Enterprise

Microsoft readies a slew of enterprise-impacting retirements • The Register


Administrators at Microsoft shops are in for a wild 2025 as Redmond prepares to deprecate and retire more than just support for Windows 10.

It’s not so much the year of the desktop but the year of the retirement.

The timeline of doom for Microsoft 365 admins was summarized in an AdminDroid blog post that detailed what was destined for the Redmond graveyard.

February looks like being a challenge. Exchange Online Legacy Tokens are set to be turned off, although administrators can buy a few more months via PowerShell. However, the option to re-enable Legacy Tokens will go away in June, and the whole system will be turned off for all tenants in October.

The most significant impact of the deprecation of Legacy Exchange Online Tokens will be around old Outlook add-ins, which are often used to glue enterprise processes together. COM add-ins are unlikely to be affected, but Outlook web add-ins probably will be since they can use Office.js APIs that rely on the tokens.

The Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) Application Impersonation role is also on its way out in February. The role was a handy way of granting access to multiple mailboxes, but these days Microsoft would much rather have apps registered with Entra.

The Azure AD and MSOnline Powershell modules will finally drop out of support at the end of March, and the domain isolated web parts feature in SharePoint Framework starts its road to deactivation on April 2, 2025. The feature will first be disabled for new tenants and later for existing tenants on April 2, 2026.

The thinking behind domain isolated web parts was to allow developers to create web parts that ran in a separate domain from the host page. The performance wasn’t great, and Microsoft decided to retire the feature.

During the second half of the year, the Microsoft axeman will be coming for the “classic” Teams desktop app, which dropped out of support in 2024. From July 1, 2025, the end will come, and users will have to switch to the company’s replacement desktop client for their Slack-for-suits fix.

Basic authentication for client submission in Exchange Online will finally end in September before the big guns come out for October.

As well as the end of support for many editions of Windows 10, support will also be terminated for Office 2016 and 2019, and Microsoft OneNote for Windows 10 will be retired. Microsoft 365 apps will also not be supported on Windows Server 2016 and 2019, and the SendMail API in SharePoint will also be retired.

Viva Goals is also due for the chop on December 31, 2025, although it’s debatable whether the shortlived project would have impacted many administrators in the two years before the plug was pulled on development at the end of 2024.

Finally, Office 365 connectors within Teams will be cut at the end of 2025. The exact date for the switch-off is unclear, and there was an almighty outcry when Microsoft tried to kill off the service in 2024. The connectors and webhooks allow workflows to be plumbed into a Teams channel, and Microsoft’s recommendation when it first tried to pull the functionality was to shift to Power Automate.

This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, and Microsoft has flagged up the changes months or even years in advance. However, while the Windows vendor is fervently hoping that 2025 will be the year of the Windows 11 PC refresh, a large number of administrators will be far too busy dealing with the fall-out from the company’s many retirements and deprecations to worry about the value AI might bring to their organization. ®



READ SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.