Some Microsoft Teams users have reacted angrily to the news that a key business feature is being shut down with just weeks’ notice.
Office 365 connectors within Teams will be permanently decommissioned in October 2025, the company confirmed in a blog post. However, there was still some confusion about the reason for this.
However, the news was met with dismay by administrators across the globe, with businesses of all sizes apparently relying heavily on the tool for effective messaging via their company’s video conferencing platform.
Say goodbye to Office 365 connectors for Microsoft Teams
If your company isn’t using the tool yet, Office 365 connectors within Teams let you push content and service updates from external services (like IT tickets or intranet messages) directly into a Microsoft Teams channel. This makes it easy for colleagues and team members to stay up to date on the latest changes.
“Starting August 15, 2024, we will be removing the Office 365 connector feature from Microsoft Teams,” reads the blog post, written by Trent Hazy and Connor Rodewald, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Teams.
The company recommends moving to Power Automate workflows as a replacement, which it says offer “a much richer catalog of Office connectors” and are built on an architecture that can extend and scale with your business.
“These changes are aligned with the Microsoft Secure Future Initiative and our company-wide priority to protect our customers from cyberthreats,” the blog continued. “Users currently using Office 365 connectors will need to transition to Power Automate to keep their services running smoothly.”
Users should note that the first deadline is August 15, 2024. After that date, all new Connector creations will be blocked across all clouds. The second, more definitive deadline is October 1. After that date, all Connectors across all clouds will stop working.
If The register It should be noted that the comments section on Microsoft’s blog has already reached over 150 separate posts in just a few days, with users clearly angry about the short notice.
“Isn’t Microsoft learning from insufficient transition deadlines? You gave users 3 months, 2 of which were during peak season when many employees are on vacation for part of it, to move service integrations from connector format to something they may have never looked at before. Why?”, Robin Malik’s comment above reads.