Meeting Migration Service Skype Academy – Summary

While watching over the Technical Product Training on the Skype Operations Framework site here i thought id take notes for future reference and wanted to see if its worth writing a summary for others as well. If its useful let me know and ill look to write up more. Ive added a number of links to resources for MMS as well.

The first one i was interested in was the recently announced Meeting Migration Service (MMS) which was referenced in the SfB Video Broadcast on regionally hosted meetings from Microsoft.

Quick Summary

Overall i think a great session and explains the Meeting Migration Service and differences compared to the Meeting Migration Tool.

The insight to the update process via PowerShell is great and understanding the meeting scheduling process gives a great understanding of how meetings work and what’s required to be updated and scenarios where MMT wont work or is limited.

I think what’s very important here is education for users and training just because there is now a service that will automatically update meetings for your users and instead of getting the users to use the Meeting Migration Tool doesn’t mean you don’t have to educate and communicate to users what to expect so plan and communication is key.

Also as an admin plan when you will migrate users as at time of migration the MMS will start to trigger updates going out.

The MMT forced the user to do this work and they were aware of the process but as MMS runs in background you don’t want your helpdesks overload with people asking where do i have a million meeting invites or i already declined this and users contacting users.

Plan, educate and communicate !

So here goes let walkthrough the session.

Title – Skype Academy presents: Meeting Migration Service
Presenter – Nick Smith – Principal Program Manager (Microsoft)
Link to video here

Starts with Intro from Nick on his previous roles and role at Microsoft and then moves into a training disclaimer.

Noting all features and functionality are subject to change, if there are changes then recordings will be rerecorded so make sure you note the date of the video. The one I’m watching is November 2016.

Agenda of the session

Next we look at scope and see that this session is about and notes its around the new Meeting Migration Service (MMS) and not the existing Meeting Migration Tool (MMT) that users have deployed on their pc to manually update meetings.

The MMT is mentioned and from watching will be still around to catch scenarios where MMS cant be used. MMT is a good failback and could be a preference for some people.

For information on the meeting migration tool check out a previous post i did here

Meeting Information

– Details how meetings are scheduled and where meeting data is stored.

When a user schedules a meeting using outlook and sfb add in, they create meeting information (coordinates) as Nick refers to them. Example shown below from Nick slides. The video has animations and show the organiser creating a meeting in Outlook using the SfB meeting add in below.

The Meeting is sent out to invitees of the meeting and the meeting is stored on back end servers.

Now the meeting invitees have the meeting details and the back end server has it as well. So the invitees have the details to connect to the meeting and the backend has well so its a valid meeting.

The back end servers do not store all the information of the meeting they store the following:

Conference key,
Conference id
Expiry time (Scheduled meeting for Tuesday at a certain time after Tuesday the meeting is expired. For recurring meeting the expiry is set for the time after the last meeting)

When the user sends the meeting information out, the organiser is the only person that knows who its been sent to and where updates needs to happen.

Each invitee will have their own local copy of the meeting join information in their own mailbox now.

Problem – What are we trying to solve ??

There are times when admins need to make a change to the users meeting configuration or service where this be,

Changing from on premise deployment of Lync or Skype for Business Server to online
Migrating between Office 365 datacentre / regions which uses a new meeting url,
Migrating from a third party audio conferencing provider (ACP) to Microsoft PSTN Conferencing.

When the admin makes a change they are changing the back end conferencing meeting configuration for the users which mean all previous meeting invites are invalid. Sad smile the meeting urls and phone numbers are invalid and are not accessible and people using existing meeting information wont be able to join the meetings and the meeting join will fail.

So we need to update the information from the organiser and update the meeting invitee information as well. We need them to be able to successfully join the meeting after the backend or service changes.

Typically the user, would either use the meeting migration tool (MMT) available now or manually update the meetings in Outlook and resend new updates meeting invites to the invitees but wouldn’t this be easier if it was automated for the user and had no user inventions.

Now here comes the meeting migration service !!

MMS goes into the users mailbox, finds the meetings, updates the meeting information and sends this to the original invitees and updates the backend for you.

What is the meeting migration service ??

MMS is an online service that will automatically update meetings that have not expired

There are scenarios noted in the above slide.

MMS runs in the following migration scenarios

Lync Server / SfB Server On premise to SfB Online Migrations
Regionally hosted meeting user migration
Anything to Microsoft Cloud PSTN conferencing (ACP to Cloud PSTN Conferencing)

It mentions processing typically starts 10minutes post operation and is expected to complete within 60minutes. Times vary on number of users and number of meetings. Expect the MMS process to finish within 60 minutes.

Further on there are ways to view the update process and troubleshooting errors via PowerShell.

Planning is important, usually migrations completed during downtime and plan when updates will be sent out.

So what does MMS bring compared to using the meeting migration tool and what wont you have to do when using MMS

You don’t have to deploy the Meeting migration tool to all users pcs
Ask the users to run through the tool and update their meeting themselves using the tool
Keep the meeting migration tool up to date on users pcs
Educate and train users on using the tool and when to run it
reduce number of meetings that may not get updated

MMS should ease this process for users and admin and increase reliability of the service.

Requirements for MMS

MMS requires to access to the Exchange Mailbox where the meetings were scheduled so the users mailbox needs to be hosted in Office 365 Exchange Online and in the same tenant as the meeting changes are taking place.

Two SfB supported MMS scenarios

Skype for Business Online
Users migrating from Lync Server 2013 / SfB Server to Skype for Business Online both operations will trigger the MMS and meeting invites to be sent out.

MMS is an online service ONLY.

MMS Limitations

Although MMS is enabled by default .You may need to disable the service if planning hasn’t been completed or users aren’t prepared so the preference maybe to use the MMT.

You cant force MMS to run.

Service must have been previously enabled prior to admin changes. You cant make the changes then turn in on and wait for MMS to do its job. In this scenario you would use the MMT.

Important thing to note if MMT is ran when MMS is turned off no auto updates will apply or triggers by MMS. When MMS is turned on it will then only monitor going forward for any new changes in the environment it will not go back and search users mailbox for any updates prior to turning on MMS.

MMS needs to be turned on prior to when you are making changes to get the best experience.

By default MMS is turned ON.

MMS is not triggered when

1. Consuming existing ACP provider and you make a change to conference id, keys or pins. As this is a change within the ACP service it will not trigger MMS updates
2. If you are on premise user making changes on premise MMS will not trigger as it doesn’t cover on premise config changes. Its an Online service only.
3. If users is changing SIP Address, ie change first name / last name it will NOT trigger the MMS. MMT is required for this change.

It didn’t mention change of SIP domain in the sip address. I’ve used the MMT for this previously but would be interesting to confirm this point.

User behaviour which wont be caught

Users must have scheduled meeting using SfB meeting add in via Outlook or OWA or different SfB ways of scheduling meeting. If you copied and pasted meeting invite into an email or meeting invite the MMS will not know about this and wont update. Best practice to schedule sfb meeting use the Sfb meeting addin.
Information sent and meeting invite includes join link,conf id, pstn details, when you schedule a meeting there a line of dots at the top and the bottom. Id never really noticed there were dots but id checked and they are, example below. So be careful with custom content.

If there is any custom information inside the dots this will not be updated, custom agendas or meetings and will be lost.
Attachments like PPT for your Skype Room systems will be lost.

Plan and Deliver

Its more about the user experience and education for which scenarios they will need to use the MMT or the MMS.

Organisers

Calendar Appointments auto sent
Updates transparently sent to all invitees
Will receive accept/declines/tentative meeting responses
Will not be displayed in sent items

Meeting invitees

Will receive meeting updates with new urls and dial in info
will receive meeting update even if they had previously declined
Could potentially see a large amount of new meeting updates when number of users are migrated. BIG ONE to watch out for and communicate to users i think.

Change Management Planning

Users educated to expect meeting updates and accepts/declines during user migrations
Support should be prepared to answer user questions

Operate

Online service that enabled by default when rolling out in December 2016

There are PowerShell commands to report progress when connected to your tenant.

You can turn off MMS if required but recommend to leave enabled , providing education is in place for users.

If turned off ensure your ready for the impacts of turning back on.

Set-CsTenantMigrationConfiguration –MeetingMigrationEnabled $true / $false

Get-CsTenantMigrationConfiguration (I checked my tenant and im enabled for it already)

Get-CsMeetingMigrationStatus

(For me showed nothing but i expected that)

Get-CsMeetingMigrationStatus -SummaryOnly

This i loved so you can see the status of the updates it shows pending, inProgress, failed and Succeeded so as admins you get good insight to the progress of the updates via MMS.

If this was after a migration or enablement you may see a large pending state after 10 minute of change and expected to be completed in 60 minutes, if there are large amount or users or meetings then this could be longer.

The summary allow you to see the pending state number change to succeeded.

If you know the sip address you can also check users individually.

get-csmeetingmigrationstatus –identity martin.boam@domin.com

If any users are classed as failed you can dig down into the errors as well.

Can also do start and end dates

Get-CsMeetingMigrationStatus -StartTime "10/1/2016" -EndTime "10/8/2016"

Troubleshooting

Get-CsMeetingMigrationStatus | Where {$_.State -eq "Failed"} | Format-Table UserId,LastErrorMessage

You can search for failures or errors which is useful.

Also there’s another place where you could turn off the MMS so in troubleshooting check this.

MMS could be enabled on tenant but you can turn it off for setting up Cloud PSTN connferencing theres a setting “AutomaticallyMigrateUserMeetings” that set to true by default but could be set to false. May be worth checking this if there’s failures.

Next step open support ticket for troubleshooting.

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