The deprecation of Office 365 connectors in Teams is not pleasant – Computerworld

Microsoft’s decision to begin phasing out Office 365 connectors within Microsoft Teams has sparked a firestorm of negative reactions.

According to a blog post published by Microsoft last week, starting August 15, “the creation of all new connectors will be blocked across all clouds,” and starting October 1, “all connectors across all clouds will stop working.”

Office connectors in Microsoft Teams, the blog notes, deliver content and service updates directly from third-party services to a Teams channel, allowing team members to stay up-to-date and in sync. The connectors connect to services like Trello, GitHub, RSS feeds, BitBucket, and Azure DevOps, giving users the ability to do things like collaborate and manage software projects online, manage and collaborate on code projects, receive RSS feeds, and let users get notifications when videos are created, all within Teams.

To replace connectors, the blog authors wrote, “We recommend Power Automate workflows as a solution for getting information into and out of Teams.” The SaaS platform, known until late 2019 as Microsoft Flow, optimizes and automates workflows and business processes.

Judging by most of the 127 comments posted in response to the blog post late Tuesday afternoon, people are outraged. One asked if Microsoft had learned its lesson from “insufficient transition dates. You gave users three months, two of which are during the peak holiday season when many employees will be on vacation, to move service integrations from a connector format to something they’ve likely never looked at. Why?”

Another wrote: “What are you doing? This is a big change for us, coming in the middle of the summer holidays. You should be more respectful and not make such changes during the holidays when most people are off work. Very disappointing!”

Other responses ranged from “this timeline is a joke, I hope it was a typo and you meant October 25” to “the transition time is insufficient. More importantly, Power Automate is not a replacement for Connectors functionality at this time. I vote for Microsoft to delay this transition for at least a year.”

Jeremy Roberts, a senior analyst at Info-Tech Research Group, said today, “It’s not entirely clear why they decided to do this. They say it’s about scale and depth, but there are certainly some issues they’ll have to address. (For example, you can’t send a message to a private channel, which will be the whole thing.) I don’t know if their user base was begging for the scale they would get from replacing their basic connectors with Power Automate. The cynic in me says they’re profiting from promoting the premium Power Automate license.”

Microsoft, he said, “has been under increasing antitrust scrutiny and has taken actions like splitting Teams. Perhaps this is a response to increasing regulatory pressure? Teams is at the center of the bundled offering, or at least that was the initial promise. Perhaps introducing this additional complexity is a way of demonstrating to regulators, especially in Europe, that Teams is not the market leader at all? It’s a bit conspiratorial, but it’s something that occurred to me.”

He described Power Automate as “powerful, but more complex than a simple webhook. I can imagine a situation where the effort required to build and maintain Power Automate would exceed the value of the Teams channel notification that the webhook provided.”

In response to the short transition period, Roberts noted, “A lot of complaints about this in Microsoft and other sysadmin communities. A few months for something like this seems rushed, although it might be best to rip off the Band-Aid.”

Overall, he said, the move “seems anti-consumer, even though Microsoft would likely argue that Power Automate provides greater capabilities for consumers. The question is, do they want to put in the time, effort and money to realize those capabilities?”