Canceled Product Playbook: Migrating Teams Off a Vendor-Specific Collaboration Platform

When a collaboration vendor sunsets, your teams can't stall — a practical migration runbook

Hook: You just learned your company’s VR meeting platform is being discontinued. Meetings, whiteboards, device fleets, and integrations all run through that vendor. How do you migrate without losing weeks of work and a year's worth of compliance data? This playbook gives IT admins and engineering managers a field-tested runbook to move people, data, and workflows off a vendor-specific collaboration product — using Meta Workrooms and Quest headsets as a 2026 case study.

Executive summary — what to do first (inverted pyramid)

When a vendor announces a vendor sunset, act with speed and clarity. Start by stabilizing business continuity, inventorying assets and integrations, and extracting critical data. Then map dependencies to replacement tooling and rewire integrations. This guide prioritizes actions you must complete in the first 72 hours, first two weeks, and first 90 days, and includes checklists, example scripts, SLA negotiation points, and migration patterns for VR-specific assets like Workrooms rooms, whiteboards, and Quest device management.

Context: Why Workrooms matters in 2026 and why this is urgent

Meta announced in early 2026 that it would discontinue the standalone Workrooms app on February 16, 2026, and stop sales of Horizon managed services and commercial Quest SKUs on February 20, 2026. These moves were part of Reality Labs cuts following major losses and layoffs in late 2025. For businesses that adopted Workrooms and Horizon-managed Quest fleets, that timeline compresses migration windows and forces IT teams to act fast.

Key takeaway: Vendor sunsetting is a product lifecycle event that becomes a project with dependencies. Treat it like an incident with a project plan: triage, containment, migration, validation, handover.

Quick triage: 0–72 hours

1. Confirm the vendor timeline and legal commitments

• Collect the vendor notice (emails, help-center posts) and extract formal dates: data export deadlines, deprecation timelines, and hardware sales cutoffs.
• Search contracts and purchase orders for SLA, data-retention, and termination clauses. Identify any paid support or managed service subscriptions (e.g., Horizon managed services) that may be cancellable or extendable.
• Open a support case with the vendor and ask for an enterprise export plan and answers about API availability during wind-down.

2. Stabilize business continuity

• Announce a temporary freeze: no non-essential changes to the vendor environment to preserve exportability and audit trails.
• Set up an incident channel (Slack, MS Teams) for migration coordination and an executive status cadence.

3. Build your migration team

• Core team: IT lead, engineering manager, security/compliance owner, procurement, and one SME for integrations.
• Extended stakeholders: department champions, legal, and end-user training leads.

Inventory and discovery: First two weeks

Your priority is to create a dependency map. Treat the vendor environment like a software supply chain: what moves data in, what moves data out, and who needs it.

1. Asset inventory (high priority)

• List all user accounts and groups in the collaboration product (export CSV if possible).
• List all rooms/sessions, whiteboards, recordings, and attached files. Tag data by owner and retention need.
• Inventory physical devices (Quest headsets) by serial number, owner, last sync date, warranty status, and whether devices are under Horizon managed services.

2. Integration inventory

Document every integration and automation that touches the platform:

• SSO / identity providers (SAML, OAuth, SCIM)
• Calendar syncs (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365)
• Storage connectors (Drive, OneDrive, Box)
• Bots, webhooks, and custom APIs that create rooms, post messages, or archive data
• Meeting recordings and transcription workflows

3. Risk classification

Tag assets as Critical (compliance, payroll, legal evidence), Important (project artifacts, recordings), or Optional (experiment rooms). Prioritize extraction of Critical and Important items.

Data export patterns and practical tactics

Most vendor platforms provide admin export tools, APIs, or team-level exports. If those are limited, you must combine automated and manual methods. The example steps below apply to VR collaboration artifacts like Workrooms rooms, whiteboards, and meeting recordings.

1. Use the vendor admin export APIs (if available)

• Request API keys and an enterprise-rate export token from the vendor support team.
• Automate bulk exports into durable storage (S3, Azure Blob) with metadata files so you can later query what was exported.

# Example Python outline for bulk export (pseudocode)
import requests
import boto3

VENDOR_API = "https://api.vendor.example/v1"
API_KEY = "${VENDOR_API_KEY}"
S3_BUCKET = "company-vendor-exports"
s3 = boto3.client('s3')

for room in requests.get(f"{VENDOR_API}/rooms", headers={"Authorization": API_KEY}).json():
    room_id = room['id']
    data = requests.get(f"{VENDOR_API}/rooms/{room_id}/export", headers={"Authorization": API_KEY})
    s3.put_object(Bucket=S3_BUCKET, Key=f"workrooms/rooms/{room_id}.zip", Body=data.content)

2. Export whiteboards and artifacts into portable formats

• Whiteboards: export as PNG/PDF for visual capture and SVG/JSON for editable formats when supported.
• Recordings: capture both video (MP4) and timestamps + transcripts (VTT or SRT) for searchability.
• Avatars and 3D assets: export OBJ/GLTF if you plan to reuse them in another WebXR/Unity environment.

3. If API exports are limited, rely on screen/stream capture and structured metadata

For sessions that can't be exported natively, record them (local or cloud capture), and create accompanying JSON that notes participants, timestamps, and linked files. Though larger and less structured, this preserves business context and supports future chain-of-custody audits when legal holds are involved.

Integrations: detach, adapt, rebuild

Every integration is a two-legged dependency: the upstream that pushes data into the vendor, and the downstream that consumes data. Your migration strategy should aim to preserve both legs or replace them with an alternative path.

1. SSO and identity

• Export user lists and sync them into your identity provider if they were managed inside the vendor environment.
• Validate SCIM syncs and update provisioning rules for your replacement platform.

2. Calendars and invites

• For calendar integrations, script a migration to create equivalent meeting invites in the new tool. Preserve join links and metadata in the event body to retain audit trails.

3. Bots, webhooks, and automation

• Inventory all webhook payloads and write shim services that translate old payloads into the new platform’s API calls. This minimizes the impact on downstream systems. Consider a lightweight gateway implemented with the same patterns reviewed in the automation orchestrator guides.

Device fleets and Quest headsets

When a vendor stops selling managed services for devices (like Horizon managed services), you must take device lifecycle control into your environment.

1. Device inventory and ownership

• Catalogue Quest serials, assigned users, last-known firmware, and whether the device was enrolled in vendor-managed MDM.
• Export device logs and telemetry for compliance if the vendor provided them. If you rely on offline-first kiosks and device hubs patterns, preserve logs to support later audits.

2. Replacing vendor MDM

Quest OS is Android-based, so many enterprise MDM tools support device management through ADB or Android Enterprise flows. Evaluate enterprise MDM tools and procurement options that support kiosk mode, remote wipe, app distribution, and over-the-air updates. If an immediate commercial MDM is unavailable, build a temporary management shell using scripts and ADB tooling for enrollment, firmware updates, and app sideloading; pairing that local tooling with local-first sync appliances helps reduce reliance on vendor-managed clouds.

3. Warranty and procurement

• Check warranties and extended-support agreements. If vendor-managed warranty will lapse, negotiate spare-part commitments or buy extra devices before sales stop.
• Plan procurement cycles for replacements and budget for any licensing differences.

Compliance, retention, and legal hold

Data export must satisfy legal and regulatory retention rules. Work with legal to identify records under hold and confirm your exported formats meet evidentiary standards.

Practical steps

• Place legal holds on key rooms and user accounts to prevent deletion.
• Document chain-of-custody for exported datasets: who exported, when, and where it was stored.
• Retain pristine copies in an immutable storage tier for the legally required retention period.

Replacement patterns and options in 2026

By 2026, real-time collaboration is multi-modal: video-first platforms (Zoom, Teams), WebXR experiences, and specialized VR vendors all compete. Your migration choice should depend on use case:

• Video + 2D collaboration — keep core meetings on Teams/Zoom and migrate whiteboards to Miro, FigJam, or Figma for cross-platform access.
• Immersive VR sessions — if VR presence is essential, consider WebXR-based platforms or enterprise-focused VR vendors that offer on-prem or hybrid deployment and better export guarantees.
• Custom workflows — build a lightweight WebXR app that loads exported GLTF assets and uses WebRTC for presence; this gives you control and portability.

Operational runbook: concrete timeline and tasks

Day 0–3 (Triage)

1. Confirm vendor dates and log legal/contract items.
2. Assemble migration team and incident channel.
3. Freeze non-critical changes to the vendor environment.

Week 1–2 (Inventory + immediate exports)

1. Export user lists and critical room metadata.
2. Prioritize and export legal-hold data.
3. Identify integrations to shim or retire.

Week 3–6 (Migrate integrations and device control)

1. Deploy shims for webhooks and bots.
2. Enroll devices in replacement MDM or build temporary ADB scripts for control.
3. Start pilot groups on replacement tooling, focusing on critical workflows.

Day 30–90 (Validation and cutover)

1. Validate data integrity and permission mapping.
2. Validate automation and scheduled jobs.
3. Run acceptance testing with department champions and sign off.

Sample checklist (copyable)

• Vendor notice saved and timeline captured
• Contracts and SLAs reviewed
• Critical data exported to immutable storage
• Device fleet inventory and MDM plan in place
• Integration shims deployed and tested
• Legal holds documented and retained
• Training plan and deprecation communication sent to users

Automation examples and patterns

Automation reduces human error. Use IaC for new environment setups and store export scripts in version control with audit logging. Key patterns:

• Scheduled export jobs that write to an encrypted S3 bucket with object-lock
• Webhook gateway that transforms vendor payloads to new platform payloads (use lightweight Lambda or serverless functions)
• CI/CD pipeline to deploy replacement apps (WebXR frontends or backend shims) with staged environments for pilot, staging, and prod

Negotiating with the vendor — what to ask for

• Request extended access windows for admin API keys and a clear export SLA (days to retrieve bulk data).
• Ask for a manifest of exported artifacts and hashes for integrity verification.
• Negotiate temporary technical support hours to help with large-scale exports or API rate limits.

Future-proofing and 2026 trends you should bake into the replacement

Late 2025 and early 2026 showed a pivot in vendor strategies: big platform vendors cut back on experimental metaverse bets and focused investments on wearable integration and platform consolidation. For your migration, assume these realities:

• Platform consolidation is likely: choose replacements with open export formats and clear exit paths; review guides on preparing platform ops for hyper-local changes like platform ops for pop-ups and flash drops.
• Hybrid presence will dominate: users will toggle between 2D meetings and XR — design for interoperability (WebRTC, GLTF, SSO).
• Device management will decentralize: rely on enterprise MDMs and robust procurement policies rather than vendor-managed fleets; see procurement and device guides at Refurbished Devices & Procurement.

Case study snippets: Workrooms (what we learned)

From the Workrooms sunsetting: many orgs discovered that meeting whiteboards and recordings were siloed without an easy export into editable formats. Teams that had proactively stored artifacts in cloud storage or used third-party capture tools had a substantially easier migration. Organizations that relied on vendor MDM had to quickly establish local device-control tooling after Horizon managed services were discontinued; pairing that approach with local-first sync appliances shortened recovery times.

Measured migration — KPIs and success criteria

• Export completeness rate: percentage of Critical artifacts successfully exported and verified (target: 100%).
• Integration parity: percentage of automations that are functionally equivalent after cutover (target: 90%+)
• User adoption: percentage of active users onboarded to the replacement tool within 30 days (target: 80%+).
• Device management coverage: percentage of devices enrolled in new MDM or managed state (target: 100% for corporate devices).

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

• Underestimating export bandwidth and API rate limits — ask the vendor about rate-limits and batch appropriately.
• Missing metadata — export and store metadata files alongside artifacts to preserve context; include an export manifest that captures checksums and provenance.
• Forgetting legal holds — coordinate with legal early and automate holds where possible.

Final checklist before you flip the switch

• All Critical data: exported, verified (checksums), and stored in immutable storage.
• Integration shims: deployed and smoke-tested with production traffic
• Device fleet: enrolled or accounted for; spare device plan in procurement
• Training & communications: emails, short how-to docs, and office hours scheduled
• Legal sign-off and compliance verification complete

Callouts: templates and artifacts you should produce

• Export manifest template (CSV/JSON): artifact_id, owner, created_at, exported_at, file_location, checksum
• Integration mapping doc: old_event -> shim -> new_event
• Device inventory sheet: serial, owner, warranty, enrolled_in_mdm

Conclusion — run this as an incident and a roadmap

Vendor sunsets are predictable in the long term but urgent in the short term. Treat the migration like an incident response with a project-plan finish: triage, secure, export, rewire, validate, and retire. With a clear runbook, automated exports, and a plan for device management and integrations, you can preserve business continuity and come out with a more portable, resilient collaboration stack.

Actionable next steps: copy the checklists in this article into a shared playbook, schedule a 48-hour kick-off, and start exporting Critical artifacts immediately.

Call to action

Need a migration checklist or an automation template tailored to your environment? Download our ready-to-run export scripts and device-enrollment playbook from the CodeWithMe runbook library or contact our team for a migration audit. Don’t wait until the vendor’s last support day — start your migration sprint now.

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