How to uninstall Skype for Business

[Kevin Ruschman]

In our small organization we recently implemented Office 365 and Skype for Business 2016. Office and SfB was installed using Microsoft Office Click-to-Run using a custom config file to separately install Office 365 Business Premium and Skype for Business Basic 2016. As there were some issues that we could get around with Skype for Business (persistent chat being the biggest) we have migrated over to Microsoft Teams for our chat functionality. As there appears to be a small issue having both installed, I have attempted to uninstall Skype for Business with little luck. After uninstall from the control panel and rebooting, Skype for Business is still installed. It is no longer listed in Control Panel and with Office 2016 you cannot add or remove individual components, although that shouldn't really matter since it was a separate install.

Any help is greatly appreciated as I am kind of stuck at the moment.

[#2]

I'm not an Office expert, but Office Click to Run includes Skype for Business, and you can't only install certain applications. (not sure why you would have to install SfB Basic as well?)

By all means someone with a better understanding of office correct me if I'm wrong.

There shouldn't be any issues running teams and SfB side by side, what issues are you seeing? It's fully supported to have them running side by side.

thanks

Tom

[#3]

At first I had assumed that Skype for Business would be installed with CtR but it wasn't. That's why it was installed separately. 

The issues that we're seeing is that a lot of our users are showing in Teams with the message "This user is currently using Skype for Business. Some Microsoft Teams features, including chat history won't funciton" even though they are not signed into Skype for Business. We have not found a way to remove this message and show them as communicating through Microsoft Teams.

[#4]

Odd, if they are not signed into SfB, I'm not sure that uninstalling SfB on the PC (if you could) would make a difference.

Are the signed into OWA? maybe it's picking it up from there?

If you take a user that has this issue, and get them to login to a PC that "doesn't have the issue" does it go away (i.e. is it PC specific or user specific)

thanks 

[#5]

Everyone uses the Outlook desktop client and not OWA. As far as if the issue is user or system related, the odd thing is that User A may appear in Teams for me but in SfB for someone else. There doesn't appear to be any consistancy as to which users appear in which manner.

[#6]

Afaik will thw SfB "Full Client" only installed by the C2R Client when you have a E3,E4,E5 Plan, for the Business Plans, you must install SfB Basic seperatly. But you can create a custom XML and add the following tag to exclude Components that you don't want to have installed.

What happens when you disable the User for SfB in the Control Panel? Are you still getting these errors?