What's so bad about Skype for Business On-Prem?

Posted by Bubba8291@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 27 comments

I am proposing a SfB migratrion from Teams to my colleagues later this week. All of our end users hate Teams, the IT department hates Teams, and Microsoft sales reps hate Teams.

We have a need for privacy and our team craves the ability to not have Microsoft force upgrades. Every day, something moves around in the MS Admins panels. It becomes very annoying.

I hear all of this talk about SfB being horrible. What is so bad about on-prem SfB?

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come_ere_duck@reddit

Short answer, it has been discontinued. Support is probably spotty at best. It'd be compliance nightmare.

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mrmattipants@reddit

My thoughts exactly. Good luck keeping it working, since support for SfB officially ended on May 5th, 2025.

As far as the Admin Panels constantly changing, this is what the PowerShell Modules are for.

Microsoft Teams PowerShell Module: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/teams/?view=teams-ps

Microsoft Graph Teams PowerShell Module; https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.graph.teams/?view=graph-powershell-1.0

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come_ere_duck@reddit

Powershell is better for managing things, but the modules are also prone to change, it wasn't so long ago that we were using the Azure AD module and MSOnline modules..

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To be more specific, I mean that you can expect most Microsoft Modules (like MSOnline & AzureAD) to be around for about a decade. And once the core module is released you can expect most of the cmdlets and parameters to remain rather constant (with the exception of improvements, bug fixes, etc.)

On an interesting note, the MS Graph API has been around a bit longer than the two aforementioned modules. However, I'd imagine that the API being language agnostic was likely a major factor behind the MS developers decision to design a new PowerShell SDK Module around the existing API endpoints, as opposed to continuing to maintain the PS modules, individually.

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Bubba8291@reddit (OP)

Any good alterantives for on-prem version of Teams?

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mrmattipants@reddit

If you're looking for a Teams replacement, you kay want to look into the following alternatives.

Slack
Zoom Workplace
Google Meet & Workspace
Zoho Cliq
Cisco Webex
Goto Meeting
Flock
Rocket.Chat

If you google "MS Teams Alternatives" you'll see this list, along with a few other suggestions.

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xphacter@reddit

IRC

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thewunderbar@reddit

It has been out of support for years and any insurance firm would laugh you right out of the room if you had to disclose you were still running it on an application for cyber security insurance

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gfunk5299@reddit

Despite all the negative posts, I 100% agree with you. Teams is the absolute worst messaging platform ever invented. Skype is way better and Microsoft nuked it. Despite odd shortcomings, SfB is still a better messaging platform than teams. He’ll even roughly 30 year old ICQ was better than teams is now.

Unfortunately Microsoft is forcing adoption by ending software development on SfB.

Slack is 100 times better than Teams. Maybe you should evaluate 3rd party options over the default Teams.

I’m hoping MS leaves enough of a void that others swoop in to fill the void, but the problem is all the young developers want to write more cloud code. Nobody wants to invest their time into on prem code. So I fear we are stuck with picking from a variety of cloud only solutions going forward.

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vertisnow@reddit

Personally, I like teams. I also like that if teams has problems, I can blame Microsoft. That is priceless.

If you bring that in-house, it's now your problem, and that sounds WAY more annoying than dealing with random UI changes.

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SVSDuke@reddit

If you keep Microsoft to blame you don't actually have to troubleshoot, if you give that up good luck bruh.

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dotme@reddit

No integration with anything probably. Integration with OL, with Zoom, good luck.

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SVSDuke@reddit

You'll hate Skype more than you hate teams

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0xDEADFA1@reddit

Wait… is this the wrong sub? Double checked, it’s not /r/shittysysadmin

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Helpjuice@reddit

Skype for business on-prem is dead and should no longer be used anywhere.

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ConfidentFuel885@reddit

There is a new subscription edition of Skype for Business, but I wouldn't expect much other than the absolute bare minimum from Microsoft. If you're dead set on moving from Teams, try Slack.

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Sasataf12@reddit

I hear all of this talk about SfB being horrible. What is so bad about on-prem SfB?

Same question back to you. I hear all your take about Teams being horrible. What do bad about Teams?

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Da_SyEnTisT@reddit

What the heck, are you seriously considering an actual deployment of an eol and unsupported solution?

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SharkJoe@reddit

So much like Exchange 2019, it did get a new Subscription Edition that will replace 2019 and be supported moving forward.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/skype_for_business_blog/skype-for-business-server-subscription-edition-se-is-now-available/4424925

But just……no. There’s only upgrade paths from SfB to Teams and not vice versa, and this would be a major headache in general (I speak from experience as someone currently upgrading their org from Exchange 2016 to SE).

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