Retirement of Office 365 connectors within Microsoft Teams
Office connectors in Microsoft Teams deliver content and service updates directly from third-party services into a Teams channel. By using Office connectors, users can receive updates from popular services such as Azure DevOps Services, Trello, Wunderlist, GitHub, and more. Office connectors post these updates directly into the chat stream. This functionality makes it easy for all team members to stay in sync and informed on relevant information.
Why are we retiring Office 365 connectors?
Starting August 15th, 2024 we will be retiring the Office 365 connectors feature from Microsoft Teams. We recommend Power Automate workflows as the solution to relay information into and out of Teams in a scalable, flexible, and secure way.
Power Automate workflows not only offer a much deeper catalog of Office connectors (see all connectors) but also ensure that your integrations are built on an architecture that can grow with your business needs and provide maximum security of your information. These changes are aligned to the Microsoft Secure Future Initiative, and our company-wide priority to safeguard our customers from cyber threats. Users currently utilizing Office 365 connectors should transition to Power Automate to maintain smooth operation of their services.
We will gradually roll out this change in waves:
- Wave 1 – effective August 15th, 2024: All new Connector creation will be blocked within all clouds
- Wave 2 – effective October 1st, 2024: All connectors within all clouds will stop working
What’s the new experience within Microsoft Teams?
The Workflows app in Microsoft Teams has received dozens of updates in the last year to more deeply integrate into your stream of work. For newcomers who aren’t yet familiar, workflows save time, reduce mistakes, and boost productivity across various activities. They facilitate approval processes, project updates, and any routine operation, offering notifications on task changes, quick actions from chats, improved meeting management, and the ability to swiftly customize workflows.
Learn more about the Workflows app here.
How do I transition from Office 365 connectors to Workflows?
If you are currently using Office 365 connectors in Microsoft Teams, you will need to migrate your existing Office connectors to Workflows before the relevant retirement dates above. To do so, follow these steps:
1. Go to the Workflows app in Teams and click on the “Create” tab. Choose the type of workflow you want from a template, or from scratch:
- If you choose to create from a template, you can browse or search for workflow templates that match your Office connectors’ functionality. For example, if you use the Trello connector, you can find templates for creating cards, updating lists, or posting messages based on Trello actions.
- If you choose to create from scratch, you can select the trigger and action for your workflow. You can use many of the same services that you used with your Office 365 connectors or explore new ones from the hundreds of Office connectors available in Power Automate. Once you have created your workflow, you will name it and add a description. You can also test it, share it, or edit it anytime from the “My flows” tab.
2. Open the Workflows app within the chat or channel by right-clicking on the conversation, or by clicking on More options (…). From there you can also browse a list of templates that are specific to the chat or channel context that match your current Office connectors’ functionality.
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- For example, if you use the Webhook or RSS connector, you can find similar workflow templates within this list.
- Explore these popular templates:
To learn more about creating workflows in Teams, check out these support articles:
- Creating a workflow from a chat in Teams
- Creating a workflow from a channel in Teams
- Add or run a workflow from a message within Microsoft Teams
Follow us on X (Twitter) / @Microsoft365Dev and subscribe to our YouTube channel to stay up to date on the latest developer news and announcements.
Connor Rodewald Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Teams
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254 comments
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?
In fact, only one month :p
Horrible, just when I thought I could rely on Teams notifications, moving to Power Automate apparently does not support private channels so no point in trying to move over.
Moving them over was incredibly easy. Give it a try yourself – it’s a piece of cake as long as you go ahead and do it.
“Incredibly easy” would be clicking the link to the power automate web hook template above, getting the post url and adding that to my teams integration (GitLab in my case). This is definitely not the case as I’ve tried and then I had to burn time debugging the power automate flow to realize the template is completely unfit for purpose. If you’ve managed to get it working in as many or fewer steps then please do post the instructions.
The key here is to make sure the integration is sending the correct card format to the flow. If your solution sends “MessageCard” for example, the default flow that loops over adaptive card attachments will fail. So you’ll have to migrate to something that sends adaptive cards. The biggest issue for us is that a personal user has to “own” the flow… Still haven’t figured out a solution to that yet.
May be I’m over simplifying but I wouldn’t have thought it beyond Microsoft to create a Power Automate workflow template that can consume the old Message card format and transform it into the Adaptive Card format, you know just to make the lives for people who’ve never touched Power Automate a bit easier.
how do you get rid of the dirty banner at the bottom of every post ?
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Another stupid decision.
Also, the link to the template is a 404.
Does the format of the payload change when switching from O365 Teams Notifications to the new Webhook workflow approach? The link just 404s.
yes it does
Honestly this comes across as a greedy cash grab, forcing us to replace integrations that we have been relying on for years as part of our M365 licenses with ones requiring yet another premium license. Can we at least assume that incoming emails will stay the same, given that it has its own setup from the channel menu (even though it is called Email Connector in the activity history)?
Making such a major change with a short timeline over the summer months shows a complete lack of understanding of European customers.
And FYI, the template links all point to your Power Platform environment, none of us will have access to that.
…not just European markets; human markets. And instructions are, as usual, unintelligible.
Ironically, it sounds like this may be a downstream consequence of the EU antitrust case against Microsoft’s Teams-365 bundling.
It’s more like the opposite, because now you need even more M$ products.
A three month deprecation window over the summer holiday period in which we have to implement a replacement solution whose documentation either amounts to “Now draw the rest of the owl” or outright 404s? This is not reasonable.
It’s simply not done with using the new url. I tried it and it failed. If you notify everyone with such a message, at least be prepared with migrations guides.
In my case, it failed too.
Power Automate Workflow is not supported for sending messages in private channels.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/teams/send-a-message-in-teams#known-issues-and-limitations
Thanks for posting this note: I spent a few hours trying to replace webhook posting a private channel and failing with unhelpful and non-specific error messages.
What a shitshow.
The documentation does indeed mention this as a known issue, but I was able to send a message to a private channel by setting the Post As setting to User.
However, setting Post As to Flow Bot results in a failing workflow, even if the Power Automate app (which is confusingly called Workflows when adding an app) is manually added to the channel, which it is apparently supposed to add automatically when a message is sent (but this fails for me too).
Manually adding the Power Automate app results in two tabs in the channel, and adding a workflow here does not show it in the channel workflow overview, but it does show it in the global overview.
Are you kidding me? LOL
So that’s why I spent 45 minutes trying to figure out why my Webhook no longer worked after trying the new Workflow method vs the Connector method?
Come on Microsoft, you’re better than this. At least make a note of that when you’re creating the Workflow Webhook in Teams via adding it right to the Private Channel so the person setting this up knows. It should be a bit more up-front and center since the link and steps in the “Deprecated” message take you right to where the new Workflow is suppose to be created.
Why am I getting this message all of the sudden for all of the Azure DevOps notifications that we have setup for Microsoft Teams?
> Action Required: O365 connectors within Teams will be deprecated and notifications from this service will stop. Learn more about the timing and how the Workflows app provides a more flexible and secure experience. If you want to continue receiving these types of messages, you can use a workflow to post messages from Azure DevOps.
You are really going to make everyone using these connectors have to roll their own notification workflows for another Microsoft product?
Very reminiscent of the Atlassian nickel and dime approach to losing customers.
The authors of this blog post have neglected the hundred+ comments telling them that the thing they are trying to push everyone on is NOT WORKING! So they have given a deadline, are not responding, and its creating a panic for some people and the deprecation warning is a constant annoyance (appending the quoted paragraph above to every message going through this connector, eating up screen real estate needed for the important parts of notifications).
You would think MIcrosoft would have established some kind of policy or procedures for the best ways to make changes, but nope.
In the WorkFlows there is nothing for Jenkins, moreover Office365 connectors brings the best solution to alighn with MS Teams.
The recommended solution: Power Automate workflows has some limitations.
For example, it is not supported for sending messages in private channels.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/teams/send-a-message-in-teams#known-issues-and-limitations
Due to this limitation, it means that Power Automate workflows simply cannot meet current requirements.