Migration Playbook: How to Replace a Discontinued SaaS (Lessons from Meta Workrooms)

Hook: Your collaboration platform vanished. Now what?

When a vendor drops a core collaboration service overnight, teams stall, compliance risks spike, and onboarding grinds to a halt. In January 2026 Meta announced it would discontinue Horizon Workrooms effective February 16 2026, and similar vendor exits are rising as platforms consolidate. This playbook gives technology teams a concrete, step by step migration plan for replacing a discontinued SaaS — with a focus on data export, replatforming, and continuity testing.

Why this matters in 2026

Late 2025 and early 2026 showed two clear trends: large vendors pruning niche collaboration tools, and infrastructure outages exposing brittle dependencies. Both trends increase the chance your team will face a forced migration. Preparing now reduces downtime, preserves compliance, and avoids rushed decisions that lock you into another bad vendor.

Plan for portability. Expect sudden deprecations and design systems to tolerate them.

Overview: The Migration Playbook at a glance

Follow these phases. Each phase contains checklists, scripts, and measurable outcomes.

1. Assess and map impact
2. Secure exports and legal holds
3. Design target architecture and integrations
4. Proof of concept and feature parity prioritization
5. Staged migration and continuity testing
6. Cutover, verification, and rollback plan
7. Post-migration cleanup and future-proofing

Phase 1 — Assess and map impact

First 48 hours: answer three questions for every team that used the discontinued SaaS.

• What data exists and who owns it?
• Which workflows and integrations will break?
• What are compliance or litigation holds?

Actions

1. Inventory users and roles. Export a list of accounts, groups, and permissions if possible.
2. Catalog integrations. Pull API keys, webhook URLs, SSO configurations, and automation scripts.
   • List consumer apps by priority: authentication, CI/CD, ticketing, monitoring, file storage.
3. Map data types. For collaboration platforms include avatar assets, session recordings, documents, calendar events, and chat logs.
4. Assign a remediation owner per impacted system. Notify legal and compliance if any retained records may be affected.

Deliverable: Impact matrix

Create a simple CSV with columns: system, data type, owner, export available, required retention, affected teams, business priority.

Phase 2 — Secure exports and legal holds

If the vendor provides an export API or data request portal, act immediately. Vendor timelines can be short.

Export checklist

• Request full account export and specify granular formats: JSON for messages, MP4/WEBM for recordings, ZIP for assets.
• Confirm export SLAs and verify that exports include metadata needed for reconstruction (timestamps, user IDs, content IDs).
• Preserve account credentials in a secure vault to re-request exports if needed.

Example export using a typical REST API

curl -s -X POST 'https://api.example-vr.com/v1/exports' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer YOUR_TOKEN' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"scope":"all","include_recordings":true}' | jq .
  

Notes

• Store exports in immutable object storage with versioning and WORM if required by compliance.
• Hash and record checksums for every exported file to ensure integrity during re-ingest.

Phase 3 — Design target architecture

Decide where functionality will live: migrate to a managed SaaS alternative, assemble a best-of-breed stack, or build an internal service. Use these criteria:

• Critical integrations must be natively supported or available via stable APIs.
• Data portability — prefer vendors that support standard export formats and programmatic backups.
• Resilience and SLAs — pick platforms with multi-region redundancy and transparent incident reports.
• Security and compliance — ensure encryption at rest and in transit, SSO and access control, and audit logs.

Architecture options

• Single replacement SaaS: fastest, lower operational burden, risk of repeating vendor lock-in.
• Best-of-breed assembly: mix chat, files, and real-time sessions via integration layer or iPaaS.
• Internal platform: higher cost upfront, maximum control, choose when to use for critical features only.

Integration pattern: facade adapter

Build an adapter layer that normalizes APIs between legacy export formats and target services. This reduces coupling and makes future migrations easier.

// Pseudo code for a simple adapter pipeline
import json

def normalize_message(raw):
  return {
    'id': raw['msg_id'],
    'user_id': raw['author']['id'],
    'timestamp': raw['ts'],
    'text': raw['body']
  }

# Read legacy export, transform, and push to target API

Phase 4 — Prioritize features and build a migration POC

Define what must work on day one versus what can wait. Use MoSCoW prioritization.

• Must: access to historical messages for investigations, meeting recordings for billing, SSO and access control.
• Should: message threading, search indexing, presence indicators.
• Could: full avatar support or XR-specific spatial audio unless business-critical.

Build a small POC that demonstrates:

1. Export of a realistic dataset from archived files
2. Transformation and ingest into target system
3. Auth and permission mapping via SSO or SCIM
4. Basic continuity test: schedule a demo meeting and verify recordings land in archive

Phase 5 — Staged migration and continuity testing

Use a canary and phased cutover approach to reduce blast radius.

Staged plan

1. Alpha: internal infra and core admins move first. Run full backups and rehearsals.
2. Beta: a single team with moderate usage migrates. Monitor metrics and collect feedback.
3. Gamma: high-impact teams migrate during an extended maintenance window if necessary.
4. Full cutover: after validation and sign-off.

Continuity test checklist

• Authentication: users can SSO into new service and have correct roles.
• Data fidelity: samples of migrated messages, files, and recordings match original checksums.
• Integrations: webhooks, ticketing, and CI flows trigger and complete successfully.
• Observability: alerts and dashboards show expected traffic and error rates.
• Fallback verified: rollback procedure restores previous routing and access within SLA.

Phase 6 — Cutover, verification, and rollback

During cutover, keep the window short and plan for immediate rollback. Communicate timelines to stakeholders and runbooks to support staff.

Runbook skeleton

1. Pre-cutover checklist: confirm backups, freeze write operations if necessary, notify users.
2. Perform migration: run transform and ingest scripts with logging.
3. Smoke tests: quick verification of login, search, and sample workflows.
4. Full verification: run continuity tests from Phase 5.
5. Rollback trigger: define threshold metrics (error rate, auth failures, integration errors) that auto-trigger rollback.

Example rollback metric

• If authentication failures exceed 5% for 10 minutes, initiate rollback.

Phase 7 — Post-migration cleanup and future-proofing

After migration, run these tasks to close the loop and make the organization resilient to future deprecations.

• Archive legacy exports in long-term storage with documented access controls.
• Update runbooks, onboarding docs, and internal training materials.
• Negotiate contract protections such as migration assistance, export guarantees, and extended export windows in future vendor contracts.
• Introduce portability requirements for procurement. Require supported export formats, API stability SLAs, and exit assistance clauses.

Risk management: concrete controls

Manage the main risks with these controls.

• Data loss: use incremental exports, checksums, and cross-region object storage.
• Service downtime: adopt dual-write for critical flows during migration to ensure continuity.
• Compliance violations: map retention policies to exports and preserve audit trails.
• Integration breakage: run synthetic tests against every webhook and API before full cutover.

Lessons from Meta Workrooms and similar deprecations

Meta announced the end of Workrooms in January 2026 with an effective shutdown in February 2026. That timeline compressed many teams to urgent migrations. Takeaways:

• Vendor exit timelines may be non-negotiable. Start export requests immediately.
• Hardware-dependent offerings (like vendor-managed headsets) create secondary procurement and logistics demands.
• Feature parity is rarely perfect. Prioritize core business capabilities and accept phased feature rollouts.

Advanced strategies for 2026 and beyond

As of 2026, collaboration platforms evolve with AI, AR/VR, and tighter security models. Use these advanced tactics to reduce future migration friction.

• Adapter-based integration layer: abstract vendor APIs behind internal contracts. Replace vendor libraries, not business logic.
• Automated export schedulers: run nightly exports into your control plane and validate integrity automatically.
• Feature toggles: enable staged rollouts and easy rollback of new integrations.
• Contracts with exit clauses: require minimum export windows and pre-paid migration hours in SLAs.
• Observe vendor health signals: maintain a watchlist of vendor viability metrics and incident history as part of procurement.

Operational templates and scripts

Two lightweight examples to jump-start migration work.

1. Export and checksum pipeline

#!/usr/bin/env bash
EXPORT_DIR='/data/exports/$(date +%F)'
mkdir -p "$EXPORT_DIR"

# Trigger export
curl -s -X POST 'https://api.vendor.com/v1/exports' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"scope":"all"}' > "$EXPORT_DIR/export_request.json"

# Poll for completion and download
# (left as exercise for specifics of vendor API)

# Compute checksums
find "$EXPORT_DIR" -type f -exec sha256sum {} \; > "$EXPORT_DIR/checksums.sha256"

2. Normalizer pseudo pipeline

def migrate_messages(records):
  for r in records:
    normalized = normalize_message(r)
    resp = requests.post('https://target-chat/api/messages', json=normalized, headers={'Authorization': 'Bearer TARGET_TOKEN'})
    if resp.status_code != 201:
      log.error('Failed to ingest', r['msg_id'])

Checklist: 30-day action plan

1. Day 0: Announce migration team and communication plan.
2. Day 1-2: Inventory and request exports.
3. Day 3-7: Secure legal holds and finalize target architecture.
4. Day 8-14: Build POC, validate imports, map permissions.
5. Day 15-21: Run staged migrations for low risk teams.
6. Day 22-28: Migrate critical teams and do full continuity tests.
7. Day 29-30: Finalize documentation and execute post-migration audit.

Future predictions: what to expect in collaboration tooling

By late 2026 we expect these trends to shape migrations:

• More modular collaboration stacks where spatial experiences are layered on core communications via open runtimes like OpenXR.
• AI-driven migration assistants that auto-map schemas and surface data fidelity gaps.
• Regulatory pressure for portability and data export standards for workplace data, making migrations smoother.
• Increased vendor consolidation; teams should assume occasional forced replatforming is normal.

Final takeaways

When a SaaS disappears, speed matters but so does structure. Follow the phases in this playbook, prioritize data integrity and continuity, and build abstractions so future migrations are lower effort. Remember the core goals: preserve business workflows, protect data and compliance, and minimize user downtime.

Call to action

Need a tailored migration checklist or help automating exports and adapters? Contact your internal platform team or download our migration templates and scripts to run an immediate impact assessment. Start the migration runbook today and avoid the scramble tomorrow.

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