Teams Joins SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 Groups in Connector Retirement

On June 11, I wrote about the retirement of Office Connectors for Microsoft 365 Groups and SharePoint Online and speculated that support for Connectors in Teams wouldn’t last. Well, Microsoft published message center notification MC808160 on 3 July 2024 to announce the retirement of Office Connectors from Teams starting on August 15, 2024. It looks as if the retirement involves some work for Microsoft to do because it’s not due to complete until January 1, 2025.

A note in the Microsoft Developer Blog explains more about why Microsoft is retiring Connectors from Teams. The timeline is:

• Microsoft will block the creation of new connectors on August 15.
• Existing connectors will stop working on October 1, 2024.

Microsoft says that when users with active connectors post to Teams, the connector will include a notice about the impending retirement at the bottom of the message posted to the target channel.

The Future is Workflows

Microsoft says that the Workflows app (Power Automate) is the replacement and where they plan to invest future development resources, It’s hard to argue against the consolidation of “citizen development” around a single platform. Moving from Connectors to workflows is straightforward for “standard” connectors like RSS (Figure 1) or if a replacement template is available in the workflows catalog.

Things get more interesting if you’ve built PowerShell scripts to generate payloads to inject into Teams channels via the incoming webhook connector. The development of the necessary code for a relatively simple example of reporting Microsoft 365 service health in an adaptive card took more hours than I anticipated. One issue that I still haven’t solved is how to run a workflow using a service account or service principal. The implementation in Teams appears to be tied to user accounts for authentication. This is fine when a user is active within the tenant but not so good when people leave.

The Problem with Connectors

The problem with Microsoft retiring Office Connectors for Teams is that tenant administrators have no way of knowing what connectors are installed where. There’s no report in the Teams admin center, so we must resort to PowerShell. Looking through the Graph documentation, we find the List apps in team API, or its Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK equivalent cmdlet, Get-MgTeamInstalledApp.

The API returns all the apps installed in a team, including the apps preinstalled by Microsoft and those used for connectors (above everything else, Teams is an app composed of apps). However, it’s easy to come up with a list of connector apps and use that list to filter what comes back from Teams.

For instance, I defined an array with entries for SharePoint News, RSS, the incoming webhook, and “Happy Communities” (a customized name for Viva Communities). If you think that another Office connector is in use, add its name to the array.

[array]$TargetApps = "SharePoint News", "RSS", "Incoming Webhook", "Happy Communities"

After populating the array, it’s easy to fetch a list of teams and run through each team to determine if any of these apps are present:

ForEach ($Team in $Teams) {
    $TeamName = $Team.DisplayName
    Write-Host "Analyzing team: $TeamName"
    $Apps = Get-MgTeamInstalledApp -TeamId $Team.id -ExpandProperty TeamsAppDefinition
    If ($Apps) {
        ForEach ($App in $Apps) {
            If ($App.TeamsAppDefinition.DisplayName -in $TargetApps) {
                $Report.Add([PSCustomObject]@{
                    TeamName = $TeamName
                    AppName = $App.TeamsAppDefinition.DisplayName
                    Description = $App.TeamsAppDefinition.ShortDescription
                    AppVersion = $App.TeamsAppDefinition.Version
                    AppState = $App.TeamsAppDefinition.PublishingState
                    AppId = $App.TeamsAppDefinition.Id
                })
            }
        }
    }
}

Hey Presto! The script generates a list of teams and connectors to check (Figure 2). You can see that the connectors are associated with teams rather than individual channels, so some manual checking of each team is necessary to find which connector is targeted by the connectors.

You can download the full script from GitHub.

More Help Needed from Microsoft

I don’t mind the retirement of Office Connectors for Teams. Once Microsoft started along the path with SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 Groups, it was always highly unlikely that Office Connectors would remain a Teams-only option. What I do mind is the lack of preparation and assistance that Microsoft gives to customers who might have been using connectors for years. It wouldn’t have taken much for Microsoft to create a list of connectors in teams as described above.

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Support for Office 365 Connectors Ceasing for Microsoft 365 Groups and SharePoint Online

Message center notification MC798683 (4 June 2024) announces the retirement of Microsoft 365 Groups connectors, a form of what are called Office 365 connectors. The retirement process commences on August 5, 2024, and finishes on September 5, 2024. After that time, connectors will no longer be supported within Outlook (Win32), OWA, and the new Outlook for Windows (aka Monarch).

Connectors take notifications from online data sources and post messages into a target destination. In this case, the target is the Inbox in the mailbox of the Microsoft 365 group configured with the connector. These connectors are used with Outlook groups rather than Teams. You can’t configure a connector for the other folders in a group mailbox, and you can’t configure a connector for any other type of mailbox.

Messages delivered through an Office 365 connector are limited to 28 KB and aren’t intended to be complete articles. Instead, they let users know that something has happened, give them a short snippet about the event, and provide a link to follow for more complete information. Using a connector to post messages from an RSS feed is one of the most common uses, but third-party companies like Asana and Trello have created connectors to bring snippets about information from their services to Outlook and other Microsoft 365 targets.

Microsoft recommends that organizations replace group connectors with the Power Automate app, which has its own set of connectors for different data sources, including the ability to create a cloud flow to post messages to the group mailbox. Some of the Power Automate Connectors (like Salesforce and Jira) require a Power Automate premium license.

Connectors and SharePoint Online

A further blow for Office 365 Connectors comes in message center notification MC793656 (16 May 2024), which announces the retirement of connectors from SharePoint Online webparts. Microsoft says that this is due to “limited usage.” Based on anecdotal evidence and personal experience, I can’t recall ever seeing an Office 365 connector configured with a SharePoint Online webpart.

In any case, from June 15, 2024, site owners are unable to add connectors to SharePoint Online. On August 1, 2024, they’ll be unable to update or manage existing connectors and the connectors will stop receiving inbound notifications.

Teams, Office 365 Connectors, and Workflows

Teams still supports Office 365 connectors, which are configured on a per-channel basis because the target for new notifications are channel conversations. Each notification creates a new conversation.

MC798683 points out that Teams channels also support workflows created using the workflows app (“powered by” Power Automate), and workflows recently turned up in the […] menu for Teams chats (MC683929, last updated 24 May 2024).

I shall have to pay more attention to workflows in the future. I know that the basic stuff works very well (like bringing an RSS feed into a channel). I’m more interested in finding out how to replace the incoming webhook connector, which is used in many ways to bring information from applications into Teams.

So far, my experiments with the Post to a channel when a webhook request is received workflow have not been successful. This seems to work in the same way (publish a URL to post messages to) and it’s easy to find the URL, but more difficult to get the workflow to run. I eventually managed and published my experience about posting an adaptive card to Teams.

Moving to a Single Answer for No-Code Automation

All of this seems to be part of a cunning plan to turn Microsoft 365 users into citizen developers by popularizing the use of Power Automate and the Microsoft Power Platform (Figure 1) for no-code automation wherever possible. According to Microsoft (January 2024), Power Automate has 33 million monthly active users in 350,000 organizations. My assumption is that PowerShell and the Graph are the answer for code-based automation.

It’s hard to argue against rationalization and it does make sense to settle on a single no-code automation platform for Microsoft 365, something that wasn’t viable when Office 365 Connectors appeared around 2016. As always, don’t be surprised when change happens inside Microsoft 365. Just be prepared to cope with the change.

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.