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Microsoft to eliminate Skype Managed Accounts feature by March's end

Microsoft is phasing out Skype Managed Accounts as of March 29. Officials have started notifying those with managed accounts as of today, February 16.
Written by Mary Jo Foley, Senior Contributing Editor

Microsoft will be eliminating support of Skype Managed Accounts, a k a Skype Business Accounts, as of March 29, 2016.

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Microsoft began notifying Skype Managed Account users of the deprecation today, February 16. (Thanks to Microsoft-news.com for the heads up.)

There are two types of Skype accounts: Personal and Managed. Personal accounts belong to the individual using that account. Managed accounts are created in Skype Manager and belong to the Skype Manager that created them.

According to Microsoft's page about its Managed Account phase-out, starting March 29, Skype Managed Accounts will automatically become personal Skype accounts.

Before March 29, a Skype Manager administrator can take back allocated Skype numbers and credits from a managed account. After that date, administrators will still be able to assign Skype Credit amounts, subscriptions and Skype Numbers to personal accounts, but they won't be able to reset passwords ore delete these accounts.

Customers who want individual Skype accounts to be managed centrally by an administrator should move to Skype for Business to continue to manage accounts this way, according to Microsoft's blog post.

As to why Microsoft is making this change, the official reason stated in today's blog post is to give Skype users more flexibility. But wanting to move more users to Skype for Business is likely the actual reason. (I asked Microsoft officials for more on the reasoning behind the move, but haven't heard back.)

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