Teams client to send messages to SfBOnly user, the message never goes to the Sfb Client of the SfBOnly user, it appears that the messages are being sent to the Teams of this user, which is something that shouldn't happen as he's set to be a SfBOnly user.

When the SfbOnly user sends a message to a TeamsOnly user, it works completely normal, and the TeamsOnly user can even successfully reply those messages, but never create a conversation from Teams.