A rash of planned feature and application retirements within the Microsoft 365 environment is the result of Microsoft wanting to centralize, modernize, operationalize customer spend, and ultimately economize by simplifying product offerings where it can, an industry analyst said Monday.
Jeremy Roberts, senior workshop director at Info-Tech Research Group, said the fact that a number of Microsoft 365 (M365) services have been or will soon be mothballed does not come as a surprise, as Microsoft has been making quite a few changes to the product. He described those changes as “the nature of SaaS [software-as-a-service]. You get with it, or you get left behind.”
The retirements will precede the end of support for Windows 10, which happens on October 14 of this year, and is a move that Roberts said has resulted in Microsoft facing “quite a bit of resistance.”
“I think the AI thing [in Windows 11] plays better with investors than with enterprise consumers, and features like Recall that have been hyped are maybe more exciting to Microsoft internal folks than to real people,” he said.
He added that he also thinks that “an aggressive effort to get people to upgrade PCs probably has left a bitter taste in some folks’ mouths. That said, for the enterprise, most in my circle have already made the transition. I don’t talk about it much anymore. Besides, if you care that much, you can get extended [Windows 10] support for three more years.”
On the Microsoft 365 front, a blog from Microsoft partner AdminDroid, sourced from the Microsoft software lifecycle reporting site, outlines the following scheduled feature “retirements.” These include:
- Retirement of Tag Feature in Microsoft 365 Apps: Microsoft retired the “Tags” feature in Microsoft 365 apps between Jan. 6, 2025, and Jan. 10, 2025. Users can no longer view or apply tags.
- Office 365 Connectors Retirement from Microsoft Teams: Owners of webhook-based Office 365 connectors in Teams must update their URLs to a new structure by January 31, 2025 to avoid service disruptions; all webhook-based connectors must be updated to continue posting messages in Teams. Microsoft recommends migrating webhooks to the Teams Workflow app.
- The O365 Connectors service will be retired at the end of 2025.
- Microsoft Viva Engage: Retirement of Private Unlisted Groups in External Networks as of Monday, Jan. 13. “After this date, users will no longer be able to create, export, access, or participate in unlisted groups within external networks,” the blog noted.
- As of Tuesday, Jan. 14, The PowerPoint QuickStarter Feature will be completely retired.
- Alert notifications feature in Microsoft Defender for Identity will be retired this week.
- Viva topics, the blog said, will be “discontinued on Feb. 22 and Microsoft will no longer pursue new feature enhancements for the platform.
- Microsoft officially deprecated the Azure AD and MSOnline PowerShell modules in March 2024. However, they will remain functional until March 30, 2025, with support limited to critical security fixes.
- Starting in late January 2025, any OneDrive accounts left unlicensed for more than 90 days will be automatically archived, hitting customers with extra costs to regain access in Microsoft Archive. They will be charged $0.05 per GB per month to store unlicensed OneDrive content and $0.60 per GB to reactivate the account in the Microsoft 365 archive. Microsoft recommends either deleting these accounts or assigning them a license.
- Starting next month, the blog said, “Microsoft will remove the ‘Monitor’ action in the Safe Attachments policy. Any existing policies set to ‘Monitor’ will be automatically changed to ‘Block.’ The recipients, status, or priority configured in the policy will remain unchanged.”
These moves followed the deprecation of the legacy Teams client in March 2024 (with its end of availability scheduled for July 1, 2025), which Roberts said “had more to do with efficiency than with aesthetics. They’ve moved off of Electron and AngularJS [development platforms] to WebView2 and React. This is meant to improve performance, responsiveness, and optimization. Basically, this is Microsoft cleaning up its technical debt.”
That is, he said, “one of the benefits of a SaaS environment, and while it might be a bit of a pain for users to make the transition, the old and new Teams are similar enough that the change management exercise shouldn’t be overwhelming. They have to cut over at some point; otherwise, they’re left maintaining a fractured environment, which is ultimately not really beneficial to anyone in the long term.”
The march to the cloud, said Roberts, “continues with the end of support for M365 Apps support on Windows Server 2016/2019 and the end of support for the legacy Office 2016 and 2019 products [which takes effect in October of this year]. I don’t think anyone is surprised that they would make this choice. Microsoft loves recurring revenue. I imagine most corporate clients are already M365 customers, but for those who are holding out, this could complicate things from a security and feature perspective.”
Another strategy Microsoft is pursuing, he said, “involves pushing people towards Graph. I see this as an attempt to standardize on a central environment. Instead of multiple standards and pathways into the ecosystem, a bit of upfront learning in the form of new cmdlets and some familiarity with the Graph architecture could introduce efficiencies at the cost of some upfront learning for administrators.”
Roberts noted that not all of these changes will please IT. “Sysadmins will be grumpy about this because it is more work in the short term,” he said. “Many of the benefits will only be clear after a few years, more than likely.”
