On August 26, 2022, Microsoft announced the official retirement of Kaizala, which will happen on August 31, 2023. Customers will receive 12 months of notice to help them plan and complete their upgrade to Teams.
What this means for our customers
- Kaizala will retire on August 31, 2023; support for and access to Kaizala will discontinue after the retirement date.
- From now until August 31, 2023, current Kaizala customers will experience no change in service and may add new users to existing tenants.
- Beginning August 26, 2022, no new tenants will be onboarded to Kaizala, and new Microsoft 365 customers will be onboarded directly to Teams for chat, meetings, and calling.
- We encourage customers to begin their transition journey from Kaizala to Teams well in advance of the retirement date.
- We have put significant resources into making this transition smooth for our customers. We anticipate this announcement may spark an increased volume of inquiries from customers with specific questions about Kaizala support, Teams capabilities, upgrade planning resources, and even exception requests for support past August 2023.
- To help customers transition to Teams, Microsoft is offering a broad range of support services and guidance – including step-by-step tutorials, training, and more.
When should my organization move from Kaizala to Teams?
We encourage all Microsoft 365 and Office 365 customers to start using Teams today to take advantage of the rich capabilities that Teams provides. These capabilities include a simple and powerful experience for mobile users in 46 languages and 181 markets. Empower your frontline worker staff with capabilities such as shift management, guest access, and support for custom workflows and apps with Microsoft Flow and PowerApps. For specific Kaizala functionality that isn’t yet available in Teams, we’ll be posting an updated timeline in the future.