Skype for Business and Lync 2013–Monitoring and Archiving Support Between Versions

If you are moving from Lync 2013 to Skype for Business, what are your supported Options with Monitoring and Archiving?

• Before you deploy your first SfB pool into an existing topology, all your Lync 2013 Pools should be patched to current
• If you deploy a new SfB pool (new machines), the existing Mon/Arch schema won’t be touched, but you can’t associate a 2013 Schema Mon/Arch with SfB
• If you do an in place upgrade of a Lync 2013 Pool to SfB which is associated with Monitoring and Archiving databases, those databases will automatically be upgraded to the SfB Schemas
• If you don’t want the databases to be upgraded, you should disassociate them from the 2013 Pool before in place upgrading SfB
• A Lync 2013 Pool that is patched to current (CU5 or higher, current CU recommended) can push data into a SfB Schema monitoring database, but a SfB pool cannot push data into a 2013 Schema Mon DB
• Where possible, doing an in place upgrade of Mon/Arch is better, as you end up with a single database with all your data
• Don’t forget if you in place upgrade Monitoring, you also need to deploy the Skype for Business Monitoring Reports as a separate task

For more step by step on in place and side by side upgrades from Lync 2013 to Skype for Business, you might want to check out my Pluralsight Course: Skype for Business Server 2015: What’s New, Install, and Upgrade