The immediate instruction in the University’s August 27 StaffNet notice is simple: use Teams for teaching support, online meetings, events and day-to-day collaboration wherever possible. The operational change is less simple. Departments still using Zoom links in course materials, webpages, calendars, registration workflows or event playbooks have four months to find and replace them—or accept that their hosted sessions will be capped by the free service.
This is not a sudden reversal. The University first announced in October 2025 that it intended to stop renewing a University-wide Zoom contract after February 2026, with limited exceptions. The new notice confirms that licensed users received a managed extension, but it also makes the final date explicit: the broad licence retirement now lands on December 31, 2026.
For IT teams, that changed timetable is the real news. It gave the University more time to move people, but it also means any department that treated the February target as a soft deadline has consumed much of its migration window.
The deadline moved, but the destination did not
The University’s 2025 communication described a plan to standardise video conferencing around Teams and said Zoom would not be renewed beyond February 2026 apart from a limited set of specialist cases. The August 2026 update says feedback led to an extension for people who already had licensed Zoom access, while reiterating that Teams remains the intended long-term platform.
That sequence matters because it distinguishes an extension from a decision to retain two equal services. The University is not presenting Teams as an optional Microsoft 365 add-on alongside a continuing Zoom estate; it is withdrawing the centrally funded Zoom entitlement and keeping a route for specialist cases to be assessed individually.
The notice does not say how many Zoom licences remain, how many users received extensions, or what requirements qualify as a specialist use case. It also does not identify whether those exceptions can extend beyond the end of 2026. Departments relying on a purported exception therefore should not assume they have a durable entitlement simply because Zoom still works today.
The University’s case for Teams is primarily administrative and financial: Teams is already available to staff and students through Microsoft 365, alongside Outlook, Office applications and OneDrive. Consolidating on a platform already covered by an institutional agreement reduces the number of services central IT must license, support, secure and document.
That is a defensible procurement argument, but it is not proof that every Zoom workflow transfers intact. A university-wide video platform often reaches far beyond routine internal meetings, including guest lectures, open events, student recruitment, research interviews, webinars, sessions involving external partners and accessibility accommodations. The University acknowledges this indirectly by asking people with needs Teams cannot support to contact the project team.
January 1 changes who can host without constraints
The key practical cutover is not that Zoom disappears from users’ computers. It is that University-affiliated accounts lose the paid hosting rights attached to the central licence.
Under the University’s stated post-retirement arrangement, a user can still log in with their University address and join Zoom meetings hosted by other organisations. But a meeting they create under that account will be constrained by the Basic plan’s 40-minute duration and 100-participant maximum. A 90-minute seminar, a staff town hall, a multi-participant research session or a public event can therefore fail mid-session if organisers continue using an old Zoom workflow without changing the account type or host.
The distinction between joining and hosting deserves attention because users may not encounter the restriction in informal work. Someone can successfully attend a Zoom call arranged by a partner university, conference organiser or supplier, conclude that Zoom remains available, and later discover the limitation only when they schedule their own session.
The University has also not said what will happen to cloud recordings, webinar registrations, templates, reporting data, integrations or administrative settings held in Zoom accounts after the paid licences end. Its current direction is to begin planning for activities that still depend on Zoom, rather than promise a like-for-like migration of those assets.
Administrators should treat that silence as a reason to inventory services now, not as evidence that old material will remain accessible indefinitely. Access to historical content, ownership transfer rules and retention periods often depend on the licence arrangement and account configuration. Those details need confirmation from the University’s project team before the final month of the year, particularly where recordings support teaching, research evidence, compliance or student services.
Teams adoption requires more than changing meeting links
Moving recurring meetings from Zoom to Teams is straightforward when the audience consists of authenticated University staff and students. The more difficult work lies in the edge cases: external attendees, recurring sessions published months ahead, automated calendar invitations, embedded registration links, rooms with dedicated conferencing hardware, and local guidance that tells users to create Zoom meetings by default.
The University explicitly asks staff to update guidance, webpages, training materials and local documentation that references Zoom. That instruction points to a common migration failure: organisations retire a service at the licence level while leaving their institutional processes written around it. Old instructions can keep generating new Zoom meetings right up to the cutover date.
Teams also changes the surrounding collaboration model. In Microsoft 365, a meeting can sit alongside the files, chat, SharePoint-backed workspace, calendar entry and identity controls used by the same group. For internal collaboration, that integration is the core rationale for the University’s decision. It can reduce the handoffs involved in running a meeting and keeping documents available afterward.
But centralisation creates a governance obligation. Departments need to decide who owns Teams and Microsoft 365 groups after staff departures, how guest access is handled for external collaborators, whether recordings are retained appropriately, and whether local users understand the difference between inviting guests to a meeting and granting access to a wider Team or shared files. Replacing one link with another does not answer those questions.
For teaching teams, the migration should include a live test with the actual mix of students and external participants expected in the session. That means checking presenter roles, lobby behaviour, captions, breakout arrangements, recording permissions and the route students use to access materials. A Teams meeting that works for a department’s internal test group may behave differently for personal accounts, guests or users accessing it through a learning platform.
The sensible work is an inventory, not a blanket ban
The University has not ordered staff to stop joining Zoom meetings. It has asked them to stop treating Zoom as the default and to plan for hosted activities that remain dependent on it. That leaves room for a targeted transition rather than a disruptive attempt to remove every Zoom reference overnight.
A department preparing for January should identify every active Zoom use by purpose and owner, then separate routine internal meetings from activities that may require an exception or a deliberately redesigned Teams process. The priority cases are the ones where the Basic plan’s host restrictions would cause an immediate failure:
- Recurring teaching, training and public events scheduled for more than 40 minutes should be recreated and tested in Teams before invitations are issued for 2027.
- Pages, templates and automated emails that create or publish Zoom links should be updated before they generate fresh links for the new term.
- Owners of cloud recordings, registration data and integrations should obtain a documented answer on export, retention and transfer before the paid licence ends.
- Teams handling external audiences, accessibility requirements or specialist production workflows should raise those needs with the University project team rather than assume a late exemption.
The University’s extended transition has bought time, but it has also made the deadline more consequential: the final cutover now coincides with year-end, when many teams have reduced staffing and limited time to repair broken event arrangements. For University of Manchester staff, the safe assumption is that any Zoom meeting they intend to host after January 1, 2027 must either be rebuilt in Teams or have an approved, documented reason to remain on Zoom.