A number of Microsoft Teams users have reacted with fury to the news that a key enterprise feature is being discontinued with just a few weeks notice.
Office 365 connectors within Teams is being retired for good in October 2025, the company confirmed in a blog post – although there did not appear to be much clarity as to why.
But the news has been met with bafflement from admins across the world, with businesses of all sizes apparently pretty reliant on the tool for effective messaging across the video conferencing platform at their company.
Farewell Office 365 connectors for Microsoft Teams
If your business isn’t one of those already using the tool, Office 365 connectors within Teams are able to take content and service updates from third-party services (such as IT tickets or intranet posts) directly into a Microsoft Teams channel, making it easy for co-workers and team members to stay up to date with all the latest changes.
“Starting August 15th, 2024 we will be retiring the Office 365 connectors feature from Microsoft Teams,” the blog post, written by Trent Hazy and Connor Rodewald, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Teams said.
The company recommends switching to its Power Automate workflows as a replacement, noting these can offer, “a much deeper catalog of Office connectors” as well as being built on an architecture that can expand and scale with your business.
“These changes are aligned to the Microsoft Secure Future Initiative, and our company-wide priority to safeguard our customers from cyber threats,” the blog continued. “Users currently utilizing Office 365 connectors should transition to Power Automate to maintain smooth operation of their services.”
Users should be aware of an initial deadline of August 15 2024, when all new Connector creation will be blocked within all clouds, with a second, more final, deadline of October 1 which will see all connectors within all clouds stop working.
As The Register noted, the comment section on Microsoft’s blog has already reached over 150 separate posts with just a few days, with users clearly upset on the short notice period.
“Do Microsoft not learn from insufficient transition deadlines? You’ve given users 3 months, 2 of which are during peak holiday season where many staff will be on annual leave for parts of it, to move service integrations away from connector format to possibly something they’ve never even looked at. Why?” the top comment, from Robin Malik, notes.
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