Preparing for Teams: Decommissioning on Prem Persistent Chat

So, I’m starting a new series of posts called “Preparing for Teams” and how I’m helping my customers transition from Lync 2013 and Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams

Today I’m talking about decommissioning your existing On Premises Persistent Chat servers as we have to moved these workloads into Teams

Note this article doesn’t cover the process of getting your users over to Teams, but the change management piece on it is super important.

Mega Update: Microsoft now exposes an API to import messages into Teams, details here
I might work on something for this, but I have a few projects I’m trying to keep spinning right now.

Update: Thanks to ViVit for reminding me to disable Persistent Chat in the control panel.
First off, log in to a Skype for Business control panel and disable Persistent Chat

SfB Control Panel – Persistent Chat – Persistent chat policy – Persistent chat enabled

Then log in to Skype for Business/Lync Powershell session and check all the rooms. Run a 

Get-CsPersistentChatRoom | Select Name

And validate that you are indeed ready to migrate these rooms

Now lets disable all the rooms, just so no more data gets put in there

Get-CsPersistentChatRoom | Set-CsPersistentChatRoom -Disabled $true

Then backup all your P-Chat data

Export-CsPersistentChatData –DBInstance 'SQLServerFQDN' –FileName “C:\UcMadScientist\Pchatdata.zip” -verbose

Protect this file! it contains all your Persistent Chat Conversations in clear text!

You can also do some due diligence here and backup the SQL instance as well.

Next, Remove all the P-Chat Rooms

Get-CsPersistentChatRoom | Remove-CsPersistentChatRoom -Confirm:$false

Double Check that all the Rooms are gone with

Get-CsPersistentChatRoom | measure

This should return a count of 0.
Now remove the Endpoint in AD

Get-CsPersistentChatEndpoint |  Remove-CsPersistentChatEndpoint 

And validate it has indeed gone by running

Get-CsPersistentChatEndpoint | measure

and validating it has a count of 0 again

Now in Topology Builder, Remove the Persistent Chat Pool and Publish the Topology.

Once that is complete. run the deployment wizard on the PChat servers to remove the components.

Then kick off a command prompt and navigate to either

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Lync Server 2013\Deployment\ 
# or
C:\Program Files\Skype for Business Server 2015\Deployment\
# and run 
"Bootstrapper.exe /Scorch"

And finally remove any Lync/Skype and SQL related apps using Appwiz.cpl

Now you can perform you normal server decommissioning process

While your at it remove the PChat databases using uninstall-csdatabase for PersistentChat and PersistentChatCompliance (if you have it)