It’s becoming more common for organizations to have migrated to Teams Only by now and have a need to remove all On-Prem Skype for Business infrastructure. If you’ve not yet completed this and are curious about an order of operations to start ripping your topology apart, read on.

Following this order should prevent the topology builder from erroring on you about dependencies that may still be in place such as:

“The following services depend on this pool. Remove the dependencies before you delete the pool.”

As all environments are different, in the event you don’t have any of the services below do not fear, simply move on. This is also not a step-by-step guide to fully decommissioning Skype for Business. It’ll complement Microsoft’s “Step 4. Remove your on-premises Skype for Business deployment” when needing to clean the topology.

The following order can be done in one site at a time. Meaning if you have 6 Sites in your topology, you do not need to remove the Front End Pool associations from all 6 sites before moving to the next step. You COULD, but not required to prevent dependency errors.

  • Front End Pool Associations
    • Associated backup pool
    • Edge Pool (for media components)
    • Office Web Apps Server
  • Delete Trunks
    • If you have multiple trunks per single gateway delete them. The trunks automatically created when the gateway was created can only be deleted when removing the gateway
  • Delete PSTN Gateways
  • Delete Mediation Pools
  • Delete Edge Pools
  • Delete Director Pools
  • Delete Office Web Apps Servers
  • Delete Trusted Application Servers
  • Delete non-CMS Front End Pools
    • If you are following Microsoft guidelines for fully decommissioning Skype for Business, you will be keeping at least one Front End Pool to complete the publishing.
    • Confirm YES to Delete the File Store
  • Delete File Store
    • If any pending file stores remain
  • Delete SQL Store
  • Confirm Site has no further configuration
  • Delete Site