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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